I rushed myself off my bed as if it was a trap. My room was so quiet, I heard only the sound of wild crows and my own huffing. At my side, my palm prickled where it met with his steel-hard skin. It was his cheekbone that hurt my knuckles. I was wise not to have backhanded him instead, though I should have. I could have.
I could have asked him why, as he had asked me. Maybe that's what he wanted from me. A reach for understanding. But I did not seek to understand. Perhaps I already understood everything.
He did it out of resentment. Possibly for his father, and for me. When we laid on the snow and I told him who I was, the stars wandered, not knowing what to do because Levi wasn't sure where exactly to place them.
He acted as a companion while under it all, he was secretly disgusted. My actions disgusted him. That was it. He was itching to use it against me and his restraint had finally run out. You're a coward. Now, the venom in his words invaded my arteries to make me sick to my core.
My legs felt shackled to stone blocks as they carried my heart downstairs. Mikasa and our mother were just about to go to the store, and I raised my hand to stop them. "Wait," I said, turning their heads, "Let me go with you." I hate it here.
Some cars passed us. Some of them fell behind. My mom changed lanes the way Levi probably would if he was human and had a driver's license: seamlessly, without rocking his passengers. Dad was the worst to ride with because of this. He drove as if he was the angriest man alive. If I held an egg with him at the wheel, he could scramble it within its shell.
We zoomed past long, patterned, brick walls. I imagined an invisible man dashing along the top. He's been racing me on the freeway since I was a child. I first met him when I was six. He waved at me, and shouted, "Look how fast I can go!" These days, he escapes from something, running to nowhere.
I hit rewind on last night as many times as I could before the car stopped. Each replay, I twisted and added different details. Different versions of how it could have played out had some things been different.
I slap him.
He presses a palm to the red on his cheek. He stands up, despising me with his eyes. Before I even register that he hit me back, pain's axe-blade chops through my skull. All of a sudden, I am knocked to the floor, him standing like a skyscraper before me. Smoke comes out of his head. Gravity lets go of my heart as he kneels. What I see is a building about to collapse onto me. The fear in the back of my brain, loud as a horn, tells me that this will kill me. My life will be no more once I am crushed. I close my eyes to anticipate my death.
It doesn't come. Nothing happens until Levi talks. His voice has never been this vulgar. He reaches deep, deep, down to his gall and pulls out a perfectly concocted string of words, "You're a hypocrite piece of shit. You should have died."
The plot-hole here is that he did not know of my guilt-driven suicide attempt two years ago. He was not omniscient, despite his divinity. He will never know unless I tell him.
I slap him.
He presses a palm to the red on his cheek. He stands up, despising me with his eyes. Before I even register that he hit me back, pain's axe-blade chops through my skull. All of a sudden, I am knocked to the floor, and his steps echo through the wood as he storms to the opposite end of the platform.
"If I'm wrong, then maybe we both are, Eren," I can tell he is facing away. His words shoot far into the air, exiting earshot. I can only hear him barely.
I force myself back up, fighting the strain in the back of my eyes. "Why did you do it?" I manage. It takes effort to speak now.
"Same reason Rome did," he says in his flat voice. He turns around, glowing silver-lining at the edge of his skin, "I fell in love in the worst way. I want her husband out of the picture. Do you blame me?" Yes, I ache to say. But do I blame him? Do I blame Rome?
This wouldn't happen because Levi does not know the name of the other man. To him, Rome is just the empire that used to be. He will not know unless I tell him.
I slap him.
He presses a palm to the red on his cheek. He stands up, despising me with his eyes. I seize the collar of his shirt and do not stutter. "I fucking hate you. You don't get to disrespect me like that. I peeled back my layers for you, how dare you!" There is no change in his expression. He is an inanimate object. "You're no better than any man. You're less than the dirt under this grass. There's nothing special about you."
Those are fighting words. I cannot picture Levi's reaction because I would not say all of that. Not to someone who I too recently saw as a companion.
