Breaking Points

++Something had happened to her that day. Something had made her snap. She couldn’t get her life back to the way that it had been before, or she wouldn’t let it. It was almost as if she had given up, had decided that living wasn’t important anymore. It was distressing to see her like that, hour after hour, day after day. It was something that strained the nerves, something that shredded happiness raw and left it hanging there in tatters at the sight of something so heartbreaking. There also wasn’t anything that she could do about it. It seemed that nothing would help, that the girl would push away anyone that might be good for her.

It seemed that it was all starting to revolve in an impossible spiral. It seemed that whenever she had cleared a new hurdle that something else even more painful would be thrown at her. It was painful to see her friend acting this way, acting like there wasn’t anything left in the world for her. Sometimes she just wanted to scream at her friend, to yell all of her anger and pain out so that the other girl would know just how she was feeling. It didn’t seem fair that she couldn’t reach one of the people that she counted on the most. It didn’t seem fair that she was being rendered helpless by someone that hated it when people did that to her. ++

"I hate it," Rhys whispered to the darkness around her. It was late at night, the only light coming from the other houses around her and the moonlight that streamed through her window. Sometimes she wondered if she would feel just as good staying up as if she had slept, because her sleep wasn’t very restful. She sighed and fell backwards onto her bed again; her head facing the ceiling with its neon green, glowing stars that had been attached. There was also some glowing silly string that had been sprayed up there in dots, and those added to the effect of distance on the otherwise white ceiling.

"I hate the fact that I can’t do anything," she whispered, her eyes filling with more moisture than normal. She rolled over so that she could see out the window. Her arm dangled over the edge of her bed to rest on the huge, stuffed, plush cat that she had next to her bed. It was just one of those things that she didn’t have the heart to get rid of even after all of these years of having it. Her head rested on one of her arms as she gazed distantly out the window.

She was never like this during the day. It always seemed like everything decided to catch up with her at night when it was dark. Or maybe it was the fact that she actually had energy during the daytime to hide the fact that she wasn’t having a good time. She was a surprisingly good actor, having been hiding her real feelings daily now for a year or more. It became a routine of not letting people see what she was really feeling, only letting them see what they would be comfortable thing.

The darkness was actually comforting to her. Sometimes it held warmth, and sometimes it held a chill, but either way it would wrap around her and make her feel safer. She couldn’t stand complete and total darkness though, but she was odd that way. The starlight and the soft yellow glow that came off of streetlights comforted her, making her feel more secure. She couldn’t explain the feeling, or even the one that made her afraid to go out at night or be alone in the woods at night. She never feared getting lost, but she feared what her imagination would think up for her.

Tonight was another night where the stress of the day that had accumulated decided to hit her extra hard and all at one time instead of being spaced out like it normally was. She couldn’t seem to decide whether or not to curl up and cry, to sit there and scream as loudly and viciously as she could, or if she should get around to punching a hole into her annoying lavender colored walls. She normally opted for crying silently for a while, but the adrenaline from the anger that came with her feelings would stay with her to the next day, making her cranky.

"Why can’t I help? Why won’t they let me help them?" she whispered to no one, letting the words hang silently in the air. She never could seem to find the answers that she wanted. They never seemed to be easy answers either, always leaving her hanging in more ways that one. Life must decide that it liked to play cruel jokes on her. If life were actually a living entity she had a feeling that she would hunt him or her down and beat them into a bloody pulp with her own two fists.

Someone really must be laughing at her. They must like to see her think that everything was going better and that everything was okay, or okay as it would get for a while. Those little bubbles of contentness seemed to be popping more and more often lately, and it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that other people seemed to be having perfectly good lives. It didn’t seem fair that they couldn’t understand what was going on with her and why she was having such a bad time. It wasn’t like they were going to try to help either; they were just going to shunt it aside and not help, seeing as it wasn’t any of their business anyway.

She sighed, pained eyes looking up at the ceiling again as she shifted positions so that she was laying on her back again. She often wondered if there was something wrong with her that made her not able to actually be happy for more than short periods of time. Some days she wondered if she had some mental disorder that would be the cause of everything that never seemed to get better, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t like counselors or therapists, she didn’t want anyone prying into her life and then dissecting her personality like that.

