There Is No Escaping It.

The nights are just as bad as they’ve been but the days get worse as the weeks, weary, wear on – The only person I can talk to with any sense of realism and honesty lives across the country and all I want is to go to her because with her, I don’t need the pills and drugs that I do when I’m around other people. She promises me that things will get better but it will take time, which, coincidentally, is the one thing I no longer have. I need things to be better and I need them to be better now because every moment that they’re not, I only feel more and more overwhelmed.

I used to feel awake and alive and passionate and I fake it most days and I fake it well. Sometimes, I think that people can’t even tell what happened and I wonder if they think it’s a sign that I’m myself again.  What a charade I’ve pulled, wool over wide eyes to blind them all from the truth: The girl they used to know doesn’t exist anymore.

I meet new people, new friends and new boys and they’re beautiful and they’re happy and they’re alive and I wonder if they could be important to me before I remember that they can’t be. Because I won’t let them.

I’m ashamed of who I am and every person I know is just another to add to the list of growing people that I have to keep it together around. And if I can’t keep it together? Well, that means I’ve failed and I can’t fail at anything else, not right now.

I pick up the phone and I call him and tell him I can’t see him again, that we can’t be friends. It’s harder than I let on to say the words because he was the last testament of normalcy to me, the last person introduced into my social circle in the “before” of my “before and after” life. And it’s strange because I think if things had been different, he could have been a big deal for me, an even bigger deal than he was. I talk about my uncertainty the night before and my friend tells me not to do anything dumb, advice I quickly cast aside when the onslaught of emotions becomes too much for me to process as I realize I’ve been cast once more in the sexless, loveless, careless role of “female friend number three”, an nameless extra in my own life, once more in the “friend zone” that destroyed my heart so savagely for twelve months last year. He says he’s glad we’re friends and I remember Jake’s words, imploring me to not be rash, and I bite my tongue, I leave and walk home and the streets are empty, all remnants of St. Patrick’s Day drunken revelry swept away and I realize I should have been honest, I should have just said it then. He might be glad we’re friends but I’m not. Not under these circumstances.

And I realize the old patterns I could so easily fall back into right now – The girl I was last summer, drinking too much in minidresses and perfectly applied makeup, a black widow bringing boys home just to rob them from the life they emanate to make herself feel better for a few minutes. It never worked. Not once. So instead, I cut myself off and I hide inside my room and I write about how things should be, so different from how they are, and in my fictional account of the past month, I have friends and I’m still crushed but I feel love.

But now I can’t feel anything at all.

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