XXX
Hey, this time I'm projecting onto Logan for once (honestly, I'm most similar to Logan, but Janus is my favorite so I usually project onto him…).
But yeah, this is mostly just a vent thing, so… it's not that great. But eh, it exists.
XXX
Deep breaths.
In.
Hold.
Out.
He was fine. He knew he was fine, he was going to be fine, and there was no reason for him to feel like this. Really, if anything, this should be a relief. Finally, he could fix what happened and get his life back on track. And yet, as he stared at the calendar, day after day, his heart clenched a little more with each changing of the numbers.
The semester had just ended at his college, and graduation was the day before.
Logan was a senior, and he should have been there.
He wasn't.
Instead, he was scrolling on his phone, eyes flickering past the pictures of his friends as they finished their semesters and put on their robes. Bright eyes and grinning faces stared back at him from the screen, and he couldn't help the ugly feelings rising in his chest (of course, he was also happy for them, happy for the friends he'd long-since distanced himself from, because they'd all worked so hard and they deserved to be happy on such an occasion, but he should have been standing beside them, and he wasn't).
There was nothing he could do about that now, though. Even if he fixed everything, he would never be able to stand beside them at their graduation ceremony, never take photos in matching robes or have a combined celebration or move onto the next stage of their lives together. It would never happen, because he had already condemned himself to falling behind them.
Sometimes, Logan wished he could just be normal for once. And yet, it seemed like, every time he tried, it just blew up in his face. He was never the best at making or keeping friends, so he focused on school. He was the smart kid, and people were proud of him, and it felt good, even though he would stay up all night worried about assignments and never went out anywhere and fell apart any time his performance slipped. Everyone else had friends; Logan had his grades (until he met the others, and even then, he hadn't spoken to them in months, now. He couldn't even bring himself to send them a congratulatory text- because what right did he have to text them now after ignoring them for so long?). His peers started dating, while he didn't even consider it until he was 18 (not because he was 'naive' or 'pure' or 'innocent' like everyone else thought- he just didn't see it as a priority, and he didn't quite understand it either). He would go to the school dances, and he'd end up leaving (running) halfway through. Even when he tried to go to prom, his boyfriend refused to go with him. While everyone applied for weekend jobs, Logan studied. His family was financially well-off enough that he didn't have to, and he didn't need to buy too many superfluous things. As everyone else got their driving permits, Logan found himself too scared of accidentally killing someone to get behind the wheel. When he went to college, he got a single room instead of having a roommate (even though he would have been far less lonely if he had one) because he couldn't stand the idea of not having somewhere he could reliably be alone if he needed it.
His whole life, Logan had been trying to do what everyone else did, but no matter how much he tried to follow along the paths he saw others take, he never seemed to do it quite right. There was always something making it harder for him, something setting him apart even though he just wanted to be normal sometimes.
But normal didn't seem to work for him, which was fine because he was intelligent, so clearly, he'd go to a good college and get a good job and have a good life, even if he messed up everything else. Some people excelled at sports or friendships or leadership. Logan excelled at school.
And that was fine- that was enough-
Until he didn't have that anymore.
Until school became harder and harder, and no matter how much he studied, he just wasn't understanding as much as he used to.
Until finding the motivation to do his work started to get increasingly difficult, and he found himself spending less time studying than before even though he needed to more now.
Until the lack of close friendships was slowly driving him insane, as he sat alone in a dorm room hours away from home.
Until he slowly realized that he'd never be able to do normal things as easily as other people could, if he could do them at all.
Until he realized that his grades meant nothing if he didn't have any other career skills, so he might not even get a good job at the end of this.
Until he had a mental breakdown in his final semester and had to resign from school.
Deep breaths.
In.
Hold.
Out.
