Chapter 3: Chapter 2

Chapter Two

The thing about breaking a person, is that it’s not like breaking a toy, or your computer or your phone. You can’t just take a person back to the store and get a new screen installed. It’s not easier and cheaper to just buy the newest upgrade. When you break a person, you shatter everything. You don’t leave a single microscopic section of that person undamaged. It’s not like looking at your phone and seeing a crack in the screen from when it fell out of your pocket last week that you can’t be bothered to get repaired. You can’t just look at a person and know that they’re broken, or see exactly where the point of impact was. It’s been nine years and I’m still trying to figure out where else I can stick a Band-Aid to see if it’s the spot that will magically put me back together.

The thing about being broken, is that it’s endlessly infuriating, and with every breath it seems to get worse. You start to pull away from other people, slowly drawing further and further inside of yourself until there’s no part of the real you who anybody can remember. You start to worry about the effect you will have on the people around you, the people who you love. You would never wish the same pain upon them, nor do you want them to feel sorry for you and your pain, and so you become impossibly adept at making people believe that you’re okay.

I think that’s part of the problem with people though. We believe what’s easiest. We’re all so self-centered and consumed by our own lives, our own issues, that we don’t always notice the wars that people around us are fighting. I don’t think that it’s intentional, I just don’t think that it can be stopped…

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I didn’t sleep that night. The hotel was either too hot, or too cold; too loud or too quiet; or maybe it was a combination of all of those things. The party played in my head over and over like a movie on an infinite loop. I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t look away. I was trapped. Have you ever had the misfortune of becoming a prisoner in your own head? I think it’s the worst form of torture. If people could find a way to trap other people inside of themselves… well, the world is a dark enough place as it is.

Everyone went back out skiing that day and I decided to stay in bed. I told them I wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t tell anyone the truth, I couldn’t. How could I have possibly explained that I’d been kicked out of my body and forced to snort cocaine and fuck some guys I barely knew?! I spent the entire day trying to cry. I thought that if I could just cry then I would feel something and that would be enough to remind myself that I was still okay.

I stared into the mirror for hours, willing myself to see only my reflection, but I couldn’t. Try as I might the person staring out of the mirror at me, wasn’t me. Her eyes were cold, emotionless where mine sparkled and danced when I laughed and always seemed to imply that I was about to do something mischievous. “What do you want with me?” I whispered over and over, and my reflection mouthed the words back at me in mockery. A feeling of panic and rage flooded me and it took everything in my power not to throw another hairbrush through the mirror, to smash the smug face within it. My fists clenched and unclenched, my jaw tightened and I started to sweat. I threw a towel over the mirror, thinking that would help, but it didn’t. I got in the shower, I turned the water as cold as it would go trying to calm down, but it just seemed to add more fuel to the fire. Instead, I turned the tap as hot as it would go.

Within seconds the shower was filled with steam, that kind of hot steam that’s in a sauna, when it hurts to breath if you sit too high up. I stood under the water, letting it trace a scalding trail along my skin as it ran down my body, over my feet and down the drain. With each drop that hit my body I started to laugh, I could feel it! It was hurting, I could feel where each droplet of water angrily stung my skin. It was marvelous.

I stood in that shower for far too long, enjoying every second of agony. When I got out, my skin was as angry as the water had been. It was raw and hot, and I could see blisters had started to form on my arms and my torso… idiot. Somebody is going to notice that. I willed the voice out of my head, nobody was going to notice once I got dressed. And yet the voice was persistent, of course they’ll notice. Everyone will look at you. Everyone is going to stare. I shook my head. Pulling the towel off of the mirror I looked into it again. There stood my reflection, naked, burned, and looking as though I was withering, just as I really was. Still, there was something about it that was unsettling to me, my eyes, her eyes, they weren’t right. They were vacant, unfeeling, they were dead.

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