That used to be me.

He gently caressed her sides as his chin rested on her shoulder. She giggled at the feeling that tickled her sides. She elbowed him back due to this said feeling. He giggled in return at her happiness but didn’t stop touching her. He pulled her tighter, his eyes closing to the happiness that filled him. He felt warm. He felt happy, and, most of all, he felt that there was nothing in the world that could make him happier.  She wasn’t any different. As he was caressing her sides the way he did, she tugged at his shirt. It was as if she were trying to pull him as close to her as possible. She wanted that. Anyone could see this want that stretched between them; their want for each other looked as tangible as the clothes on their very bodies, colorful and soft as cotton.

               That used to be me. He used to hold me like that, and I sometimes I like to wonder if he is picturing me instead of her when he does these things. I wish that was the way it happened, but I know deep in the back of my mind that this is not true. He doesn’t love me anymore. I guess I tell myself this in the hopes that he would prove me wrong, but that is never going to happen either.  Third period is my most hated class now because of him and this girl. Everything that has happened is his fault, not mine. I didn’t do anything but care for him in ways that hurt immensely when we were apart. All I feel now is a pain that aches inside my stomach. It hurts to come to this class and be in this class. It hurts to see those two together, the holding each other in an embrace that shows they love each other. I don’t understand. I just don’t understand why he just dumped me to the side and for her at that.

               It isn’t like she is a bad person. In fact, she used to be my best friend. I still feel that link between us. The friendship line has just faded out a little like an pair of worn jeans, old and raggedy. I guess I tell myself it is their fault to make myself feel better. It is probably more my fault than theirs. Everything usually ends up like this. Something happens, they fight with me, and in the end, everything that happened is my fault and I am the one left with the blame and the guilt that eats me up inside.

               I can’t really hear what they are saying to each other. His soft lips caress her ears as the quietness of the words fill her mind and his touch warms her body. I feel my body shiver at the sight, feeling as if he is doing these things to me and not her.

               I look away from the horrifying image. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t sit here and watch them love each other the way that they do. That used to be me. It used to be me that got held in such ways! Why doesn’t he love me anymore? I miss out friendship! I miss talking to him every day! I miss hearing his voice! I miss his touch! I miss his warmth! I miss his entirety! I miss him.

               “I have to use the bathroom!” I didn’t mean to shout this at the teacher. I never mean to yell, but my thoughts were clouding my mind in ways that hurt to think about. I can see that he was shocked at my sudden change in tone and by looking around the room I see all eyes are on me. It makes me nervous.

“That is fine. Go,” he told me in the caring, kind tone he always uses with me and I ran out the class room. My body’s heat heightened as my arms accidentally brushed against his. His eyes try to find mine but my eyes are closed as I rush out of the classroom, groping around for the doorway as if lost in a dark forest.

 

I can feel the pain inside my chest burn as if it is trying to push its way out of my body. It hurts to feel this. I feel it every second of the day actually and most days I just lay in bed and let the pain take over. I don’t even bother to cover up. I lay there, the cold air of the huge, box fan blowing against every inch of my body. Goosebumps tend to take over as well but I have done this so often that I have come accustomed to it. It doesn’t bother me anymore like it used to. When I do that now, it actually feels good. I take in the shivery feeling.

I am in the bathroom. The walls surrounding me are covered in some sort of green substance that could resemble boogers and many shades of chipping brown from art students rushing in to wash the drying paint off their hands. I remember this bathroom. None of the doors lock, and my favorite stall happens to be the second from the right so I rush into this one.

By now tears are covering my cheeks at an excessive rate that I cannot seem to stop. My eyes are a crimson red.

Get it together, Lynn. Get it together. You can’t let people see you like this. I thought to myself.  I started with some deep breaths as if I were meditating. I closed my eyes. I inhaled, exhaled, did what I could to try and calm my body’s state but nothing was working. I couldn’t stop it. Soon I was bent over as if in pain, my arms pushing themselves into my stomach and my face buried between my knees, as I muffled my crying with the grey and black Aztec scarf dangling from my neck.

As I pressed my elbows into my thigh a sharp pain came out, pulling me to reality. I jolted up right. My thigh was burning and it reminded me of what was there. I stuck my hand in my pocket that lay over my thighs and ran the fabric and my fingers along the cuts that cover my leg. It was rough, scars trying to heal themselves. There really isn’t any use for them to heal. I will just end up cutting them open once I get home. The cuts should stop trying to heal but I cannot control what my body does to me, or what I do my body.  It is as if a demon possesses me at certain moments in time, moments when I cannot seem to control my emotions, and my mind blacks out as it takes over. I can’t stop anything. I can’t control what I do, or what I say, or how I do it.

