Disclaimer: I do not own Degrassi. I do not own any Sylvia Plath, or Chuck Palahniuk quotes. I also do not own any real world references made in this fic... I wish..
A/N : This is me trying to get into Eli's mindset around the earlier parts of Now or Never.. I'm experimenting with my writing quite a bit, so this is a little different. I tried to write it the way I imagine Eli is thinking it.
"A falling star
Least I fall alone.
I can't explain what you can't explain.
You're finding things that you didn't know
I look at you with such disdain
The walls start breathing
My mind's unweaving
Maybe it's best you leave me alone."
"It ends tonight" – All American Rejects
He cannot focus. All of his thoughts are escaping him before he can get through to them, and this pisses him off to no extent. His breathing is sharp, and his lungs burn as they take in oxygen, as his heart beats, as he stays alive, even if all the while he feels like a walking corpse. A corpse that feels too much. There are tears brimming on the edges of his eyes, and he just doesn't know the reason as to why they're there.
He does, but he doesn't at the same time. All that he knows is that he is tired, so extremely tired. He thinks, and wonders, and his mind is always racing when he should be off in dreamland. There are bags underneath his eyes, and they grow larger, and darker with each, and every passing day. He's sleepy. He feels so tired. He's feels pathetic.
His therapist tries to get him to talk about things, things like Julia and Mike and her. She tries to get him to talk about his feelings. "How are you feeling, Eli?" she'll say, and he'll just rolls his eyes, and snort derisively at the cliché question. He doesn't say what he's thinking, of course not. He doesn't say that, if anyone really does want to know he feels crazy.
He feels crazy because whatever goes on in his mind isn't normal. Normal people don't have to take pills to act mentally stable. When he takes pills he feels less human than he ever has before. He feels detached from life. Everything around him is distant, and his head is miles away. His thoughts are out of reach, and he is gone from himself.
"This room is too small," he thinks to himself in a panic. He feels as though the walls are closing in on him, his pile of belongings is sporadically growing larger, and larger before his very eyes. There's a faint ringing noise in his ears that's growing louder by the second. And he can't leave, but he can't stand still. He doesn't know what's going on. He's pacing. He walks circles in the space where a bit of ground is left uncovered.
He wants to scream. He wants to cry. He wants to break down, but he doesn't. He can feel heaviness building up in his raw throat and the pressure around his eyes. He could let it out and get it over with, but he holds it in. He holds in the confusion, and the sadness, and the aching because it feels so exceedingly good to hurt. It feels so good to feel something other than the fog of numbness that his medication leave him in.
"What did my arms do before they held you?' he quotes in his head. It's a line he knows all to well. She was Plath, and he was Hughes and he laughs at the irony. Sylvia Plath did kill herself, but his Plath; well she didn't get that far. She ran away when she realized that he was killing her from the inside out. And though he feels like breaking down he laughs.
He laughs because he feels, he's feeling oh so very sad, he laughs because there's no one to laugh with, because it's just him and his thoughts inside of this small room of his, and he laughs because the ringing in his ears is being replaced by the sound of his heartbeat, his pulse is beating faster and faster, and all he sees is his shaking hands.
His hands, they're cold, they're spindly, and they're numb. They're slightly callused, yet smooth, and whenever he tries to grip things, or whenever he tries to hold people close to his heart, he breaks them. He breaks things. But mostly he breaks people; he breaks them in his hands. "How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."
Two girls so far, he's left in pieces, but one in particular always comes to mind. He held onto her too tight, and he shattered her. He broke her into pieces, because he cared to much. She crumbled in his hands, and he tried, he tried so damn hard to lock his hands together, clutch her between his fingers to hold the breaking pieces, but she scattered through like sand on a windy day.
Only this wasn't a slight breeze that caught him off guard this was a brewing hurricane. This was a category three storm so strong he nearly broke as he lost his balance to the cruel act of nature torturing him, simply because it could. But of course with him being who he is, he could care less about his own pain, no his cries aren't for himself but for the girl slipping between his fingers. The girl whose smile lost its warmth, the girl who's growing distance towards him only made him hold on tighter. He held on until there was nothing but ruins. There are only left of the girl she once was.
Really it is his entire fault. He should have recognized the signs, he should have seen the way he was latching onto her like a life source, and he should have seen the way his dependency was growing at an unhealthy rate.
He sank his claws into her and she didn't put up a fight because he sucked the life right out of her. He drained her dry and left her vacant, because that's what he does. He destroys people, there's no doubt in his mind that he does. He's a monster. That's really all there is too it.
When he looks in the mirror he sees things in his eyes, that make him wonder what crazy looks like, and he wonders if the answer is as close as his reflection. He isn't quite sure if it's sadness or insanity that's building up in him, boiling in his blood.
She was so very beautiful before he became involved with her. Countless poems, and songs come to mind but one lingers," If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating." She is so beautiful she burns him alive.
He thinks of her, she's a constant in his thoughts no matter how much he wishes she wouldn't be. He wonders if she ever thinks of him while she's with him. He knows he loves her, he knows that he probably always will love her, and god he wish he could stop. "The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return," he quotes to himself. Thinking of the line from the outrageous movie he talked him into watching with her.
God those blue eyes of hers... They could have talked him into anything.
Is it really better this way?
He's been told countless times from his therapist, from his parents, and even from Adam that this has to stop. It has too. He knows he will not stop. He'll keep her safe in his mind, they way they were back when they were an actual them. She's the wound that people will question him about when he gets older. The wound that he'll look back on and think of what he should have done differently. He knows that he hurt her but damn it, she hurt him to. She left him.
"That old saying, how you always hurt the ones you love, well, it works both ways."
Thoughts?