A/N: I'm pissed off because I can't sleep right now, so I decided to destroy fictional characters' lives.
Beware for language and psychiatric matters.
Baby, Did You Forget To Take Your Meds?
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
(Stephen King)
My name is Craig Tucker and I fucking hate my meds.
I see my shrink once a week. There's an unnamed tension when I'm there; she stares at me, thinking she can read my soul. She labels sentiments as symptoms and diagnoses what should be human nature. Doctors have said I'm depressed; major depression, they say. Because I forget faces, and I can't focus and I have an uncontrollable urge to kill myself and I hate everyone. It's not my fault, I tell her. It's not my fault I hate people. They're rotten to the core. Selfish, stupid, futile; life is ephemeral, I'm just accelerating the process of death. I just don't bother to pretend I like them, like they do with each other. I just don't bother to remember their faces, because they're all the same no matter what. They don't realize we're not living. We're dying. We're dying and slowly walking towards our graves, slowly losing what we are, slowly becoming corpses and waiting to finally take our last breath, waiting for the eternal sleep six feet underground. But I can't wait.
This is not depression, really. It's reality.
I hate you, I tell her. I hate everyone and meds won't change that. The only thing they do is make me stay up all night. I still don't smile and she keeps increasing the dosage. I still smoke a lot to die as soon as I can. She tells me I'll only get cancer and die a slow and painful death in a hospital where no one cares about me. It's something, I answer. I'll still die and if I'm dead then it's okay. If I kill myself then, they'll call it euthanasia.
Why do I want to die, people wonder. I want to die because it's sad to grow up and realize how miserable you truly are. How your friends, how everyone you know and don't know, how every single person is nothing but one miserable creature trying to make others more miserable than themselves; because I finally realized how filthy everything is, how disgusting everyone is, how wicked the world has become. How wicked the world has always been. Then I don't want to live; I don't want to be here, but there's nowhere I can go. There's nowhere people aren't pathetic and life makes sense. Every inch of land is covered with people trying to steal other people's happiness, and they don't realize there's none at all; they steal money, mistaking it for happiness. They rape and kill, they make up excuses for being ruthless – so I don't bother. I openly hate everyone and I don't want to be anywhere, so I want to die. I crave for death for more than fascination; I want salvation. True salvation. Not a god, not a miracle, not a replacement for an idealized happiness people invented. I want death, release, complete freedom without the chains society forged.
I want to die until he's in front of me, holding a bottle with good-for-fucking-nothing pills. I want to die when he finally finds me sitting on the gutter of some shitty part of the town.
"Why do you—ngh—always forget to take your meds," he asks with a quiet tone and a quiet gaze. His hands are shivering in the slightest way as I take the bottle from them. "You always tell me not to forget to take mine," he smiles and sits beside me, despite the germs and dirt and rests of things people throw there.
I swallow them dry and, for a moment, I forget I want to die. I hold his hand and we stay silent. He's the only one I don't hate; he's paranoid and fucked up and loud sometimes, but I can't bring myself to hate him. Probably because he fears people as much as I hate them, and he sees things that doctors say aren't there and hears voices that people claim don't exist, but I protect him from them because they dwell inside his head and I know he has never asked for that, just like I never asked to be smart enough to realized what I've realized so far, so I protect him when he needs to be protected, and he insists I take my meds properly and try not to kill myself, and though he knows those things don't work, I'm the only one he has. The only one he trusts, like he's the only one I don't hate.
"I trust you," it's his way to say he loves me.
"I won't kill myself," it's my way to say that I love him, too.
"Good," he smiles, and we sit in the gutter until it's too late to take a bus home, so we walk until sunrise and we know our parents won't even notice we weren't there, so we take our time.
When we have to part, he smiles at me, though I don't. I kiss him, and he kisses me back.
"You're better than any med," I tell him and his back encounters a wall. "You're better than anyone here," I tell him and kiss his neck and rest my head on his shoulder. "Don't ever change. Don't ever get better," I command more than ask, and take his hand in mine. "Don't leave me. You're the only thing that keeps me alive," I confess and feel his arm wrap around me. "You're the only thing that makes sense."
"I love you," he tells me. "I won't get better and I won't let you die," he tightens his hand around mine. "Don't leave me," he pleads. "I'll follow you wherever you go. I know you hate your meds just like I hate mine," he smiles and kisses to top of my head. "But take it. Pretend you're better so we can always leave wherever we are, so no one will know us and no one will tell us what we should be."
I smile. I rarely do, and I only do when I'm around him and we make promises of something better. We can wait. I can wait. I'll wait for him, and he'll wait for me.
I kiss him again.
We decide we don't need to go home. I don't know what day it is because I always forget what day it is, but we go to some place where no one exists, and I touch him. I touch his scars and he touches mine. He tells me stories voices told him, and I tell him stories I dreamed when I was in a hospital and doctors stitched my wrists together again. He tells me things he has seen, and I tell him things that I have thought. We picture scenarios about our deliriums smashed together, and we can almost laugh about how ridiculous they are.
I can almost feel happy.
"We're miserable," I confess. "But we're together and I think that's what matters."
"We can be miserable together," he rests his face on my chest. "I don't mind being miserable and insane if I'm with you. Your voice is louder than the ones inside my head."
"You don't have to listen to them," I hold his waist and I don't plan on letting him go. "Don't let those monsters win. I'll fight them with you."
He whispers an okay, and we stay like that for a long time.
I feel our heartbeats overlap and I feel warmth and something that resembles joy. I don't feel like dying, and I always forget to take my meds so he'll bring them to me. He does that, too, and it's like an unspoken agreement between us. We look for each other like a game and always end up in the same place – standing together, driving our insanity away, isolated from people who label us with their own misery. We stand together and we stand alone.
And I don't mind.