Chapter 35 #2
“She didn’t just leave,” I said after a moment. My voice came out lower this time, rough in a way that felt harder to keep under control. “She…” I paused, my brow pulling together for a second. The words felt uncomfortably familiar the moment they left my mouth.
“She ended it. She killed herself.”
And there it was. Out in the open, impossible to take back or turn into anything else.
The room stayed exactly the same, but I still felt it somewhere deep in my body.
Air left through my nose as I finally forced myself to move.
I leaned back, pulling my hand from the floor into my lap, my fingers tightening hard enough in the fabric of my shirt to hurt.
“She saw something wrong before anyone else did,” I said, staring ahead now instead of down, but not really seeing anything. “She couldn’t live with it.”
The words stayed between us, raw enough that neither of us wanted to touch them.
“And I get that.” That one left my mouth before I had time to think about it, and once it was out there, I let it stay. I dragged a breath into my lungs and let it out again, but my body still felt too tight for it to make any difference.
“I understand why she did it.” Silence.
“I think about it too.” I felt it somewhere low in me the second it left my mouth, even though I never intended to put that much of myself into it.
“Not all the time,” I added quickly, like that mattered. Like that changed anything. “Just… sometimes.” My fingers tightened, fabric twisting in my grip. “When it gets too loud.”
I could feel him behind me the entire time, listening in that way he always did, like he was trying to grab hold of every word before it slipped too far away from him.
Trying to force meaning into it. Trying to understand it in a way that still left room for me to come back from it somehow.
I don’t know why I kept talking. Maybe I knew the second I stopped thinking about it, the whole thing would hit me properly.
Or maybe I was just sick of hearing people turn ugly things into something easier to stomach. I wanted him to hear it exactly the way it lived inside me. Untouched. Unedited. Exactly as fucking wrong as it actually was.
“You ever notice,” I said, my voice lower now, uneven in a different way, “how some people just… don’t belong anywhere?”
I didn’t wait for an answer.
“You can move them around, put them in different places, different rooms, different lives, doesn’t matter. It’s the same every time. They don’t settle, because they don’t belong.”
My fingers loosened slightly, then tightened again.
“I think I was like that from the start.” The second I said it out loud, it felt stupidly obvious. Like the thought had been sitting inside me the entire time, waiting for me to finally stop avoiding it.
“There’s something wrong with me,” I added. There was nothing uncertain left in it anymore. I was just saying it for what it was.
“And she saw it. She looked at me and saw something she couldn’t live with,”
I continued, my gaze drifting again, not landing anywhere, just moving without purpose. “And I,” I exhaled through my nose again, a short and broken excuse for a breath.
“I don’t even think she was wrong for that.”
There was a pause full of things I didn’t say.
“You ever tried to sit with yourself for too long?” I muttered, almost to myself now. “No distractions, just you.” I let out a small breath.
“It doesn’t take long before it gets… ugly.” I pressed my lips together for a second. “I used to think it would get quieter at some point,” I admitted.
“That if I just… held it together long enough, did everything right, stayed in control…”
I shook my head once.
“Stupid.”
Because it just fucking builds. It always builds.
“And then there are moments,” I went on, slower now, like I was choosing whether to say it or not and deciding to anyway, “where it just… tips.”
My chest rose, held, dropped.
“And not in a ‘I’m sad’ way,” I added, almost annoyed at the thought. “It’s not even about that. More like… what’s the point of dragging it out?”
That sat there deep in the pit of my chest, uncomfortable, but true, honest.
“You wake up, you move through it, you exist in it and for what?” My voice dipped.
“To end up in the exact same place again the next day? I get why she did it.” I said it again, because it didn’t feel like enough the first time.
“She just… stopped participating.” That was the closest I could get to it.
“There’s something almost peaceful about that idea,” I admitted and there was something off about the way I said it.
“Just… deciding you’re done.”
My fingers stilled completely now. No movement, nothing to distract me from it.
“Not having to fight your own head every second.” That was the part that hooked, that stayed with me deep enough that I could feel it in my core.
Little Ghost… if you were sitting in front of me right now, really sitting here, close enough that I could see your eyes properly, close enough that you could feel my breath on your skin, I’d ask you something.
And you wouldn’t lie to me. Have you ever felt that?
Not the pain, just… exhaustion so deep it makes everything else feel pointless.
Because if you have, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
And if you haven’t… you will. Eventually.
My jaw tightened again.
“I don’t think people like me get better,” I said finally, lower now, but more certain than anything else I’d said so far.
“I think we just get better at pretending we’re not already halfway gone.”
That was the truth. At least mine. And once you see it, you can’t go back.
“You can’t do that, Rowan.” His voice was closer now. He still sounded controlled, and somehow that got under my skin far more than if he’d just started yelling at me. “You don’t get to just… end it like that.”
End it. I almost laughed.
It didn’t come out though. Just sat somewhere in my throat and turned into something bitter instead.
I kept my eyes on nothing. There was a crack in the wall ahead of me.
Thin and crooked, it ran from the corner down toward the floor like something had tried to split the room open and gave up halfway.
I started following it with my eyes. Up. Down. Again.
“I’m not deciding anything,” I said eventually. It came out empty. “It’s already like that.”
That’s the part people never understand, little Ghost. They think it’s about wanting to die, but it’s not.
It’s about already feeling gone. I sat there and tried to find something inside me that reacted to what he had said.
I wasn’t even sure what, fear, guilt maybe, just something.
There was nothing. Just this wide, stretched out nothing that didn’t even hurt anymore.
That’s the worst part. When it stops hurting. When it just… is.
I dragged a breath in, slow, but it didn’t feel like it reached anywhere.
My chest moved, yeah, but it didn’t connect to anything real.
Just a motion. In and out. In and out. Useless.
And that thought, it stuck. What’s the point of breathing if it doesn’t change anything?
I blinked once and the room didn’t shift back with it.
“I keep thinking about drowning,” I said.
I don’t even know why I said it out loud. Maybe because it was easier than saying the rest.
“It’s not even violent.” My voice dragged a little, like it didn’t want to carry properly. “It’s just peaceful.” I swallowed.
“It closes in slowly. You don’t fight forever. At some point you just…”
I paused, my brow tightened, trying to find the right word and not really caring if I did.
“Stop… And I think I’m already there,” I muttered. My hand moved without me thinking, pressing flat against my chest for a second. “Just not under water.” Because that’s what it felt like.
Like everything inside me had filled up with something that didn’t belong there. Something that left no room for anything else. No space to think clearly, no space to feel anything properly, just the constant pressure. No, not even that, just too full of nothing.