Hope was a mirage: a paradox, a mere fantasy, a delusion.
It seeped its way into your mind until it clogged up your lungs, diffusing through every cell and infesting every breath you took. Hope gave you a pair of rose-tinted glasses, urging you to forget everything that protected you and to trust in the transient feel of positivity that soaked into your every thought. It started off soothing and relaxing, like a drug slowly infusing into your bloodstream, until you finally felt happy – and then the high crashed down, leaving you reeling in rue and reminiscing on the better days that seemed to have drifted so far away.
Hope was poison.
But at this point, call me Romeo and pass me the bottle because I was going to drink it all anyway.
I was the most cynical person I knew: jaded and sceptical, I chose to stay in the darkness because I was scared of the light, scared of the feeling of freedom and happiness which was so unfamiliar to me. Romeo had told me the harsh truth, and despite his overbearing positivity, he did have a point: I had to at least try. Even though I knew the hope would fade, and the potential happiness I might feel could leave me even more shattered than I was before, I was going to try.
Right now it was all or nothing, and whether my journey to healing lasted two hours or two days, or whether I reached a level of mental stability or I became more suicidal than ever, at least I would know that I had consciously tried. At least I'd know what fate had destined for me: to be confined in my own mental prison or to be someone who was in love with life and herself.
As much as I hoped it was the latter, I had to be realistic, and know that years' worth of childhood trauma and mental health struggles wouldn't be magically cured in one night, one week or even one year. Finding a source of light to clear out some of my darkness wouldn't be an imminent change, and even though Romeo had set alight a small candle, it would burn out eventually. Change took time, and I was going to have to learn to be patient instead of running away the second I felt uncomfortable.
Without Romeo's help, I doubt I would have come to the decision to try and alter my mindset, but ultimately I wasn't doing this for him. I wasn't trying to heal because I felt obligated to listen to his words, or because he wanted me to, but rather because I wanted to - and I needed to.
I was doing this because I owed it to myself to try.
And so I was going to attempt to untie the rope from my hands and to save myself from the fall. I was going to allow myself to be everything I was afraid of – hopeful, carefree, and possibly even happy - and hope that I wouldn't die trying to fight for a lost war. I was going to indulge myself in hope, soak in the bittersweet poison of its promises, and hope that I wouldn't make the fragile pieces of myself even more broken.
Zoning back in to my surroundings after being lost in my thoughts, I recollected my bearings as I glanced down at the boy stood below me, after having torn my transfixed eyes away from the sleeping city. Romeo's gaze was focused out into the distance as a somewhat comfortable silence had fallen between us, the air swarming with something unknown yet tangible to the both of us, an unspoken agreement to let the wind carry away Romeo's words and allow the implications to simply fade into the slight breeze.
Looking down on Romeo from above, I found myself hyperaware of the realisation that throughout the entire night he had kept his hood on, tugging on it every few minutes as if to check it was still up on his head. His reaction the first time I had thought to ask him seemed innocent enough, but I couldn't help but wonder if there was another reason for the continual checks.
He stood at an angle, his body halfway towards me and hallway towards the empty road as I let my eyes trail down his figure, fitted in all-black with his rucksack loosely slung over one shoulder. He must have forgotten to remove his bandana completely from earlier, since it was still hung around his neck, only having been pulled down instead of untied after finishing the spray painting.
"Cass?"
He spoke with such ease, his head turning by the tiniest fraction as he kept his unwavering gaze focused away from me, ever so slightly turning his body around to angle towards me more. I hummed questioningly in reply, crossing my arms as I leaned against the railing while looking down at his still figure, the lingering silence evoking flutters of worries in my mind.
"I just..." he trailed off, sighing before running a hand over his face as he shook his head slightly. "I finally understood something about you... something that's been repeated several times through tonight and I only now get it." His pensive tone made my gaze drift up in remembrance, before returning to him just as he turned his head to glance up at me, his potent gaze holding mine for a brief second. "You were protecting yourself from pain, right? That's why you're scared of being happy: because of the pain that would follow it."
I nodded despite him not being able to fully see me, following along with his words. "I had to protect myself," I reasoned, "So I avoided pain in any form it could possibly arise from."
"But the part that's been stuck on my mind; the part I didn't realise until now is that," he continued, his head dropping down as he put his hands into his pockets, "Avoiding pain and avoiding happiness are the same thing."
I simply blinked down at him, taking a step away from the railing as his paradoxical his words hit me, my brain scrambling to decode his ambiguity. Although the words were directed at me, his words were tainted with something more personal, like he was relating to himself rather than me. As though sensing my lack of clarity, Romeo turned around at last, his eyes taking an eternity to trail up to mine before his onyx orbs became focused on me.
"That's what you were doing Cass. That's why you were so scared of happiness - why you consciously avoided it: you were protecting yourself from pain, so you had to protect yourself from happiness which would cause you pain when it ended; as well as protect yourself from pain which would bloom into happiness once the problem was over. That's why you run away from pain and pleasure, because they both have the same end result:"
"Sadness," I finished off, breaking his gaze as I reached back out to the railing, wanting something to grip onto. "Sadness was always the end result."
"And when the sadness ended, it turned back into happiness-"
"Which would turn back into sadness, and the cycle of two mental extremes would always continue, causing me whiplash as I jumped between the two states of mind."
"Until you decided to just avoid both. You avoided happiness, and avoided situations which would cause you pain..." Romeo spoke tentatively, his eyes fixated on mine for any sign that he was reading the situation wrong, "And you avoided both, by running away from them."
