Work Text:
You can’t remember a time when you weren't hollow. When wind could gently splay your hair across a clear sky without making the aching hole in your chest ring out with its piercing, whistling song. When you could sit in the Breeze and not worry about the face revealed by the gentle curtain-pull of your bangs. When the tender sadness in your heart didn't sting like a cold day on wet skin, raw from chlorine, and God knows whatever else was in that public pool.
You think that, yes, in the distant past, there was some time like this. But that was quite a while ago. Before your world came crashing down to the conductor’s baton, beginning a Shepardian crescendo, the sound growing, growing, growing, so loud, so very loud, even in the moments of respite afforded by a three-year journey here, or a couple weeks there.
And then, it was gone.
You don't think about how long you've spent in this house, you don't think about how many times you've tried to cry yourself to sleep, only to be met with a dry face, hot with embarrassment, and you certainly don't think about how much your friends message you, even when you ignore them.
You think that maybe, someday soon, you would like to respond to them. But you know too that you have tried before, and you have failed.
They don't understand. How *could* they understand? How could they know what it's like to feel the wind snatching bits and pieces from you every time it blows by? How could they know the way it felt to fail? How could they EVER know, really KNOW, how your heart stops when you look in the mirror?
You muse over these thoughts often, turning them over in your mind’s eye like particularly pleasant pieces of sea glass. They are similarly cloudy.
You like to think that, maybe, this is what you're supposed to do, supposed to feel. Not in a karmic way, not as any sort of punishment - just as your duty. To take their pain and gently sand it down with the fuzzy edges of your own psyche, and pick up the pieces and shove them back into the mirror of your self. To feel everything they cannot, should not, to know the terrible things they mustn't. Someone has to do it, you think, and you've already been doing it for so long.
You have been doing it for so very long.
So, what's one more day?