Most people don't realise when someone is depressed because most of the time all the person has to do is master a fake smile. We smile to hide our pain because if we don't the tears may fall and never stop.
It's awful when we have to fake a smile to hide how miserable we are inside but imagine how far gone you have to be to not be able to fake a smile.
I can't fake a smile and the only time I properly smiled was when thinking about killing myself.
Seventeen muscles are used with every smile, seventeen muscles flexing and contracting while thinking about death and the end of my life. How depressingly poetic.
However there are forty three muscles used when frowning. My forty three muscles are being used as Jackson Ryder grabs my hand, pulling me along with him in the rain, wind and storm.
I wanted to ask him where he's taking me but I physically did not have the motivation to open my mouth and force words out. I hardly spoke to anyone in the last year and not wanting to see or speak to anyone to suddenly being forced in to a conversation wasn't exactly how I envisioned my night going. I had this thing called a social battery, where you can only talk or be around someone so long before you feel your energy diminishing and you don't want to be around them anymore. I could feel my social battery at an all time low, it wasn't all that high to begin with but right now it was in the molten core of the Earth.
It wasn't long until we walked in to a house, a neat and well organised living room with sofa's and a TV hooked on the wall. I knew it was his parents house when the scent attacked me, washing over me was a mix of what he smelled like; citrus but with a rough edge.
"My parents aren't home so go use the shower, I'll set some clothes outside the door and then I'll put your clothes in the wash and dryer." He smiled down at me as I continued to study the cream painted living room.
"Can I have a long sleeved top?" I ask quietly. "I get cold."
He nods. "I'll also get food for us."
"For you." I mumbled back, my eyes never straying from the room.
"What?" I heard his confused voice in the air. "For you as well. You look like a toothpick."
I looked like a toothpick.
Subconsciously I wound my arms around my, trying to shield my body from his view.
I looked like a toothpick.
I knew it was meant to be a simple
sentence, just for him to try and make me understand that I needed to eat but to me... it was both an insult and an attack.
I looked like a toothpick.
My mind wasn't a normal mind, not anymore. It took the simple things and turned them against me, making me hate myself even more. I didn't really know what I looked like, I avoided a mirror for the last few months, not even wanting to take a peek of myself but I knew from the lack of meals I ate that I had lost weight and that it most likely wasn't pretty.
I wasn't pretty and I looked like a toothpick.
"You know it's a very dangerous thing to comment on someone's body and weight." I simply say, walking past him and up the grey carpeted stairs, listening to his faint instructions on where the bathroom was.
I shed my clothes, hanging my mac over a hook and putting my boots in the corner while leaving my heavy and drenched clothes on the floor. I took this time to actually look at my body for the first time in months.
Bones.
That's the first thing that came to my mind.
We have two-hundred-and-six bones in the human body and I can pretty much see all of them.
My ribs, my collarbone, my thighs, my arms.
I can't find an ounce of fat. I'm anorexic but without the realisation. It's not like I don't eat because I don't want to gain weight so I'm not anorexic in that aspect, I just can't find the energy to eat and normally, most of the time, I'm just not hungry at all.
A thigh gap, visible ribs, a flat stomach, a tiny waist. They're the things modelling agents look for: 'the perfect body'.
If it's the perfect body then why don't I like it?
Of course there was no such thing as the perfect body, in fact everyone was beautiful and no one was perfect. I kept that in mind, trying to convince myself that I was beautiful because no matter what shape someone was or what they looked like, they were always beautiful to me.
But this... this creature in front of me, this thing was not beautiful.
My skin had taken on a sort of grey twinge while my face is scarce white. I'm a zombie but without the eating brains part.
There's a need within me to fall to the floor, to shout and flaunt my incessant vocabulary, to cry a river of tears that the Amazon would be jealous of. But I can't. I'm numb. I can't find anything within me that actually cares about my body. I want to care, a small part of my brain wants to cry since it is the reasonable reaction but I can't. My tear ducts have dried up more than a river in the Sahara.
Everyone believes pain is the worst thing imaginable, the emotional pain within you. The agonising pain and thoughts that bombard you. When I felt the pain I wanted to be numb, I wanted the pain to stop and to just feel nothing. But now I want that pain, I want to feel something because standing in front of the mirror, wanting to cry but not being able to is worse than any pain I've ever endured.
I'm just fucking empty.
Instead, I turn away and climb in the shower.
The clothes Jackson picked out was an oversized long sleeved top that fell to my knees and a pair of leggings (probably his mum's). The top hides everything, every sign that I don't eat which satisfies me. I don't want Jackson around longer than he has to be. He'll 'prove' that life is more meaningful and when he realises that I can't find any meaning or happiness in life, he'll let me be on my way to death.
I heard -or read- that people who commit suicide instantly end up in Hell. That doesn't bother me. Like I said, this year has been worse than Hell. I'll be thankful I'll be able to live in peace and relax down there.
"Here are my clothes." I pass the pile of my clothes to him which he takes with a smile and stuffs them in the washing machine.
"Sit." He gestures his head to the table behind me where there's a box of pizza and sides with a display of sauce. I do as he says, sitting opposite him while he digs in.
