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You sat on your couch with your gaze transfixed at a single point on the white wall staring back at you. For how long you didn’t know, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care.
All you knew was that it was light outside one minute and dark the next.
Your ears picked up on the light knock on the door, and then another —this time a bit more forcefully— before you heard the rustle of the handle following the sound of a key being slotted into the lock.
The familiar click of the bolt alerted you of the door opening, and the cautious footsteps of a pair of dress shoes stepped onto the ceramic flooring of the entrance. You made no move to turn your head over to acknowledge the arrival of your visitor, but you heard them crouch down to untie their laces and slip their shoe off, carefully tucking them into the cupboard without a single pause.
“I’ve been looking for you.” His words were the first uttered into existence in the flat since the beginning of the day, breaking the towering silence you had spent hours aplenty laboring over to construct. Akaashi reached over, entering your peripheral field of vision, to flick on the light switch, the light bulb crackling abruptly before bathing the room in artificial light.
Your eyes instinctively blinked from the sudden brightness, though you failed to register the stinging of the searing light that should have come along. You briefly tilted your head over to the door, as if acknowledging his presence in the room, before your eyes shifted back onto the point on the bare walls you had been staring at moments prior.
“You could’ve called,” you responded plainly after a heavy silence as he walked over to the dining table and draped his winter coat over a chair. He turned to look over at you, kneeling down in front to reach your eye level.
“I tried,” he revealed as he fished his phone out of his back pocket, unlocking the device and turning it over to show you the call history. “You didn’t pick up.”
Your eyes flitted over to your phone sitting at the top of your bookcase at the corner of the room, powered down and turned over on its back as it laid screen-first on the edge, the clutches of gravity threatening to snatch it for itself at any second.
“Guess I didn’t notice,” you mumbled as your gaze returned to Akaashi’s, your eyes meeting his sea blue ones for the first time since his arrival. You paused, stirring through your vernacular to piece together an excuse that would convince the man in front of you of the lie you intended to tell. “I’m sorry. I was just… busy,” you exhaled.
You drew in another slow breath —controlled, steady, and purposeful. “Yeah, busy,” you repeated following a pregnant pause.
He shifted in his spot, crossing his legs and reaching out a hand in front of you, silently inviting you to place yours in his. You relented, and his thumb gently traced the raised edges of your knuckles. “We both know that’s not the case,” he murmured as you stared back at the calm waves of the sea.
“And how are you so sure?” you challenged, peeling your eyes away to gaze out the window on the other side of the room instead.
The loud pitter patter of the pouring rain could be heard even with every entrance of the space you occupied having been completely sealed. The blinding flashes of lightning illuminating the cloudy backlit sky followed closely behind the bellowing claps of thunder that shook you to your very core. Your gaze settled onto the glass separating you from the outside world, the raindrops disappearing as fast as they appeared, streaking across the surface from the sheer velocity and acceleration propelling their movement.
When had the storm come in? You shifted your gaze over to the dinner table, looking at where Akaashi’s jacket sat on the chair closest to the door. A patchwork of darkened areas still fresh from the onslaught of the rain contrasted by the lightened areas of fabric that had since dried. It reminded you a bit of a vase, you thought —as if Pandora’s Pithos were struck by the Lord of the Sky’s wrath and had shattered into a million pieces, each shard haphazardly glued on back together to restore some semblance of its former glory though existing as nothing but an empty vessel with no purpose.
“Because you’d never let time slip by like this if you were. You crave being busy. You work well being busy.” Akaashi tugged on your hand, warping your attention back onto the entrancing stillness of the calm before the storm his irises possessed.
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘workaholic’,” you suggested, the edges of your lips raising up ever so slightly.
He shrugged, reaching up to your face to brush a loose strand of hair out of your eyes. “Not sure I like the connotation in that word,” he laughed, his voice so honest and pure, like the first clap of thunder signifying the onset of the storm. “So can I hear it from you?”