I stared down at Romeo in pure amazement, nodding slowly as I was hit with the continual realisation that for once, someone actually understood me; truly understood me, even before I'd processed the situation and understood myself. I suppose my actions had been subconscious, but it was now that Romeo had pointed out the patterns in my behaviour that I could see everything so much clearer.
In hindsight, I could see now that I had been avoiding anything that might cause me happiness, as well as pain. Like at the graffiti wall, when I'd been so reluctant to spray paint something, or when I'd first shown my poetry to Romeo, because aside from my surface level fears of not being good enough, when I read deeper into it, it wasn't the fear of failure that made me reluctant:
It was the fear of succeeding.
The fear that I might actually have spray painted something good, or received praise on one of my poems, or actually been successful – that's what had initially stopped me. Because if I had been good enough, I would've felt the feeling I've learned to loathe, the feeling that never lasted and brought me more pain than the transient joy it supplied: I would have felt happiness, and now I realise that my hesitance had merely been me subconsciously trying to avoid being happy.
"One of the first things you said to me, one of the first things you asked me was how I felt." I let go of my vice-grip on the railing, resting on my arms as I glanced out at the quiet city instead of meeting Romeo's dark brown eyes. "And I said I didn't feel anything. Because when I avoided both happiness and pain, constantly running from anything which would make me feel either, I started to feel nothing."
I became numb enough to plan my suicide. I became numb enough to try and kill myself without even saying goodbye. I became numb enough to lie to my best friend, and push him away because he was the only source of happiness in my life. I became numb enough to want to stop living – and I think that was the scariest part about it; finding life so mundane and empty that I lost all sense of direction in it.
"And in feeling nothing, I lost who I was. I defined myself by my past because I didn't know who I was, and used the trauma and hurt I've experienced as an excuse to continue feeling nothing," I let my eyes drift back down to Romeo, a glimmer of sympathy swirling through his dark brown swirls, "Until I ended up here, with you, tonight, which forced to realise that everything I've been doing has all been in vain."
"So what changed tonight then?" Romeo questioned, already knowing the answer but asking me just so I could say it out loud.
"Tonight it hit me that, after everything, all my running from pain..." I trailed off, smiling softly to myself while drumming my fingers along the railing. "I realised that pain is inevitable - and I can't avoid it. I felt nothing, but feeling nothing is feeling pain. Being numb just meant I was still experiencing pain, but on such an unmeasurable scale that I learnt to just stop processing it. I convinced myself that feeling nothing was the solution but really I was still feeling pain and just disguising it under a new name."
All I did was try and avoid the most irrevocable thing in life: I ran, I isolated myself, I pushed away Theo, I kept quiet about everything on the inside and projected out a fake exterior, I wrote poems till my wrists ached and sobbed silent tears into my pillows – and it didn't stop the pain. Suppressing didn't solve, and all the miles I ran away from my issues amounted to nothing when all along I was carrying them with me.
"Running, like you said earlier, doesn't solve anything. Nothing I do, none of my coping methods, solve anything. As hard as it is to admit to myself, I wasn't trying to get better, I was just preventing myself from getting worse. And in the end, I still ended up deteriorating."
I thought putting my emotions on lockdown would cure the sick parts of my mind, but when everything re-opened the illness was still there, returning at full force with an even more devastating impact.
"And I miss myself. I miss being happy. I miss everything I never got to become because of the environment I grew I up in. And... and I think I deserve it, you know?" I breathed out, trying to keep my voice steady as I felt an ocean of emotions well up within me. "I think I deserve to know who I am, and to learn to love myself and enjoy being alive."
"Of course you do Cassie," Romeo nodded, his tone heartfelt and genuine, "You do just as much as anyone else."
"So if I'm never going to avoid pain, why not just... embrace it? Welcome it, invite it in and make peace with it in the hopes that it will agree and won't kill me. I'm allowing myself to be hopeful, even though I'm aware that pain will no doubt follow, because- because I'm tired of being dictated by my fears. I'm tired of being who I've become, and letting my mental illnesses define me, and being scared of happiness and everything else I'm entitled to. And even if I don't reach happiness, even if I don't heal, or get better- All I want..."
I brought my eyes back to Romeo's, the chocolate swirls within his warm brown orbs giving me the strength to continue and finish my statement.
"All I want is to be okay."
A single tear rolled down my cheek as I finally came to an end, my voice catching on the last word as Romeo sent me a supportive smile, the strength of his presence still felt despite the metres between us.
"I've encountered a lot of struggling people Cass, and I've seen them endure pain like no other... but there is no one I have ever met with strength that could even compare to yours." The breath left my lungs at the sincerity of his words, the gentle smile on his face and the look in his beautiful brown eyes a memory that I would remember forever. "I don't know if you yourself quite even realise how much strength you possess, how brave, and resilient, and inspiring you are, for trying to fix what you once thought was the unfixable."
My tears only fell harder at his words, a wide smile on my face through the blurry mess of my vision as I glanced down at the boy who had achieved what he said he would: he was helping me untie the rope around my hands to save myself from falling.
"And I can promise you Cass, that one day - no matter how much pain is yet to come or how hard this journey will be - you will be okay."
(A/N) I realised yesterday that boys notice pain more than girls do.
I was having a conversation with a group of friends, all girls except for one boy, and halfway through speaking my male friend interrupted me and asked, "Why do you speak like that?" I was so confused, so I asked what he meant, and he literally said "You talk so flat and empty with no emotion." And I kinda just blinked back at him in shock at his bluntness because I hadn't even realised I was doing that, and none of my female friends realised either.
And the more I thought about it, I remembered that the first two times I started self-harming, it had been two of my male friends who had realised, and to this day none of my female friends have noticed without me telling them.
I suppose maybe there is hope that somewhere out there a version of Romeo does exist after all.
- T.R.