If anyone in the car addressed me, I was not present hear them. The only words I heard were imaginary, in my head. I did not wake to reality until my eyes caught a restaurant logo that I recognized. We were in the parking lot of the grocery store.
In a small section next to hair products and vitamins, there were shelves of 'diet' products. Keto supplements, diuretics, and caffeine capsules. A particular brand of caffeine capsules grabbed my attention. I removed it from where it stood, and ran my thumb under the big money words. Fat burner.
Its price did not matter. Mom wouldn't have wanted her money to go into it. I carried it into an aisle with no people and slipped it under my jacket. It concealed nicely. I told the security guard to have a nice day on the way out.
My bed was not thin. To find this bottle that I hid in the corner, someone—namely my mother—would have to actually climb onto the bed and peek down. And if they do, I will have the warrant to ask them why the fuck they were looking somewhere they shouldn't have been looking.
The first two pills I took some time after dinner was the recommended dose on the label. The heart is one of the hardest working organs in the body. The more stimulated the heart, the more calories are burnt. That was the simple math behind it, if you didn't count the number it could potentially do on me if I took too much.
And I did. Somewhere between I don't feel it and Last one, I swear and I want it to work overnight and I still don't feel it, I remember ending up with eleven pills worth of caffeine in my system. That was, precisely, 880 milligrams of it mingling in my blood, all at once. My body was like a mall, jam-packed with stomping feet that shook the entire building.
I clutched my chest, realizing I had accidentally dug half my grave. A raging wave of nausea keeps me tied to my bed. If I thought about getting up, my body threatened to collapse. But I really had to throw up.
I drag myself to the bathroom and almost fell before the toilet. I grabbed onto the seat to steady myself.
Nothing came out. My stomach had nothing. When I tired from trying to force the pills back up, I focused on breathing. Hand on my heart, I felt it kick and squirm like a fetus. I needed to lie down again. When I stumbled back into my room, the caffeine was yet to even peak.
I prayed. I apologized to not Levi, but the real god that was all-seeing. Please, don't let me die like this.
Not here. Not like this.
My heart was outpacing time itself now. Seconds distorted and felt much longer. When I laid down to rest, blood pooled in my head, making the beat of my heart loud in my ears. The only other thing I can hear is my moans of pain.
I almost popped my own lungs with every inhale, but it was not enough. There was not enough oxygen in the air. I suffocated without a noose. I writhed with no injury. I trembled violently at my hands and jaw.
The fluids that traveled throughout me were long worms, fattening my veins so that they stuck out on my arms and neck. I retreated into myself to offer encouraging words to my own heart, afraid that it would quit on me if I didn't let it know I still wanted to live.
A second wave of nausea, more vicious than the last. I thought I would definitely throw up then. I didn't. I knelt in front of the toilet, stifling cries and pants. I glance at the clock, forgetting briefly how to read analog. Midnight. I had to be quiet or I might wake someone.
Rinse and repeat. I went to and fro, not knowing a wink of sleep that night.
1 a.m.
Felt like years to reach, yet was just the beginning.
2 a.m.
I was angry at myself for overdosing.
3 a.m.
I prayed again.
4 a.m.
I think I started to see cracks in my spirit. Manually pumping my lungs had taken nearly all of my energy.
5 a.m.
I grew tired.
6 a.m.
The sky began to blanch.
Sunrise. My heart finally calms. I felt wellness fill me back up as well as relief. I looked up to the sky at the white clouds that appeared closer than usual. I couldn't believe I still lived.
A single tear leaps from my eye. Then, another from the other eye. Then, the dam broke. And with my arms wet with salty water, I wondered why I was so sad. From where within me did the tears flow? It was beyond me, even though it felt like something I should know. Wherever it came from was far away, somewhere in the corner of my mind. Somewhere I could not reach now.
I was hurting for whatever reason, and that's all I knew.
It truly hurt, so I allowed myself to weep.