Buttercup [H.S]

Chapter Eighteen

A darkness had come for me often in my life. I remember distinctly the first time I felt this unrelenting hopelessness creep over me, engulf me, weigh me down with such force that leaving my bed seemed torturous.

The first time a depressive episode ruled my life, I was fourteen years old and I'd witnessed my father slap my mother for the first time. He'd hit her with such force that she'd fallen to the ground, her cheek erupting in a crimson blister immediately, an impression of his outstretched fingers burning into the side of her face.

They'd been shouting and screaming at one another for days at that point, over what exactly never seemed to make much sense. It could start over an off-handed comment about the dinner my mother had served, or the way my father had flirted with a woman at a fundraiser, but quickly it would erupt into a blaze of words that reflected the years of resentment that my parents held toward one another.

But that night, my father had gotten louder and louder, my mothers angry shrieks became quieter and laced with a tension that could only be described as fear, and I'd descended the stairs in search of her.

And that's where I found them in the cold and pristine living room; a lamp shattered, my mother cowered with her legs pressed right up to the edge of the sofa, her torso leaning back to create as much space as she could between herself and my father, so much so I thought she may tumble back into the cream cushions any moment.

As I stepped over the threshold of the door, that's when he swung his arm back and slapped her so hard that the clap of his palm to her face rang around the empty house like a gunshot.

I'd rushed over to help my mother but she'd shouted at me to stop. Gritted her teeth at me with a reservoir of tears and shame balancing on her lower lash line and spat at me to go back to my room and finish my homework.

My father didn't say a word, simply bowed his head and shook it to himself as if I were the biggest disappointment in the room.

The days that followed my parents pretended as though the entire thing had never happened. When I brought it up to my mother in a hushed voice, asking her why she wouldn't leave him, she gripped my wrist so tightly her nails dig into my flesh and hissed at me to shut up.

I didn't speak to my father at all.

So I'd spend my nights in my room, listening to either their silence or their fury, and I wondered why it had to be this way. Wondered if this was how it was for my friends at school, if their parents barely acknowledged their existence, too blinded by their hate for one another to focus any energy on loving their child.

Loneliness crept in with the quiet and then so the darkness followed.

It had always felt like a black hole at the centre of my chest, yet it wasn't hollow. In fact it was so heavy that at times I was convinced that attempting to walk further than the distance from my bed to the bathroom and back again would crush me.

During my teen years, the desire to be anywhere but home had willed me out into the world, and then later I had Harry. That heavy, dark nothingness was increasingly present as Jason came into the picture, but upon meeting Harry that hole seemed to become a little easier to carry around with me.

Because it wasn't always dark anymore. There was a tiny pinprick of light, a star perhaps. The more time we spent together, the more songs we shared between headphones, in the shadows of an art supply cupboard or the cab of Cyndi, the brighter that light would burn until eventually whenever he was around it's like I was walking into the sun. So bright and warm that the darkness never stood a chance of looming when I was in the presence of Harry.