Tick tock

So, here’s the thing. Life doesn’t start the minute you leave high school. That diploma isn’t a key that opens the cage to let you run wild and chase the dreams you’ve let cloud your head and blur your vision. Your life started years ago. Stop wasting it. Stop wishing away the weekdays, eyes fixed on the clock, waiting for the moment you can drown your stresses in alcohol. The only thing ticking away is your life. Stop counting down the days and start making the days count. Stop hating on Sundays, sinking under the covers into a dream that seems to outweigh your reality. Start living that dream. Wake up. Get out of bed. Breathe through sunrises, eat chocolate for breakfast, step on a bus you’ve never heard of before and get lost in the magic of it all. Lose who you used to be and find someone better. Look for inspiration where you never saw it before and you might find something that makes your skin tingle. A sign that your heart craves. Grasp Monday mornings as if they were your last because, one day, they just might be. Don’t wait. Don’t wait to graduate, don’t wait for the day that someone else nods to give you permission to start feeling like you’re alive. Because that day won’t come. And, before you even have time to blink, you’ll be drowning in sterile sheets and x-rays and countless appointments where doctors tell you that time is running out. The ticking is getting faster. And you’ll bite your tongue to force back the tears and silence the voices that are screaming that you should have done it sooner. Your life started years ago. When are you going to start living it?  

Broken strings

It was 3am when his slurs and stumbles sounded. He was early tonight. Mum’s lonely snores echoed through the tired walls of the house. My mind wouldn’t let me sleep. Words caught in my throat, song lyrics I’d lined countless notebook pages with, thoughts that seemed only meaningful enough for the depths of the night. I let go of my guitar within seconds. A few seconds too late. He’d heard.

“What did I tell you about your dumb music?” His words were knives slicing through me. My heartbeat accelerated with his footsteps. Vodka lined his breath, his eyes red as the blood that stained his left cheek. I closed my eyes but couldn’t avoid the way my body shook beneath the covers. They couldn’t protect me. Nobody could.

My vision blurred as he reached for the guitar. Pieces of wood flew through the air as if they were meaning to escape. I wished I could. The final strums of the strings echoed against my bed frame as the instrument shattered. I wanted to scream, but Mum did that for me. Evil burned through his fiery eyes. “Now I’ll never have to hear this sound again.”

I watched him rip the songs I’d spent hours writing, bleeding tears about his absence, his alcoholism. I lost myself in the words like he lost himself in bottles. I only wrote songs about him. Because there was a part of me, a part smaller than the guitar picks I hid in my t-shirt drawer, that was still hopeful. Hopeful he’d realise, hopeful he’d change. Hopeful he’d choose his family, he’d choose me. But, in that moment, when splinters of my guitar dotted the floor and his laugh deafened my tears, I lost all hope for my father.  

Healing

Other people are not medicine. They should have told me that before I found myself drowning in your words, craving the compliments you spoon-fed me with. They didn’t sound like lies when you said them.

It was January when I fell in love with you. March was when I realised I needed you. I needed the rasp of your voice to force me out of bed, to prise off the cover that I used to hide from my reality. I needed the twinkle in your eyes to guide me through the darkness that would otherwise consume me. You became my anti-depressants, the pills that burned through my body, ignited a fire inside of me that I thought could never go out.  

But it did. It went out when you left me standing alone on that bitter November night, suffocated in thick layers but naked inside. Empty. My bones were weaker than your apologies. And that twinkle that used to keep me going, you let it shine for someone else. I fell into a black hole when you left me, sunk deeper than the scars that wound their way up my wrists, around my ankles.

I wound up in hospital weeks later, echoes of pills and broken vodka bottles piercing my mind. You weren’t holding onto me anymore, so I didn’t need to either.

***

It’s been a year since the night I woke up to Mum’s cries of relief. You’re alive, she sobbed into the sterile white sheets. And I am. For the first time I can breathe. Alone. Without you.

I thought I needed you. I thought I needed a hero. Someone who could save me from myself, shield me from my own thoughts. It took me seventeen years to realise that the only person who could do that was me. Other people are not medicine. You shattered the glass I’d been made out of, but you couldn’t pick up the pieces to put me back together. I could. And I did.

Skinny

No pain, no gain. Isn’t that what they always say? I ignored my stomach’s desperate cries. Every inch of my body ached, deprived of what I most wanted and what I most wanted to avoid.

Food.

When I was nine, my mother told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. I looked into her ocean blue eyes and told her I wanted to be skinny. And that’s where it all began.

Other girls obsessed over boy bands and makeup brands. I obsessed over exposed ribs and thigh gaps. I stopped eating meals when I was twelve. Measly crumbs became all-you-can-eat buffets. Detox tea turned into a filling three-course meal.