“Lynn, what did you use?” I can feel my mind turning to one flash back in particular, a couple weeks ago.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”  My old self said to my mother. I remember this day. My mother came in and asked me what I used to harm my body. Even if I did harm my body, I don’t know why she got so upset. It is not like anybody cared, right? My body, my life.

“Are you telling me that you didn’t use anything to do this to yourself? It just showed up at your own free will?”

“Of course not, b-” she had stopped me from finishing my sentence.

“But you are not going to tell me anything, are you? I have to turn into one of those mothers who doesn’t care what her daughter does? Is that what you want from me? I don’t want that. I don’t want any of this at all.” She held my wrist the whole time she nagged me. I had tried to pull away from her touch but it seemed that the more I tried to loosen her grasp, the tighter her fingers wrapped around themselves. After a while of her yelling at me and obviously not letting go, I just gave up trying. 

You can’t just sit here the rest of your life. I thought to myself. But I can’t go out there looking like this either. What is wrong with me? It is just a guy. I had to pull myself together. When I walked out of the stall a couple minutes or so later, I let out a sigh of relief to the fact that I was alone, but gasped to the sight in the mirror when I looked into it. The girl looking back at me looked completely unlike herself. Her face was a bright red and her hair was a bit matted up as if she had just rolled out of bed about five minutes ago. I stand there for a couple minutes just staring at myself, watching the many colors of my face shade back to normal.

You can do this, I tell myself. You can do this, I repeat and I repeat this to myself as I rush back to class.

 

 “Yeah, I saw that episode too!” I hear her voice echo through the silence in the library as she enters with four other people. I am in the Library for lunch. I wouldn’t really call it a lunch period for me because of the fact I am not even eating lunch, and not in the cafeteria. I never eat lunch. Better yet, I am never hungry enough to eat anything, but a lot of people do that. A lot of people just don’t eat lunch.

It’s her, the best friend that used to be. She looks at me but brushes away the eye contact as if dust in the wind. The group of friends make their way to a vacant table that sits on the other side of the library and the way she sits down makes it seem she picked that table to watch me discretely from a distance. That can’t be why she sat there. It is probably just in my head.

Focus on your work, Lynn, I think to myself. I am working on a project for my English class. I try to fully focus my attention on my project but I feel a shiver go through my body when I feel someone is watching me. I look up to see that the table of girls are all staring directly at me, but when we all make eye contact they just look away as if it never happened. Part of me wants to go over there and ask them what their problem is, but I already know the answer. They would just laugh at me.

               “She is so stupid!” One of the girls is talking at a volume way too loud to be appropriate for a school library.

               “You know what I think? I think she kind of looks like a British man! Maybe she really is a man, and she is just good at hiding it. Well, actually, there is not much to hide really, because her face looks as if it got ran over with a steam roller when she was a kid!” The same girl says, using the same volume and tone. I look over the table with some interest into who she must be talking to if she has to talk so loud.

               When I look up, the girl, who had originally said the comments, looks at me and smirks.

               They are talking about me, I think to myself. Why would they be talking about me? I look over at my ex-best friend, and she is looking right at me, a sort of sympathy peeking out of her eyes, covered by a smile that says she is laughing with them. I can’t let them get to me. This charade went on for the rest of the period, and I rushed out as fast as I could, making sure to avoid all eye contact, to pre-calculus.

 

               The rest of my day went by in a big blur. It was all just one big blur that I cannot seem to remember the slightest. I slept the way home through my usual, daily, hour long bus ride and I do not even remember getting off and walking down my driveway. Better yet, I don’t remember going straight to my bed once I got their either. The next thing I remember is waking up at 10:00 PM. I guess my mom didn’t bother to wake me up. I am still fully dressed in my skinny jeans, an old pair of Van’s shoes the same shade as dark denim, and plain coral colored, V-style t-shirt I bought from the mall on clearance. I kick off my shoes and listen as they loudly bang against the floor and I just lay on my bed, no covers, and I stare up at the glowing stars on my ceiling, illuminating the room with neon green. I don’t bother to turn the lights on because there really is no use in getting up at this moment. I know I have some homework to do, but I don’t think that one day of not doing the work will hurt me too badly. I have dealt with worse. As if on cue I feel a wetness form on my cheek. My hands wipe away the tears, and I think back to what I remember of the day. The memories flood my mind all at once.