You slowly blinked back, your lips unmoving as your chest rose and fell back down in even breaths. Your eyes darted back to the window outside, back to the storm thundering down from the heavens above.
If you had to, you would be more than willing to be the one who sealed away your own voice, burying it six feet under to rot and to forget for the rest of eternity. Perhaps then you would find the peace and quiet that you had always heard so much about, or maybe you would be able to find in you the will to relax and the strength to smile. Perhaps then you wouldn’t be constantly wrought with worry that someday this would be too much for those you loved. Perhaps then you wouldn’t have to worry that Akaashi’s iron grip on your hands saving you from plummeting into the abyss would one day loosen and send you falling down.
You were… you. You were productive, you were the person whose shoulders alone carried the weight of the world. You were headstrong, an unforgiving force of nature that raced through the obstacles set up by others to get in your way. With hard work in one hand and a fervent desire to be better in the other —to breathe to life improvement with each breath you took— you were supposed to be infallible; you were supposed to be the gravitational axis supporting the orbit of the rest of the universe.
To falter in weakness, to lapse into despair… To give into such primally human desires… You shouldn’t —you couldn’t.
So you wouldn’t.
“It’s just… You know,” you mumbled as you looked over to the other side to hide the grimace on your face from the man, bringing your legs up to your chest.
Akaashi tugged at your hand again —this time more forcefully— before getting onto his knees, working his hands up your arm and hooking his hands around your shoulders to gently pull you down from your spot and into his hold.
And for a brief moment, the two of you fell, your mind drawing up scenarios aplenty of ones where the ground would open up and gravity would pull you down past the core of the Earth and down to the inferno of the Underworld —to the domain where Hades himself oversaw, where perhaps you could be laid to rest and wallow in your own self misery in the River Styx.
“And I’ll say I don’t know just so you say it out flat,” he insisted as his eyes grabbed your attention once more, the crashing waves of the angered sea thrashing about in the depths of his gaze.
“It’s just me,” you answered curtly, the gears in your head spinning to plan out how to continue on your rouse.
“What do you mean?” You could feel the grip he had on your arm tighten ever so slightly.
Your lips parted, though you found your words caught in your throat. You could laugh it off, you could wave a hand up in dismissal. You could even jump right back up to your feet this instant and slap on a smile rivalling the radiance of the chariot of the sun all in your act to fool the man —and maybe even yourself— into thinking that everything was fine, that you just felt sick —a migraine perhaps.
And yet you didn’t. You had chosen not to, or maybe it was because you couldn’t bring yourself to do so. The nerves underneath your skin had sent the message, but instinctive reflex had shut it down, chaining you back from the escape you had made yourself to believe you sought.
You looked back into Akaashi’s eyes, the stone-set frown on your face warning him to drop the subject with an air of mock arrogance, yet your eyes screamed of paradoxical pleas of rescue, of some saving grace to swoop in and fight the battles with your mind’s own demons in place of you.
“Same old, same old,” you lamented in the end, looking down and unravelling your legs from his waist to sit adjacent to him. “Just the usual menu,” you continued as your gaze remained on the floor.
“You know that’s not true.”
Your breath hitched for a sliver of a second as you processed Akaashi’s words. You? Lie? You scoffed, that’s not true.
It wasn’t true because you knew with definitive certainty that it was the usual mixed bag of emotions tossed at you from above. You knew exactly what was on your mind, you knew exactly what it was that had spurred you to bend until your mind split apart, your own dreams shattering to reveal the grim reality lurking underneath, your own undoing from your own uncontrolled thoughts.
And you could scream and cry for help, bang your hands against the cold prison bars of confinement until your skin tore and your fists bled, but what would be the point of it all if you were the prison warden all along? Because the chaos you had unleashed when your own inferiority got the best of you all came from within, nestled under the protection meant to block out attacks from the exterior, travelling along your vessels to envelope you in the suffocating darkness of the void.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you mustered as you looked skyward at your white ceiling.
