Chapter Text
“I’ll be there for you. Always.” Ash’s face had been so earnest when he said those words that day in the park. Shiny, wet eyes with tears refusing to part from them as he tried his darndest to lock his eyes with mine. “I’ll keep choosing you. Over and over and over again.”
Those words ended up ringing true. Around mid-August, I got sectioned and placed in a psych ward indefinitely “for my own safety”.
Not even a day later, Ash had handed in his form to intercolate for a year so he could stay by my side while I recovered, or tried my best to.
I hated every second of it.
The psych ward was dull, but chaotic. Over the sound of the fights, therapists would repeat the same things I’d heard countless times over the years. It wasn’t anything new. When you don’t want to get better, there’s not very much they can force you to do. So, they kept me in there.
“For my own safety”.
Really, I think they just did that so no one could see me. The theory was, I think, that if I have someone taking care of me 24/7, it’s at the very least not going to get worse. And maybe, even with time, I might get better.
Might.
I didn’t believe it. I still couldn’t see a future where I got better.
To me, this was forever. This is my life now, I would think, I’m never going to get better or escape from here.
Every day, at 3 o’clock on the dot, Ash would come to visit me. He would sometimes have snacks with him that he’d try to get me to share with him. Other times, he would bring flowers “to cheer up my room”. Another time, he brought his version of Monopoly with all the places where we’d had dates as properties on the board.
He left that copy here, so I could look at it whenever I felt down.
It must’ve been hard for him. He couldn’t work much, but what little he could earn he would end up spending on me. He couldn’t move on with his life, despite how nightmarish staying here must’ve been for him. Ash never once complained, though.
He kept painting on that happy smile for me, even though he could see that I wasn’t getting better. After a particularly difficult relapse, even after my own family stopped visiting (not that they visited much anyway), he kept coming back. No matter how much I urged him to go back to uni, to find someone else, to move on; he kept coming back. He kept choosing me, over and over and over.
Sometimes I wonder if he find my brokenness appealing. I wonder if something about my chaotic whirlwind of a life is exhilarating to him, as much as it drains me. Maybe the cracks in my facade is just texture to him…
“Who am I?” I had screamed at him once, during one of my … “episodes”. “Who am I to you?”
“You’re my one,” he reassured me. But I could see his trembling hand grasping the back of the chair between us. He was scared. “I love you. Eiji, please….”
“I am not your “one”!” I laughed, maniacally, desperate to get him away from me. Away from the monster I had become, at any cost. “I don’t even love you, can’t you see that? In any other universe, we would never have gotten together. This one is just a glitch, a random fluke.”
But still, he kept coming back.
I had to get him away from this mess. He deserves so much better. If he won’t leave me of his own accord, I would have to do it myself.
No matter the price.