Freed

52

A life that I was still getting used to. A life that I'd built out of a broken heart and a mind that had given up on me. A life that I'd been given as a second chance and I was doing everything possible to make it worthwhile.

And I was succeeding.

A new song began to rattle through the walls of the apartment. The crowd seemed to grow and I excused myself to go to the bathroom, leaving Chase behind.

I shut the door behind me and pressed my back against it, taking a few deep breaths as a sort of euphoria rushed through my body, lighting my veins on fire. Electricity seemed to be coursing through my limbs, making me aware of every sense. In the distance, the music still pounded through the walls, and my heart still drummed against my chest, but all of that faded into the background as I saw the mirror.

I took a few steps until I was standing right in front of the mirror, so I could take in my appearance.

Mirrors had been enemies to my heart. My reflection had always showed me what was broken with me. I remembered looking into the glass and seeing everything that was wrong with me; my thinning hair, my bones jutting out, my eyes vacant of all life—everything that always served to tell me that I was a lost cause. I'd lost a battle that I'd fought in my head, and it had destroyed all of me.

Mental illness, just like physical, had the power to do that. It had the ability to break you in every way possible. It had the power to wear your bones out and weaken your heart. It had the power to kill you because it was hard to escape the enemy when it was trapped in your own mind.

It had almost killed me.

But now, things were changing. Slowly, but surely. Now, the mirror was becoming my friend.

The mirror gave me hope because it showed me that my body was fighting to gain back the life it had lost a long time ago. I was stronger than I believed because I was still fighting.

My reflection showed me that whatever I was doing to work on myself was working because there was physical proof standing right in front of me.

I was never giving up, no matter how dark some days got, and my effort was showing. The life was coming back into me. It showed itself in the littlest ways. Day by day, step by step, pieces of me that I thought I'd lost forever found their ways back to my mind, to my body, to my heart.

My skin no longer remained the translucent, pale color it always used to be. My cheeks were flushed with color; with life. My steel grey eyes were alive, almost glowing from all the emotions that coursed through my body. My collarbones no longer looked like they were blades sticking out of my skin. My cheekbones didn't look like they'd been carved into my face.

The scale began to change. My body began to change. I began to change.

I didn't look like I was a dead person living inside a barely functioning body.

And there was no greater feeling in the world for me than waking up one morning and realizing my first thought hadn't been that I wished that I was dead.

I finished up and walked out of the bathroom, my body practically buzzing with energy. My phone vibrated in my back pocket and I slipped it out to see a text from Mariam. She was just checking in on me like she did everyday when I wasn't home with her. I sent her a quick reply back, reassuring her that I was alright, before I slipped my phone back into my pocket, a small smile shaping my lips as I thought about her momentarily.