I watch him while his dark blonde hair flops down on his forehead from the rain, some strands in random directions from where he's roughly dried it with a towel. He's changed clothes now, they -and him- are dry.
"Aren't you going to eat?" He interrupts my scan of him.
Shaking my head, I stare down in to my lap. "I'm not hungry."
"Li- Eliza... can I call you Eliza?" I shrug before nodding my head. I hadn't been called that before. It was new. Different. Safe. "Eliza you have to eat. You're going to get ill if you don't eat and I can already see that you're thin, dangerously thin. Please just eat. One slice."
His pleading voice struck a chord with me, it sounding like someone I used to know and that bothers me. Instead of commenting or arguing because I simply do not have the energy, I take a slice with shaky hands and bite in to the cheese and tomato pizza hesitantly, the flavours and textures exploding on my tongue and I almost moan.
I eat the pizza quickly, dipping it in to the red sauce.
He smiles while he watches me eat before wiping his mouth and fingers on a napkin, folding his arms on the table and clearing his throat. "I said I would prove to you that there is much more to life and I have a way... you pretty much have to agree with me and do what I say if you don't want me telling your parents."
'My parents wouldn't care anyway'
Is what I wanted to say but I held my tongue, licking my fingers from the grease and wiping them on a napkin, feeling the fullness in my stomach and slumping in my chair bloated.
Not eating a decent meal for a year really messes up ones food intake.
"What is it?" I ask instead.
"I'm going on a tour, visiting all the professional Rugby clubs in England. I want you to come with me." He states with a smile and I resist the urge to throw a slice of pizza in his face.
That sounds like the most stupid and boring trip that's ever happened in the history of stupid and boring trips.
"I don't know anything about rugby." I narrow my eyes, tilting my head. "Why would I want to follow you round while you spout shit about a sport I don't care about?"
"That's a very rude thing to say but I'm going to pretend you didn't say it so we can still be friends."
"Not friends." I interrupt with a shrug.
He rolls his eyes and ignores me. "Anyway... I'm visiting twelve cities, watching rugby matches and touring the stadiums. But if you come with me, and you will, we'll do more than just tour the stadiums and watch matches. I'll find us an activity or somewhere to go in each city, proving to you that life is better than how your life is right now."
"That's a ridiculous idea." I snort, rolling my eyes. "I've been living like this for a year, progressively getting worse and finding no motivation, no enjoyment in anything. This is both a waste of your time and mine. I could be dead by now... I could be happy for the first time in a long time but you stopped me for this."
"Don't say that." Inhaling, he drops his arms, and clenched fists, on his lap so I can't see them. "I will prove this to you. You are going to come with me and I am going to help you."
"Realistically I need professional help not help from a twenty year old rugby enthusiast." I grab a chicken strip, nibbling on it slowly even though I'm full.
His happy face downturns while his eyes turn careful. "Why haven't you then? Why don't your parents help you?"
If I could feel, if I wasn't completely numb and empty inside then that question would probably hurt. I could imagine a sharp pain stabbing my heart while my stomach drops and nausea kicks in. But I am. I am completely numb and empty inside, dead inside, so I don't feel anything.
Shrugging, I force a smile, one that feels and can only imagine looks to fake and painful. The movement, the seventeen muscles, is weird, so foreign because in the longest time I haven't had to fake a smile to pretend like I was alright. In the end, I realised no one really cared.
"My parents don't know I'm depressed and they wouldn't care if I was."
Shaking his head, he scoffs. "That's not true. That can't be true."
Sighing, I lean forward. "I haven't seen my parents in seven months. I've been in my room, alone, only leaving my room at night when the whole town is asleep. My parents haven't checked up on me and I'm pretty sure if I did succeed in killing myself then they wouldn't have known until someone, a random person most likely, found my body downstream."
It's incredibly depressing to think about, even more to say out loud, but it's true. Depression takes many different forms, it's a shape-shifting monster that can change it's shape and form for every single person it affects. For me, now, it's in the form of nothingness. I don't get out of bed because I can't. I can hardly brush my teeth. I hardly eat. I stare blankly at the screen when a movie is playing. I sometimes can find the energy to read a book but most of the time I can't even though my room is practically a library. Sometimes I leave my room, always in the night, for a snack or just to leave and escape from the darkness and depression that entraps my room and house.
Everyday wasn't like this. There were good days but those days weren't leaving my room to talk to my parents or smiling or being happy. They were being able to brush my teeth, being able to read a few chapters of a book, being able to concentrate and not have the darkness and demons in my mind hold me captive. They were the days I was able to eat and go for walks in the night, secretly hoping that a car would come out of nowhere and knock me down.
"That's..." His eyes flitter from mine to the pizza at the centre of the table.
"Depressing? Lonely? Fucked up?" I smile sarcastically. "Yep. Look I'll do your stupid rugby tour, visiting the godforsaken cities that exist in our country but I'm telling you, I can't be fixed. You can't fix a plate after it's been shattered."
You can't fix a human after they've been broken beyond repair.
I was that human and I was broken beyond repair.