It feels like a heavy weight in the pit of my stomach. It crumbles me, it makes my mouth dry. I can’t breath, can’t move. I want to cry, scream, throw things, rip my hair out, beg for help, fall to the floor, let the tears come, let it all out until there is nothing left inside of me but emptiness. Maybe then I wont be able to feel things. My feelings will disappear. I will not cry anymore. I will not feel like this anymore. I could be empty-headed and emotionless. I could be like every other fucking robot girl in my school. I would lose myself, but I would gain peace.

I could be happy.

That is all I want.

I just want to be happy.

After waiting outside for 15 minutes for my dad to meet us with the key, we finally entered and looked around, deciding where our furniture would go and which room belonged to who. It was empty and cold, but bright with sunshine. I followed my parents around a while, until we got to the bedrooms.

I freaked out. I couldn’t take it. The reality was hitting me too hard. As I was descending back down the stairs, it felt like there were weights in my legs and arms. I barely moved but I somehow made it to the bottom of the staircase. That feeling was back. I had warded it off with false good feelings and food and optimistic delusions and quite simply denial. If I didn’t think about my life too hard, it wasn’t actually happening. It’s the most ludicrous way of thinking, but I’ve been buying it so something’s working.

I felt those tears prickle at my eyes again, and I bit my lip so hard to keep them from coming. My family noticed the different in my attitude, but they didn’t comment on it. I sat in the car for the rest of the time they were inside, listening to annoying pop music on the radio and trying to build my shell back up.

On the way home, after eating dinner at a mexican place, my mom reached over and rubbed my arm without saying anything. I nearly broke down right there, almost told her how bad it felt to carry around this feeling. But I didn’t tell her anything. I’m stronger than that, I don’t want to bother her, she’s probably just get angry at me anyway.

I wonder how easy it would be to give up. I’ve never really thought about it before, because I always looked towards the future and how it would help me then. But now it seems like there is no future. That tiny little light that I had my eye on for the past three years has closed up. It doesn’t exist anymore.

I never even knew it could get this bad. It feels like every waking moment I’m going to cry. I’m afraid to be alone because I don’t like my own thoughts. But I don’t want to spend time with fake & temporary friends, or even my family. I don’t want to be anywhere. 

It’s not like I want to die, no. You know that place you go where you sleep? You’re not quite dead, but you’re so unconscious that you don’t really feel anything. You mostly float there covered in bliss. That’s where I want to go. For a while. I just want to lay there for a year or maybe two, until I have my head together.

But that’s impossible. We all know that. So what would happen if I tried? If I stopped doing my homework, stopped trying to do my best on tests and in classes and in my appearance? Stopped trying to be nice to people I could care less about? Stopped trying to wake up with an optimistic attitude?

It would be so easy. I would probably stop having these headaches. I could sneak out and get and do whatever I pleased. I would finally be able to get these tattoos that I want. I would be able to go to parties whenever I wanted. I would be able to dye my hair and get my nosed pierced. My parents would be angry, yes, but I wouldn’t care. I have no future, so I might as well just live my life as I have it now, because it’s not getting any better.

Sometimes it feels like this sadness won’t go away. I’m so tired, but not sleepy-tired. I’m just tired of everything and everyone. Sometimes I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a few years, until everything feels okay again.

But I’m not completely happy either. I know I’m missing pieces of myself, like sometimes I forget to smile at a joke or I’m not always completely there during a conversation. Sometimes I don’t remember what I did the day before, or I’ll get stuck on the easiest math problem.

I don’t know where I go when this happens. I don’t believe I’m thinking of anything entirely important. If I snap out of it, I don’t remember where my mind just was. Sometimes I’ll even lose track of what I was trying to explain.

I’m just tired. I’ve convinced myself of that. I’m melancholy, but not depressed. I still wake up some days feeling a little happier than I felt when I went to bed the night before. I can sometimes find a little optimism in an otherwise hopeless situation. Sometimes I actually feel like wearing bright colors, sometimes I’m more talkative, and sometimes I laugh more than usual.

Most days though, I stumble throughout the day dragging this profound sadness along with me. Most days I don’t laugh a lot. Most days it feels like there’s a weight in my stomach, trying to force me to the ground so I can just go to sleep for a while. Everyday, I have to leave a class to sit in a bathroom stall where it’s quiet so I can collect myself.

Sometimes I really wish I had to courage to leave. To run away and never look back and never think about how things were anymore. I would be free of all this sadness and guilt and contempt. I would be happy. I wouldn’t care about how you would try to get me to come back, as if I liked living that way. I would be with people I want to be with, I wouldn’t care what you would say, I would be so happy I wouldn’t know what to do with all of it. But it would be okay because I would be with people to share it with, I would have people to share real smiles with. I would have fun, I would live a life that I wanted.

And in the future, when I’m older, I wont look back on those times where I didn’t have a lot of positive thoughts in my head. I wouldn’t think back to how many tears were wasted over something that I could have fixed so easily. I wouldn’t think about how 99% of my “good moods” were fake and exaggerated. And I would smile because it wouldn’t matter. I would have fixed it a long time ago and I would only dwell on the good times, the times I spent with my real friends, the laughs and smiles and secrets and jokes and new shoes and crushes. I would smile because I would have lived the entire rest of my life happily, and it would make up for the times before then.

But the truth is that I’m too scared to do it. I’m too rational, I’m too cowardly. I wont have enough money, I wont know what do to, and I wouldn’t want to be on my own. I hate myself for it, the fact that I can’t leave because I care too much about how you would react. I would hate how sad it would make you. I wish it was as easy as cutting a string, but feelings aren’t that easy to trim. I wish I could do it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. I’ll live the rest of my life blaming myself for being so stupid and afraid. And you’ll live the rest of yours thinking that I was okay with everything.

People don’t know what goes on inside my head. I’m so good at smiling it looks authentic. You can even see happiness in my eyes, just don’t look to close or too long. People think I look on the bright side, that I never seem to get sad or angry. They think I take care of my appearance because they believe I think I’m pretty. They believe me when I say it’s okay, I’m fine, just a little sleepy.

Just don’t talk about my past, don’t ask me where I’m going to be next year, next month, next week. Don’t ask why I wear more makeup some days than others. Don’t ask me how my day went. Don’t ask me anything about my life. Don’t ask me to do anything with you. I’m going to say no. Don’t ask me why I’m so quiet.

I look so happy, I look so perfectly fine on the outside because I don’t think too deeply about my life. I can talk about shallow things, like complaining about school or what I ate for dinner last night or my favorite color. Don’t ask me something heavy or it’ll crack my perfect, fragile shell. When it breaks, I feel like I’m going to be sick. It feels like my insides are twisting up inside me and churning into something disgusting. It feels like someone is shattering my mind with a sledgehammer. I can’t swallow. I can’t breath. I can’t stand up. I’m pretty sure my heart beats irregularly. I don’t even know what it is, this feeling. It’s like guilt and loneliness and pain and disgust and hate mixed into one and shoved down my throat.

I don’t talk to you a lot because of this. We have curt conversations because I don’t like how I feel when I talk to you. I get tired, and I just want to go to sleep for a while. I want to go back to 2008 and redo everything. I feel like I’m wasting my life.