When I was thirteen, I spent hours scrutinising myself in the mirror. Fat clouded my vision. My eyes could focus on nothing but the unbearable width of my legs and the repulsive stretch marks scarred onto my hips. It hurt to starve.

They whispered about me. She doesn’t eat, they’d say. They’re not rumours when they’re true. Skinny was blinding and I’d lost sight of everything else.

And even when I started fitting into a size XS, even when my bones shone through my paper white skin, I pinched at parts of my body. I pinched hard. I broke down and bled tears, folded myself in half on the bathroom floor and dug my palms into my thighs until it appeared, for just a second, that the fat wasn’t there anymore. It hurt. No pain, no gain, right?

2015

And so, another New Year’s Eve came and went, sweet champagne kisses lingering on my lips. I didn’t make a resolution, not one. Not this year. I was tired of the two time gym sessions and vows to cut out the carbs. I didn’t want to be that girl anymore – the girl who sobbed through December, the girl with disappointment stained cheeks. I didn’t want to wake up at midday and have it dawn on me that every plan I’d made had failed. I was tired of being a failure.

I didn’t want to make plans.

I wanted to daydream my way through lazy Sunday mornings and feel the coffee spill through my veins. I wanted to drag blankets onto my balcony and watch the sun glow with endless new possibilities. I wanted to put my Christmas tree up in October and carve pumpkins in June. I wanted to eat a bag of cheesy crisps without guilt’s constant nags whispering in my ear. I wanted to buy a plane ticket and board the plane that same day, explore hidden gardens and hectic sidewalks you can’t plan for.

I wanted to fall in love and not think about the consequences. I wanted to stop thinking altogether and just do. I wanted to lose myself and find someone completely different, someone who more resembled what I wished I could be. I wanted to grab a microphone and sing about my sorrows, leaving them in the past where they’d be safe and could be forgotten. I wanted to smile for no goddamn reason. I wanted to drive on an open road and ignore all the traffic lights, feel the freedom stream through my hair. I wanted to meet someone new and get to know every single thing about them, drown in my own laughter at their words.

I didn’t want to imagine tomorrow, or the day after that. For once, I wanted to think about the present. This year, I wanted to let myself live.

You

Sing me your favourite songs. Whisper the words into my ear, but say only what you mean. When you catch me looking at myself in the mirror, pinching at the layers around my legs, just know that I try so hard to listen to the words you say. All those times you’ve called me beautiful. And, on those days when the raindrops on the glass match the tears on my cheeks, use your left forefinger to wipe them away and tell me things will be okay. Maybe if you say it enough times I’ll start to believe it.

And, do me a favour and save the I love you for a night when you feel like, if you don’t say it, your heart will catch on fire. Because when I fall, I fall hard and I fall fast. If you’re not ready to catch me, I will collapse and I will break. If ever seem distant, know that I’m trying to pull away because I’m a wave of regret and you are the strongest pull of the tide there’s ever been. Pull me into you.

I wish more than anything that I could be good enough for you. I tie chains around my body in a hope that I don’t cling too tight. In a hope that you won’t get tired of me. Even though I know you will. Everyone does eventually.

On those nights when I keep my lips pressed together and my eyes are hollow, drag me out of bed and show me what it feels like to live. We could run to the beach and feel the waves lick our toes, lie back on the sand and watch the stars twinkle like my eyes on the day when I realised that you made me feel a way I couldn’t control.

So, I did fall hard. And I did fall fast. And my eyes did twinkle like stars whenever I was around you. You taught me what it was like to feel full. You took my mind places it had never been before and I let you. Because, in the end I wanted it to be you.

11:17am

It was 11:17am when Grace started crying. We were in Math class, foreign functions painted over the pages. The pencil fell to the floor. The desk shook as she ran out.

“Go with her,” Miss Smith said. To me.

I found her in the bathroom, her reflection crimson in the mirror. Tear puddles dotted the floor. She looked at me and pressed her palms into her face, as if she were trying to shield the tears. She wanted to hide them, lock them away. She wouldn’t be able to. I’d tried.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. Her knees went first. She collapsed to the floor, gasped for air as if the walls were closing in on us. Her sobs echoed. I sat next to her. The auburn waves fell over her face, strands sticking to her sorrow stained cheeks. As she lifted her arm to move them away, I saw them. I saw the scars winding their way up her wrists. They were deep. Just like mine.

She looked up. “What’s wrong with me?”

A question I’d been asking myself for weeks. “How do you feel?” My words were breaths.

“Empty.”