I Guess They Never Disappear

Chapter 29

Trigger Warning: Unhealthy Relationship with Medication, Argument/Screaming (Do Not Read Any of the Chapter if  these topics are triggers for you!)

Two days after I officially got permission to stop taking the extra five milligrams of Lexapro, everything goes to shit. 

I mean, maybe, if you think about it, things have been shit for a while. If I was a more philosophical man, I might ponder when the shit began. 

Was it my birth? The day I got diagnosed with anxiety? Starting medication? Meeting Jared? Any point in the Connor Project? Or something sooner, like when Jared came back?

What even is, I might ask, the criteria for determining when the shit really began in earnest?

But that isn't the point. 

The point is, everything should've been smooth sailing from that therapy appointment on out. I no longer had anything to hide. Nobody ever had to know that I had quit my meds weeks earlier and had been pretending that everything was fine. 

There was one thing I needed to do, and I was sure I wouldn't have an issue with it, for once in my life. All I had to do was pretend that I was having the symptoms that I had been having for weeks, the symptoms that had finally started to lessen. 

The reverse of what I had been doing. 

And it didn't seem to be going that badly. When Jared was watching, I would (convincingly) start to look a little dizzy and plop down on the nearest thing I could sit on. He would bring me a glass of water and hold my hand until my 'dizzy spell' vanished, and then I continued on with my day. 

He looked worried about me, and for once, I was okay with that. 

It was temporary, and I figured that putting up with this temporary coddling would be good for me in the long end. 

(It wasn't really an argument I allowed myself to debate, actually. If Jared thought I was upset by how he was treating me when I was apparently feeling poorly, he might get suspicious, and then he might think that I wasn't actually stopping with the mediation. And then he might come to the conclusion that I had been doing it all along and then I would be screwed I would be so screwed and everything that I had ever tried to do would be wiped away in an instant.)

You know what else was temporary?

The calm. 

It ended like this: two days after I finally grasped that calm, I lost it. For maybe forever. 

And the beginning of the end began right after breakfast. 

And I didn't even know it was happening until I was locked on a track I couldn't hope to get out of. 

Breakfast is good, although Jared seems a little more tense than usual. I attribute that to him being worried about my physical state and try to push away the small part of me that is saying that he hates me and that he's found out about everything. 

I'm not very good at pushing those thoughts away, so I just try to look calm. 

It works, for the most part. At least I have the excuse of brain twitches for the handy explaining away of all of my many nervous movements. 

After breakfast, I get up and prepare to water my various plants. 

I'm on leave from work today because Jared said that he wanted to actually hang out with me instead of me leaving to go be in the comforting embrace of Ellison Park. 

I'm standing at the sink, filling up my watering can when Jared taps me on the shoulder. 

"Evan," he begins, and his tone is wavering on the boundary of something that I can't quite describe and I don't know if I really like. "Can we talk?"