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Something whispers in your ear, and it snaps you back from your complete absorption into the video you had been watching. You shake your head, trying to adjust yourself. It feels cold, and your whole body is shivering now. You won’t leave your chair right now, you think. It isn’t safe.
You lean back a bit. You’re tired, probably. You forget how long it’s been since you slept, and you don’t want to check what time it is. You don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter, anyway.
Your cold hand finds your face, first adjusting your glasses, then giving into curiosity, and feeling under your lower lip. It’s been a few days since you shaved, and now you’re feeling gross again… maybe that will be the thing to motivate you to shower. You doubt it, but it’s possible. The energy it takes, the door standing between you and the bathroom, those are still factors. You don’t think you have the energy. You want to. You wish you could. It didn't used to be this hard. But you just don't have the energy for it all. You lean back in your chair and close your eyes.
Images flash in your head of that thing you saw earlier while scrolling the Internet, the horrible stuff you came across, and you wince, and the world starts spinning, and you’re on the floor, laying on top of empty plastic bags of popcorn and chips. Your head is throbbing, and when you fell, your headphones clattered across the ground out of reach. You try to extend your arm to take them, but you can’t. You sigh, and you curl into a ball, and you close your eyes. The static in your brain gradually starts to dull, and before long, you’re unconscious again.
There’s someone in your room. There’s someone in your room. There’s someone in your room.
You’re playing dead, or whatever you might call it, still balled up on the floor. You can’t help but occasionally open your eyes, but you’re too scared to look around for them.
One such time when you flash your eyes open, you spot a hairy arm reaching down to grab your headphones.
No no no no.
You yelp, and shove yourself up and throw yourself into a corner, breathing heavy and closing your eyes tight, curling into a ball with your arms tightly gripping your legs to your chest.
“Futaba!” comes the voice. It’s familiar, but that doesn’t make it good. In fact, it usually makes it bad. They’re yelling too, which hurts, and they know it hurts, that’s why they do it, usually…
“It’s just me.” The voice is softer now, like they just grasped that they'd made a mistake. That’s enough to confuse you. You open your eyes slowly, cautiously. It takes you a few seconds. You recognize the person standing in front of you, hands raised in a surrender of sorts. A gesture of “I come in peace”.
You recognize him. He’s kind of bad, but he’s probably the best one. He’s the one who lets you stay safe in your room. You relax a little.
He offers you your headphones, slowly reaching them out to you quietly. You hesitate for a moment, you don’t really like that he touched them, but you’ll have to take it. You grab them and quickly put them back over your ears, ticking them on once, for noise cancelling mode.
He seems to hesitate for a minute, biting his lower lip. “Did you eat today?” he says quietly. You shake your head. You don’t think you did, because it’s been awhile, even if you don’t know what time it is.
He sighs, looking disappointed. “Okay,” he says. “That’s okay.” He looks conflicted, like he wants to do something, but he can’t, like he’s trying to decide if it’s worth it. It probably isn't worth it, you think. Nothing has worked so far. And nothing will.
“They kept me late tonight,” he says with a groan. “I’m pretty tired. I’ll go to bed soon, so you can have free reign of the house if you want it. Okay?” You nod.
He seems to hesitate, sighing again, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. You probably did something bad, you figure. Being a bad child again… no no no.
He slowly backs away, and heads for the door. You watch him like a hawk, making sure he’s gone, and he closes the door on the way out. You crawl over and lock it immediately.
Now it’s going to take you longer to work up for a shower. You’ll have to give it a good hour to make sure he’s asleep, and you’ll need to come down from that. You shake your head. It’s so annoying. It’s so hard, why is it so hard? Why is doing things, doing anything, so hard??
You retreat to your chair, and take a seat, and hug your legs to your chest. You press play on the video you’d started earlier. If you watch it for a bit, maybe you can calm down.
You remember he said you should eat, but your stomach hurts and you feel sick, so you’re not going to. You feel bad, because he looked sad, but at least he didn’t yell at you that you had to eat. You always hated that.