The spot you noticed in the morning was still there, the one that stared back tauntingly at you three feet off from the light fixture. The damned spot you tried using every household cleaning reagent you could find, spending hours under the fumes of the solvents desperately trying to scrub it out. It was an eyesore to see, mocking you each time you laid eyes on it of your own ineptness for having dirtied your own safe haven and for having failed to clean up your own mess, reminding you of the blood spilled on your hands.
Akaashi’s slender fingers found themselves tucked underneath your jaw, his thumb tracing light circles as he forced on a worried smile. “You. Your definition of being ‘good enough’. The fact that you don’t think you are.”
The nagging voice in the your mind —the one you had fought so desperately all your life yet failed time and time again to muffle and drown under the raging rapids of your thoughts— blared out daggers of contempt, piercing through you in reminder of your own overwhelming incompetence and raising the demons that slept in the corners of the chambers in your mind.
And in truth, you’ve tried. You’ve tried long and hard, your fight against your own voice beginning at the first conscious thought, the first tangible memory in the recesses of your mind being not one of childish laughter but rather one of defeat. You’ve lost track of the times the sun and moon swapped places, you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve muttered determined vows of self-encouragement. You’ve attempted it all, every combination and every permutation, and yet in each and every case, the blade would always slip from your grasp, clanging onto the ground as your knees gave in and you hung your head to surrender to your enemy, only for them to pick up your sword and force it into your hands once more.
“I’m not, and no it’s not. I’m just honest,” you explained.
“And so am I,” he countered back instantaneously.
You elected not to argue back —it would have been another futile fight against the inevitable. You felt the warmth of Akaashi’s hand trail down from your face down the length of your back, and you leaned in again to rest your head on his chest, the petrichor smell of the rain from outside still clinging to the sweater he had on.
Your eyes succumbed to the enticement of the sandman’s words as your eyelids sealed shut, but unlike the landscape of dreams and unlike the prisons down in the depths of Hell, there was no escape from the confinement of your own imagined inferiority. You had been doomed since you drew your first breath to fight to the end of humanity —till the brink of exhaustion— destined to defend what embers remained of your dying spirit.
His hand had settled onto the small of your back, now rubbing small circles into the cotton of your shirt to lull the God of Thunder himself to sleep and drown out the booming claps of thunder that penetrated both your head and the atmosphere outside. “You can cry if you want,” he whispered into your hair.
“I can’t.”
“And why is that?”
You unfurled yourself from his form as you leaned back, meeting the stormy sea of his eyes once more.
It had caught you off guard —his question, that was. You couldn’t surmise any logical reason for why you couldn’t, but you just knew you wouldn’t be able to. To unleash the rapids from the dam and to let out the pool of emotions that had been slowly building up would mean to let it all go —to let it all rush away. Would you finally be free? Would you finally be able to pick yourself back up this time and break free of the shackles that dug deeper into your skin with each movement of your limbs?
You closed your eyes as you imagined the possibility of freedom, tasting the uneasy excitement in the word as it flashed through your mind. Would it be worth the risk? Would it be worth whatever ordeal would befall you should you try to fight your own destiny?
Would it be right for you to seek something like change out with your hands as dirtied as they were from the murky waters of the River Styx?
Would you still recognize yourself in the mirror if you did?
“I don’t know,” you confessed after a lengthy pause.
An eerie silence settled in-between the two of you as your focus returned onto your breath —slow and steady, unlike the racing palpitations of your heart that incessantly urged at your lungs to work harder, faster, better. Akaashi’s hold on you tightened, his hand guiding your head back into the safety of his chest as the rhythmic beat of his heart against your ears worked to soothe the screeching in your head.
What had you expected? For him to have been telepathic? To be able to read your thoughts and discern the truth from your lies? You had sealed the course of this interaction in your reluctance to speak the words in your mind, choosing to jeer at your own inadequacy rather than to be honest for a single moment and allow your vocal cords to materialize the demons plaguing your thoughts into existence.
