Page 156 of Under the Waves

I burned my skin with hot water bottles and filled my stomach with pills with the hope that, for a while, all my thoughts might just…stop. I bathed in bubble baths and walked through nature and exercised and kept a journal and tried andtried andtriedeverything I could to make myself feel even the least bit calmer.

I wished I could think like a normal person.

I wished I could do a presentation without breaking down into tears.

I wished I could walk down the street without having to list five things I could see until my heartbeat finally evened out.

I wished, I wished, I wished…

As the fading sunset finally disappeared beyond the horizon, I kept my fingers on my pulse and waited for it to settle with nothing but an aching heart and a head full of dreams that would never come true.

Tugging my old, wired headphones out of my bag, I placed them in my ears, pressing shuffle on another playlist Jasper made for me asEverestby Beabadoobee drained out all the thoughts racing inside my head.

Jasper.

My Spiderman.

I wanted to run to him.

I wanted him to hold me.

I wanted to be his more than anything in between.

Except, I did none of those because in my mind, letting myself seek comfort in others was just letting myself burden them, and that was a deep and hollow feeling I was forever desperate to erase.

‘Cause even if your bags are packed

you’ll never leave your home.

‘Cause you’re scared of all the monsters

that are waiting to unfold.

The lyrics spoke to me, understanding me in a way nobody else had before. But Jasper…heknew. Despite everything I’d done to keep us at a distance, he’d managed to bulldoze every wall, brick by brick.He knew me. And I used to hate that idea. But now…now I wasn’t so sure if what I felt was hate. Perhaps even all along.

My mind refused to erase the image of him I had unintentionally summoned inside my head. He knew what to say to make me feel like my scars were never the anchors weighing me down all my life. Knew how to comfort me, reassure me to make me feel free of every past mistake and memory thathaunted my every breath.

Nothing between us had felt fake these past few weeks…but was that just me hoping to find something real between us that wasn’t there? The thing that scared me the most was what if it was all happening inside my head? Just another thing my brain had desperately created in a last attempt at creating a lifeline.

I wanted to fight. I wanted to stay. But I couldn’t go home.

Not after what happened tonight—after what I’d realized.

Feeling free was addicting and I wanted to ride that high a little while longer before reality came crashing back down. For once, I wanted to be able to dream withoutwhat ifholding me back. I wanted to feel how it should’ve felt all those years ago–how it should’ve felt knowing I had a loving home to go back to instead of one that broke me piece by piece each passing day.

As the hours passed and the daylight surrendered, I let the music whisk my mind off to a faraway world where my magic and dreams existed–where the power of fantasy and make-believe slipped between every crack and scar and healed something it had never broken in the first place because those stories–they were never just books, just characters, just words on pages…they wereeverythingto me.

When I lost myself inside of them, I feltfree. Those characters, theysurvived. They fought, and even though their journey was tough, they made it out alive. It was hope. A possibility that, maybe, I too could escape the story that had been written for me. That perhaps I could find my happily ever after too.

Seeing them fight the same battles as me andwin—there couldn’t be anythingmoreinspiring. I related to them. I saw every fragment of myself in them. I wanted to fight like them. Survive like them. Heal like them.

To. Just. Hold. On.

I was more at home hidden between ink on paper than trapped inside the walls of a home that was supposed to protect me from everything evil in the world. But what I didn’t realize was that the evil I was warned about existed under that very roof, only a door handle away.

I was a kid, but I wasn’t clueless, and even though I didn’t understand it all, I knew, deep down, that it was wrong–thathewas wrong.

But it was hard to fight a world that didn’t believe you.