You feel sick. Your head feels hot and you’re exhausted, but you can’t sleep. You’ve spent the past few hours trying to find something to do, anything to suck in your interest. After marathoning another video game, you’ve gotten completely lost without anything to excite you. Nothing feels interesting.
It’s not boredom. Boredom is for normal people. Boredom is when normal people don’t know what to do. This is different. You’re miserable, you’re panicking, the idea of not having something to do makes you sick. You need something, something to distract you from this horrible world, something to absorb yourself in and lose track of the world. If you don’t have that, all you’re left with is your tomb. It’s just you and this room and the void that encompasses it.
You’ve spent the last few hours Googling for some sort of game, some new show, some anything to hold your attention. Your special interests have dulled enough that they don’t excite you. You have nothing at the moment. And there's no telling how long it will take for something else to come along.
You feel your face again. Okay. A shower is something you can do. Quick and easy. Hopefully it’ll twist your head around somehow and you’ll feel a little less numb, a little less dull. You take a deep breath, take off your glasses and set them aside. It’ll take you awhile to get ready.
That was rough, tougher than expected. It takes you awhile to get ready for a shower, and it was cold. With winter at its peak, everything was freezing. You like the winter, the cold, mostly, but this much of it still isn’t easy to handle.
You had to leave your room, of course, and that was hard. Even with the whole house to yourself, it still felt… bad, unsafe. You couldn’t breathe normally, not just from the cold. You had to take your headphones off, too, to keep them from getting wet, and you don’t like to be that vulnerable, even in a place like this, somewhere pretty safe.
When you turn the lights on in the bathroom, the fan turns on automatically. And that hurts your ears a little.
You caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, too, and you felt sick, and you had to look away. You don’t like seeing yourself, especially not like that, not with your gross ugly body on full display. You couldn’t help be drawn to your worst features, you thought, and now the image is stuck in your memory, and you feel sick.
Once you actually got in the shower it felt nice. The warm water was good, even though it exacerbated some of the skin conditions you’d felt flaring up. But it felt too good in contrast to the stark cold contrast to deny it. Anything that gets you to shower is good, you figure.
Once you were in there, though, and you were shaving your face, you noticed your arms, too. One of the people you used to live with said you’re not supposed to shave those, so you normally don’t, but you noticed them starting to grow hair, and it looked like… it looked wrong, for you, so you shaved them too. It was hard to shave around the scars. You wanted to be careful.
The guy you’re living with got you a while bunch of girly-smelling shampoos, anything he could find, and you thought that was sweet. It was a little overboard considering you hardly use them, and it makes you feel guilty, like it always does. You’re just… draining money from some poor, nice man. He’s desperately trying to fix you, hopelessly unaware that he’s investing in the future of a girl who’s already dead. At least you smell nice now, though.
Once you turned off the water it felt like someone punched you in the gut, all the wind was sucked out of your sails and you fell down, and you sat there in the shower for a bit, cold again and tired and still so uncomfortable with your body. As soon as you could manage, you hurried to change into pajamas.
You climb back into bed under your weighted blanket, warm and safe, and you try to dull your thoughts. Ugly vivid memories are still clamoring around in your head. You aren’t tired either, so you’ll need to find a way to keep yourself busy for awhile longer.
Even from behind your shades, you can tell the sun is rising. You’re finally starting to become tired.
You wonder if things will miraculously get better when you wake up. If your day will be good, and one good day will be all it takes to change your cognition and repair all the damage in it. You know that isn’t true, but it’s nice to think about.
It would be cool if there were some secret out there that you hadn’t realized yet, waiting to be discovered, some magic switch that could flip off everything wrong with you. You start to wonder, though, if that would even be you anymore. The thought makes you shudder a bit.
Maybe tomorrow you’ll try your best. Maybe that will be enough. Right now, all you know is that you’re too tired to be sure.