Work Text:
Chris sighed, for the first time in maybe… 20 minutes?
He swiped up on the Tumblr app and checked Whatsapp instead. An unread message from Taylor that he really ought to reply to, but he just didn’t have the energy to commit to a response yet. It felt easier to just ignore until his head was in the right space. He limply dropped his phone down the side of the bed before he could let the guilt set in.
It has been like this for a couple of weeks now. Go through the work week on autopilot, slowly getting more and more annoyed with every little thing that went wrong, and crash at the weekend. It was a cycle he knew wasn’t sustainable and he needed to find a way out, or a way of tempering his mood somehow.
But, hey, there were bills to pay.
He stood up and stretched, hard enough for blood to rush to his head and he stumbled a little, feeling faint. He rubbed his eyes and blinked until he could see clearly again. There was a row of soda cans and a couple of empty cigarette packets taunting him from the top of his dresser. There were plenty of things you could use to describe Chris, and addictive personality was definitely one of them.
He knew he should clear them away but, fuck it, that was a job for tomorrow Chris to worry about. Or next week Chris, or whatever.
Instead, he slumped down at his desk, switched on his laptop, and continued the routine of cycling through different social media sites, hoping something would appear to distract him. Twitter was the same old, same old: a lot of shouting into the empty void at the injustice of everything, with a few spoilers for a show he hadn’t caught up on yet. Damnit. Facebook was predictably just as depressing. A bunch of family members he hardly saw talking about a bunch of stuff he hardly gave a fuck about, with the occasional status update from Dad about latest game. Go Beavers…
He leant back and stared at the ceiling. There was a cobweb in the corner that seemed particularly interesting today. If he were actually writing that novel that had been hiding in his head for the last ten years, he’d probably describe how the flies trapped in the intricate construction of their predator’s making reminded him of his own existence. But even he wasn’t that lazy in his metaphors.
But he did feel trapped. And it was hard to pinpoint exactly how and why this latest episode had begun. That was sort of his style really. For the most part, social anxiety aside, life was pretty okay. It could be better by a large margin, sure, but Chris had a good circle of friends, a job he didn’t hate completely , and enough financial freedom to do things he enjoyed. But somehow all of that wasn’t enough, and occasionally he would spiral down into an existential crisis like this.
The obvious answer would be therapy, but Chris had his doubts over how effective that would be, and he didn’t like to waste people’s time.
Instead, he’d just accepted this as part of himself, and weathered the storms when they passed through, and always made it out of the other side mostly unscathed. What was it Dad had said back when Mom died? It’s important to let yourself cry and feel your emotions. Bottling them up isn’t healthy . Hm, maybe he’d mostly been telling himself that as he polished off the second whiskey bottle of the week.
Now that thought was a blast from the past. He’d managed to survive those dark years – the worst years of his life – so it was beyond him why it was now , when Dad was abstinent and Chris was now house-sharing with Michael in Seattle, that he was really lacking any motivation or energy.
His nose twitched and he lifted his arm and sniffed underneath. Maybe he could use what little energy he did have to drag himself to the shower…
****
After that was done, he threw the towel over his exercise bike- cum -clothes horse, changed into a fresh pair of underwear and threw on the clothes he’d been wearing before. Fuck it, he wasn’t going out today so who was he trying to impress?
He flopped back onto his bed and opened up Tumblr again. He flicked onto the hashtag of a game that was a favourite of his and a certain post caught his eye. It was a really cool piece of fanart of the main character, but it was the name of the artist that took him aback: Daniel Diaz. Daniel had always been good, but this was great . He allowed himself a brief, sad smile and said, “this looks awesome, dude.” Not that anyone could hear him, and certainly not Daniel, but it was sincere all the same.
He closed the app and sighed again. Another one so soon after the last, it was getting dangerously close to becoming a habit.
Tomorrow, he decided, he would text Taylor back and make some plans to meet up on his lunch break. He knew she’d understand. They’d been friends long enough to just know when not to bother one another. She could read him like a book, and vice-versa. For now, he just plugged in his earphones and fell into the comforting embrace of his ‘sad boi hours’ playlist; finally, a distraction from the storm raging on in his head.
All he could do was what he did every single day: hope that, when the fog clears the next morning, the clouds break and let a little sunshine through.