How would he have known if you didn’t make it obvious? You had won: your lie had worked and he had been duped once again into believing it was something intangible, that it wasn’t the lifelong crusade the inner demons of your insecurities had launched to conquer every last inch of your self-worth.
He wouldn’t be burdened by the knowledge, you wouldn’t have to fear the day that he eventually left.
So why was it that the sinking feeling of despair growing in your stomach and travelling up to your jaw was still spreading throughout the rest of your body?
“I’m just weird. Sorry,” you apologized as you inched back and stood up on your feet, your eyes looking listlessly back out the window. The storm outside had since lightened up. The raindrops hammering down against the Earth’s surface had softened, now gently prodding against existing puddles left from before.
Akaashi looked up at you from his spot on the ground, his brows knit with concern. “What are you apologizing for?”
For what, you didn’t know —you couldn’t answer. Was it instinctive? Was it a primal desire to be cared for, to feel acknowledged, to feel validated? You simply stared back, your mouth pursed into a tight frown as you tasted the words in your mouth, struggling to make sense of it all.
“The usual.”
And in truth, it was the usual, because this scenario had played out a million times. You would disappear from reality with no traces of having ever existed, your usual chattiness replaced by complete radio silence. And each time he would come, picking up the key underneath the door mat to let himself in, finding you huddled in the corner of the sofa with your eyes a mere blank slate in place of the unexplored galaxies the he had fallen in love with.
You swallowed down a breath as you fought back against the tears you had so boldly proclaimed didn’t exist moments earlier. It happened every time, with each weighing down heavier than the last. Your mind screamed and cried at you to change, to find it within you to move past this fault and to get over it, to be better and to stop being such a burden to the ones you loved. But each time your arms and legs would quaver, your joints weak as you fell down onto the ice cold floor dirtied by the thoughts plaguing your mind as you chose to stay confined in your mental prison.
Akaashi quietly stood up, his head tilted down to meet your face with a soft smile. He reached out a hand, and when you accepted it, he twirled you back into the embrace of his arms.
“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice now steady and calm. If you were the coursing river rapids that destroyed all in its path with its ice-cold waves, then Akaashi was the clouds above that brought upon the storming showers that cleansed the floor of sin.
You nodded, and his frown deepened, his grip on you tightening ever so slightly in a silent act of reassurance.
“What, you don’t believe me?” you forced out as a laugh.
He shook his head, his breath shaky as if it was him whose hair was dishevelled and him whose face was now stained by tears.
“It’s not that,” he began, staring straight into your eyes in a desperate attempt to reignite whatever was left of the snuffed out candle you had once called hope. “I believe in you. Even if you try to convince yourself otherwise, even if you find yourself thinking for a fraction of a second that I might be lying.” He pulled your head in to rest against the crook of his neck, his hand gently carding through the strands of your hair. “My faith will always lie in you.”
You closed your eyes and took a deep breath, relishing in the warmth of the embrace and the encouragement in his words. Your eyes drifted back towards the window, the sun peaking out from behind the storm clouds, bathing all in its path in gentle tranquility.
Maybe it was wrong to liken Akaashi to the calm before the storm —maybe he was better suited to be the sun after the rain. The reminder that there would be something to look forward to after a rampage of destruction, that no matter how bad it got there would always be an end —that chaos would eventually settle and normalcy would return.
Just like the sailors sailing along the rocky coasts of the stormy seas who were lured by the hypnotic trap of the siren’s voice to meet their inescapable demise, perhaps if you stopped fighting the beckoning of the siren’s call, you too would be able to become enchanted under their spell. Perhaps you would come to understand that unwavering faith Akaashi spoke of, perhaps you would find it within you to trudge on forward and fight off the guard blocking you from the exit of your self-constructed prison. Perhaps —just perhaps.
Your eyes returned to the white walls of your flat. Your shoulders relaxed into Akaashi’s hold as the storm brewing in your head cleared up as realization settled.
To say with your head held high that you, in all your flaws, were enough…
It was high time you learnt to simply accept that you’d never be able to convince yourself of that lie.