Damaged

Before

One year before

I slammed the front door closed and ran into the marble-floored living room, my frantic steps echoing on the tall walls of my house. I looked at my surroundings, momentarily lost in my head, panic enveloping my body. I dropped my school bag and desperately climbed the flight of stairs, not really seeing anything, not processing what i was doing. My mind was too occupied with the whirlwind of thoughts coursing through my brain to know what i was doing with lucidity.

I opened my bedroom door and sat on the floor with my back on my bed. The tears were already wetting my cheeks since I've left the school, but once I got to my bedroom I started crying maniacally, the desperate sobs rising in my chest uncontrollably. I rocked myself back and forth with my hands on my knees, and then, I started screaming.

The screams didn't sound like my own, but I felt the tell-tale rawness in my throat which kept me grounded. The screaming didn't ease my mind, it just made me feel worse. Crazier.

It was all too much to handle, the panic attack was paralyzing. My brain was consuming me, my thoughts were killing myself from the inside and there was no way to stop it this time. The knot on my throat intensified and i grabbed handfuls of my own hair from my scalp, pulling it, trying to make it all stop.

I remember that I started laughing then, crazily, the sound damaged by my aching throat. It had never been that bad.

My hands started shaking then, and my whole body shivered violently. My mind held onto the rational thought that I was having a episode but I couldn't seem to snap out of it. My body refused to calm down.

I felt broken on the inside. The thoughts in my head were too much to process, too self-destructive.

I unlatched my hands from my hair and got up, knowing what i needed to do. My mind was consuming me and there was only one way to make it stop. I had been dreaming of this for months and months and months.

I stumbled inside my bathroom and closed the door. I looked at myself. Black hair, blue eyes, bags under my eyes and sunken in cheeks with red blotches on them.

I looked at my dilated pupils. I'm finally strong enough to do it, I finally have the courage to press down. I didn't want to do it, but my mind screamed yes.

I grabbed the razor that was stashed inside my drawer, hidden and looked at it. I latched it onto my right wrist and pressed hard. I pressed and pressed and pressed until my mind got silent went away and the world turned into red.

********

The blackness had enveloped me in its silky embrace, pushing me down and down. The fuzziness in my mind has become comfortable, it made everything insubstantial, disembodied from reality. The darkness that i've relished so much slowly started becoming gray, a limbo between the soothing black and harsh white. My mind started regaining consciousness, pulling me away from safety. My finger tips twitched, and i felt rough fabric beneath me.

I open my eyes and i'm blinded from the overwhelming whiteness. I manage to focus my gaze and i look at the soft green wall. Rhythmic beeps sound from somewhere to my right and i turn my head to look at the source of the noise. My limbs scream in pain as i do so, and i see a machine monitoring my heart rate. I start remembering things, and i look down at my arms. Both my wrists are wrapped in white bandages which are slightly stained with blood, and there's an iv line on my left hand.

They saved me. They saved me when the thing that i wanted the most was to leave this world, to escape everything. Frustrated tears come to my eyes and i drop my head onto my pillow. I've almost found release and they managed to bring me back and save my body, restoring my own personal prison. I was floating, stuck in limbo where nothing was able to touch me and my mind was blissfully quiet. For months it hasn't been this way, for months it tormented me every single second that i was conscious.

I feel a shuddering breath rising in my chest and i turned my head to the other side, crying desperately. I can't remember when i had started crying so much.

I was always the tough one. The one who could handle all the shit thrown at me, the one who took the initiative and got things done. I guess i was still like that, but the numbness was what made me indifferent to people's opinions, made me brave, and not dauntlessness. I guess that slicing my wrists open was a combination of both. I still look like the old me, but god, how has my mind changed still then. Not that i wasn't fucking crazy before. It was just a controlled, recreational crazy, but full time. It wasn't the crazy which made you fear your own head and want to die, but the crazy that people talked about, and enjoyed.

I hear a commotion near the door but i'm too tired, too numb, to look up. My mind escapes from the trance i was in and goes blank. I hear steps getting closer to the bed and i see my mom standing above me.

"Luna? Oh my god you're awake,"she starts crying, "i've been so scared! Why would you do something like this to yourself?"

i looked at the ceiling, unable to look into my mother's green eyes. There's no way to explain how fucked up I actually was, how much I just wanted to make everything stop and feel peace instead of turmoil inside my mind. How for the last months my life was a living hell and I just wanted it to stop.

It's simple. I'm just maddeningly, inexplicably, irrevocably fucked up.