               I couldn’t even look him in the eyes when we touched. I can remember feeling everything: sadness worse than death, anger worse than revenge, a depression worse than the kind someone takes pills to forget about. Why am I even crying right now? He doesn’t deserve my tears.  None of them do. I wipe the fallen tears from my cheeks and I strip down to change to my pajamas. Once my pants are off I look down at my thighs and examine the healing scars that cover my legs in the most discrete places. They burn when I touch them but I like that pain. I cover the open wounds with my hands and I take in the burning feeling.

               “She is just faking it, you know that right?” I remember listening in on a certain conversation that I will not forget. It was during lunch. I had left to go to the bathroom just like I usually do when no one is looking, just to be alone because I cannot stand being around people anymore. The same girls that were in the library were just around the corner of the hallway. I knew they were talking about me. They even used my name.

               “Ok, how do you know that she is? I mean, you don’t know what is going on up in that head of hers,” One of the girls replied with. I slightly smiled at the fact that this one girl had partly stood up for me, but frowned at the following response of my ex-best friend.

               “She does this to get attention. I mean, seriously. She started that fight because she just could not stand the sight of me with Adam. She couldn’t take us being friends, so she started this whole thing just to push us apart. It is a good thing that Adam likes me way better than her because in the end, she was the one who got pushed away.” It was at this point when I could feel my face burning to let the tears fall.

               “Why would Adam like you better? He was her friend too. He loved her.”

               “Oh, he did not love her. He only told her that because she did everything that he said when he talked to her like this. He really hates her.” I started silently crying at this point. My face was turning red, the most painful of tears falling down my cheeks.

               “I don’t think that is true. I think he had real feelings for her.”

               “Well, it doesn’t matter now. She is leaving us alone. What’s done is done.” My ex-best friend said.

               “She is in my physics class and I noticed some marks on her wrists that showed when she took her jacket off or something. I think she is hurting herself.” The girl who said this sounded surprised.

               “Like I said: attention. She does it to get attention. I remember telling her that I cut, and she just laughed at me. She just laughed in my face. I am happy that she cuts. Maybe it will teach her a lesson or two about what is funny and what isn’t.” At this point, I wanted to turn around that corner and say that all she was telling these girls was a lie. She doesn’t cut herself. In fact, she has even told me that she finds it stupid and a waste of time. If anyone should be looked down on in this way, it is her. Not me. She is the one who laughed at me when I told her about my mother being sick again. She laughed at me when I told her about me and Adam. She said it was stupid that I felt these feelings of mine. She said even he was way out of my league.

               “You don’t cut?” One of the girls asked with a questioning sort of tone.

               “Nope. Not at all.”

               “You little liar.” The girls she was talking with were just laughing with her. They weren’t sticking up for me. They were laughing in my face as if I were an ugly dog or something. I ran straight into the bathroom after that. I didn’t come out the rest of the day because I couldn’t stop the crying that escaped me every second.

               I can’t take this anymore. I cannot take all the ridicule, and the laughing, and the being made fun of, and the fact that everyone hates me. I just can’t do this anymore. Looking at my desk I see a bracelet. It sits next to a bottle filled to the brim with some pills I have never noticed before. I had made the bracelet for Adam and after I found out he betrayed me, I took it off his wrists and kept it. I made this bracelet as a sign or our friendship, our love. He didn’t deserve it. Tears run down my cheeks. My hands start to shake violently. The red, green, and yellow colored string the bracelet was made of fill my mind and all I can think of is Adam and his hate for me. She hates me too. They both hate me.

               The bracelet was on my wrist now and I played with it between my fingers, feeling the soft and worn feeling it sent across my skin. As the bottle of pills filled my system, engulfing me, the last thing I remember is the sight of Adams bracelet intertwining in my fingers. The room went black.

Author's Note

Ok, so I literally just sat down and wrote and this is what happened. It need a lot of work and i know that it sucks so that is why I am asking you all for help. I am going to add some more back story to it also. So what would you like to know more of? Any questions I leave unanswered that shouldn't? Any help at all would just be awesome!!! Thank you all! <3

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

Many strong statements in the story for the title. You did very well. The description of each situation was enough. I like the flow and the thoughts of the main character. A title? "Watching my world fall apart." or "Something lost". The ending was sad. Many option for the ending also. Sometime swimming in misery is worst then death. Thank you for sharing the excellent story.
Coyote

[XxTheFallenAngelxX]

This made me tear. Sometimes we don't know what our actions do to people -- using their pain for our pleasure. And then, we end up dying inside, and sometimes outside. Thank you for sharing this

[deepblue04]

This is such a sad story, i really feel sorry for the main character because of what her best friend did to her. For a title, I have none yet to tell you, but if i do, i will tell you

[Samantha Lynn]

Ok, I just finished editting this. How does it look now. How is the title now that you have read it? :)

[deepblue04]

it matches it really well