8 Zara #3
This is what it feels like when the depression finally catches up. I can pretend I’m fine all day. I can party and flirt with frat boys and make jokes about needing to get railed into the next dimension. I can laugh and spin and act like my brain isn’t a hostile roommate.
But eventually the mask slips, and it’s just me and the quiet. And in the quiet, all the thoughts I shoved down start crawling back up.
You’re too much.
You always ruin things.
He has a girlfriend and still punched a guy for touching you. That’s not romantic; that’s fucked up.
You make his life harder just by existing.
Stacey’s voice creeps in at the end.
Clingy. Obnoxious. Always around.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, but it doesn’t help.
I hate this. I hate all of this.
The thing is, I know Cass didn’t hit that guy because I’m some possession he wanted to protect. I know it’s tangled up with his anger, his fear, the way he feels everything more pronounced than he wants to. But it still hurts.
It hurts that he lost control because of me being touched by someone else.
It hurts that I wanted it. His jealousy, some kind of proof.
The tiny, selfish part of me that’s been in love with him since we were fifteen is thrilled that he snapped.
And that makes me feel disgusting. Because he has a girlfriend.
A real one. A girl he kissed and asked out and promised to try harder with.
I watched him walk away earlier today to go apologize to her and play Normal Boyfriend for an afternoon.
And I went to a party and tried to find someone to distract me from the fact that no matter what I do, I keep orbiting the same boy. My chest tightens. I press my face harder into my knees.
“I love you,” I whisper, so quiet I barely hear it myself.
It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud where anyone could hear, even if no one does.
I love him.
I’ve loved him since the day he handed me a mangled Snickers bar after school and said, “You look like you want to cry but you’re trying not to. Sugar helps.” I loved him when he let me rant about my mom for three straight hours without looking at his phone once.
I loved him when he sat on the floor of my room freshman year and listened to me explain, in great detail, why Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle is superior to every other animated man on the planet.
I love him now, even after he just punched some random dude in the face and dragged me out of a party like a cartoon caveman.
And I can’t have him.
At least not in the way I want.
Because even if he broke up with Stacey tomorrow, there would still be this mess between us. His anger. My depression. The way we cling to each other like we’re both hanging off the same ledge.
I need a person. I need someone who stays when my brain gets dark, who remembers when I took my meds, who doesn’t flinch when I say “I’m not okay” and actually mean it.
But I don’t know if anyone can love all of me like that.
The loud, ridiculous, meme-spouting goblin side and the hollow, exhausted, can’t-get-out-of-bed side.
Maybe Stacey’s right. Maybe I really am too much.
Too intense. Too needy.
The kind of girl people tolerate for a while and then quietly edge away from when it gets heavy. I hate that my brain goes there. I hate that I can list off all the coping skills my therapist taught me and still end up curled on the floor like this.
Eventually, the tears slow because my body runs out of water. By now, my head throbs, my throat is raw, and my nose is clogged.
I untangle my arms from my legs and push myself up, joints stiff. I don’t bother undressing. I just toe off my boots, leave them by the door, and stumble to the bed. The mattress dips under my weight as I flop face-first onto it, then roll onto my back because breathing is usually helpful.
The ceiling stares back at me, blank and uncaring. The tiny stain near the light fixture is still there. The one I noticed this morning. It looks like a thin, crooked vein.
I drag the comforter up over myself, skirt still riding up my thighs, hair a mess, makeup probably terrifying. My phone buzzes somewhere in my bag, but I don’t move to find it. If it’s Cass, I don’t want to see whatever he wrote. At least not yet. And if it’s not, I somehow want that even less.
So I stay still, breathing and counting tiles on the ceiling in my head, then losing count and starting over.
“I wanted you to chase me,” I admit to the dark room. “And you didn’t.”
He walked me to the door. He made sure I got here. Then he let me go. Maybe that’s what a healthy person is supposed to do. Give space. Respect boundaries. It still feels like a tiny, little grief in my chest.
I turn on my side, curl around a pillow, and close my eyes. Eventually, exhaustion drags me under—the heavy, dreamless kind that feels more like passing out than resting.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and pretend I’m okay again. Tonight, I let myself be the tired, too-much girl who loves her best friend way more than is safe.
Just for a little while.