Problems

|| Chapter 28 ||

Me? Going MIA for 2 months? It's more likely than you'd think.

TW: self-harm (cutting), depressed thoughts/actions, mentions of eating disorder, suicide attempt(?) (I don't know if you'd call it an attempt exactly, but that's for you to decide.)

X

Alexander had only felt this bad twice before.

Once, after his mom had died, and he was shipped off to foster care after the hurricane, where he barely spoke good English and was reeling from the overload of emotions.

The second time was after Nick had died. He'd been ripped apart, torn and shattered into so many pieces that there wasn't a chance of being put back together in the right way again.

Both times, there hadn't been anyone left to pick up the pieces.

And there wasn't anyone left now, either.

He was a ghost, leftover from a previous century, slowing drifting in and out of everyone's' lives, never sticking around long enough to be missed.

And he was ghostly, given the darkened hollows of his cheeks and the ghastly paleness of his skin, the way that his hair had become a thinner, straw-like version of the thick mop it had once been.

He was a side effect.

He hadn't spoken to the Schuylers in weeks, he hadn't seen Hercules for a while and hadn't spoken to Laf since the night he had asked him to leave.

Conversations with John consisted of checking whether or not Alex had eaten, gone to therapy, refilled his meds, gone to class, or gotten a decent amount of sleep.

Almost all of the answers were no.

He stopped going to Creative Writing, instead choosing to spend the hour and a half in the library, dazedly wandering between the shelves and pulling out random books, skimming them without actually retaining any information. Washington had given up on persuading Alex to participate in class and now left him alone, leaving Alex to doodle in his notebook or gaze blankly into space off to the left of the board.

He didn't really care, not anymore.

In his mind, he was already gone.

X

Today was a bad day.

His body felt as though it were filled with cement. He stared at the ceiling, which was warping and twisting in a full kaleidoscope of color, even though he knew logically that there was only white. Logic had gone out the window many months ago.

He heard John's alarm start going off on his phone, and the hand groggily reaching out from under the pile of blankets to fumble around for it, the thump of the phone hitting the ground and John's sleepy cursing. The sounds were muffled yet screaming in his head, colliding together with a shaking rattle that made his brain hurt. Everything felt like too much-colors, numbers, sounds, twisting, twisting, twisting, until Alex was being dragged down into the whirlpool his mind had created.

"Alex?" John said, and Alex detected a hint of worry in his voice. He forced himself up into a sitting position, then dragged himself out of bed, even though his body felt like it was being ripped to shreds. His hands were numb, and he stood, swaying, eyes shut, in front of his bed for a moment.

Everything hurt.

He took a breath and held it in his chest. His ribs felt fragile, paper-like.

He was falling apart from the inside-out.

He took a step towards the bathroom and felt the floor crumble beneath his feet, yet he somehow stayed upright. This was how it felt, on bad days. The world was crashing and burning around him, and he was crashing and burning on the inside, but everything on the outside looked fine.