What she really needed, she had decided, was an anchor, something to hold her in the present and not let her go off on tangents that didn’t happen to be set in this reality. She needed something, or someone, to help keep her from going over the edge every time something seemed to be falling apart again. She needed someone that she could talk to and that would be there, someone that she could really count on in that way. She needed something that she could lean on when everything got tough, when all she felt like doing was collapsing.

++It was like something inside her was uncoiling, but crying as it did so. It was like there was something in there that was bleeding inside of her that couldn’t just be healing with something so temporary as a Band-Aid. Something inside of her wanted comfort that she couldn’t give, wanted a comfort that she didn’t know how to find. It was a little voice keening in the back of her mind for warmth and love that couldn’t seem to be found.

The keening grew louder every time something painful came along, demanding attention like a small child. It would distract her, and it would entice the other things that lived in her head. It would entice them into taunting her and telling her to shut it up already. Then she would have to try and tune her own thoughts out. She would try and tune herself out of existence, except for the fact that her body happened to like living. She didn’t know how much more of this that she could take. ++

School wasn’t really worth the effort. It always seemed that she spent a majority of her day being bored and wondering when it would all end. That wasn’t always something that she liked to think about, but there wasn’t really anything else to think about. She didn’t really know if getting and education, and a sloppy one at that, was worth it. All she wanted to do was write, to get her thousands of words onto crisp, white pieces of paper for people to read.

That was one problem with not liking the reality that she lived in. She tended to not pay attention to what was happening in the world around her, leaving her clueless about current events. It didn’t matter how old she was; she had a sneaking suspicion that she was going to be like this her whole life. Sometimes it really seemed pointless, but she had to go to school by law until she was sixteen.

The only good thing about school was seeing her friends, but that was bad at the same time. She always seemed to be attracted to people who had problems, giving her endless nights of frustration at the fact that nothing she did seemed to help them. It was bothering her that nothing she could say or do would help. Often times she would wonder when one of them would totally snap and send the rest of the group right along with them. That was a definite possibility if one of them did snap. There was no guarantee that the other would stay sane.

Things like that were always problems. It seemed that she was just digging her own grave though. She could easily go find another group that wasn’t like this, but they wouldn’t be her friends and the people that she knew and could be herself around. That’s the bad thing about having friends. It wasn’t like she wanted them to have problems so that she could fix them, she would rather they tell someone else that actually seemed to be able to help more that she seemed to be doing. Life just liked to laugh at her that way.

Lunches seemed pointless to her, other than the fact that she got to eat. She liked to eat, but not much, and only what she wanted at the moment. She generally didn’t like what was being served at home, preferring something else to soups and casseroles. So what if she only ate about one meal a day, that was just how she was. She probably needed to eat better and get something healthier for lunch, but she was in the middle of trying to kick a caffeine habit, so she could care less about the rest of it.

Sometimes living just seemed pointless to her, but she didn’t tell anyone that. The endless rutines that happened every weekday that she went to school just seemed to blur together into a big blobby mush in her head that she couldn’t make any sense of. Everything seemed to run together pointlessly. It was actually a little frustrating to have everything running together in so much repetition that nothing made sense anymore in her head. There were parts that stood out, but they would soon get lost in the mush along with everything else.

There were bright points in her life, and she would keep the general feelings of those times, but would often lose the actual memories. It seemed easier for her to remember the feelings for later when she would be feeling really down. She could act happy, and sometimes she would even actually be having a genuine good time, but the pressure of everything soon overrode that. She could take comfort and hide all that she wanted, but reality always seemed to catch up with her.

++She stood in the middle of the crowded hallway; just watching the people go by her. She could see everyone moving around in what seemed to be pointless and repetitive existences, scrabbling around to get a hold on whom they were and what they were actually going to do with their lives. She knew that she shouldn’t think that way, but that was who she was, and there was no changing it now. Her eyes were unfocused as she looked around her, seeing everything as a large blur that didn’t seem to want to reveal its true nature to her.

She dragged her feet along the ground and hauled herself up a couple of flights of stairs. This was the life was the sarcastic thought that kept floating through her brain. This was the braking point. This was where she gave up and left everything behind, even her friends’ suicidal tendencies. This was where she broke and just gave everything up. ++