Those few weeks were hazy in his mind, jumbled and confusing in a way that made it hard for him to remember how everything happened. He remembered the paralyzing panic that never abated, no matter what he tried to do or how many problems he resolved. He remembered not being able to sleep without having Janus on a video call with him, and then bolting awake from a nightmare barely an hour after he finally fell asleep. He remembered being so overwhelmed by his assignments that he couldn't actually do them. He remembered feeling too anxious to eat, every bite making him want to throw up. He remembered Virgil sitting with him in his room, gently pulling his hands away from his arms so he wouldn't pick his skin to shreds. He remembered breaking down in front of his professor after class. He remembered admitting to his self harm for the first time while talking to a crisis line on the phone, and subsequently panicking about it (and he remembered a haze of phone call after phone call as he tried to get help and got transferred from person to person to person, so many times that he wouldn't even be able to guess at a number). He remembered breaking down in front of another staff member, getting escorted to the counseling center, and eventually being driven to a crisis center by the police, where he would sit in a strange series of waiting rooms for so many hours that he ran out of energy to panic and looked calm (even though he wasn't- he was just so exhausted that he couldn't manage to even emote).
He had to go home.
He knew that. The best-case scenario was that he'd be miserable for a few weeks and maybe he'd go back to normal with time.
The worst-case scenario, one that became more and more likely with each day he stayed, was him ending up dead.
And so, he'd been convinced to pack up his things and go home. He figured out how to resign from his classes and take a temporary leave of absence. That way, he wouldn't have a semester's worth of failures, and he could go back to school when he was ready.
And now, in just a few days, that's what he was going to do. He'd dropped one of his majors and decided to take a single online summer class so he could finish his course requirements and graduate. Technically, this was the best possible outcome he could have hoped for. He'd be able to finish his classes, even getting to focus on only one, and he'd only have to take it for six weeks. Then he'd be done, and really, no one even had to know that he'd graduated in the summer of 202X instead of the spring. He didn't even have to go back to campus, because being online allowed him to take the course from home (which was really a big deal for him, because even the thought of returning to the city his college was located in filled him with an anxious dread that hadn't abated in the months since he'd left).
He'd graduate (hopefully). Just… Not when he was supposed to, not the way he was supposed to, and he'd had to sacrifice a major he'd spent the past four years suffering through the classes for when he was so close (but those classes were too much for him. He'd finally hit a wall that he couldn't even imagine climbing over, and he'd already wasted so much time climbing that he just couldn't do it anymore).
He'd done so many things, tried so hard to be a good student his entire life, and now, he couldn't even do that right. If this was how things were going to go, what had all those years of studying been for? What had been the point of holding himself back from going out, from relaxing, from having fun, when all he'd given up had given him nothing in return?
Maybe there wasn't a point, and maybe there never had been, but Logan hadn't known that, and it was too late to do anything about it now.
"Logan? I made you some tea."
A mug clinked down onto the table beside him, making Logan jump at the unexpected noise.
Janus, his older brother, was standing in front of him, hand still hovering beside a mug of steaming tea, another cup held firmly in his other hand.
Logan hadn't realized he was home.
"Is something wrong?" Janus asked, sliding into the chair beside him.
He shrugged, and Janus gave him a long look.
"Come on, I can tell something's bothering you," he pressed.
Logan sighed, his tense shoulders slumping as he resisted the urge to lay his head on the table.
"I don't know."
"I think you do."
He moved his jaw, masticating the tangled thoughts for a long time before they turned into usable words.
"I have school in a few days."
"Yes, you do."
Logan fidgeted in his chair.
"I don't know."
"What don't you know?"
"I don't know. I don't know."
Deep breaths.
In.
Hold.
Out.
"Hey, try to calm down," Janus advised. "And don't worry. You're going to be fine- you have me and our parents to help you if you need it, as well as your therapist. And you picked a class you're interested in, so it won't be so bad, right?"
"I don't know."
"It'll be fine. You'll be fine."
Logan bit his cheek.
"What if I'm not?"
Janus took a long, thoughtful sip of his tea.
"Well, do you want to delay going back to school?"
He couldn't. Logan knew he couldn't. If he pushed back taking classes to the fall, he'd either have to pay for a dorm or live with his grandparents (who lived an hour away from his school by car and didn't have a bus route that could bring him there). Really, this online class was his only option.
He shook his head.
"Are you sure? If you're not ready, you don't have to go back yet. No one's giving you a deadline for feeling better."
Except he did have a deadline. The latest he could return to classes was the fall semester. If he waited until spring or later, he'd have to contact the dean's office and pay a fee to be reinstated as a student, and he really didn't have any idea of how complicated that was. He'd rather avoid finding out.
"I know," Logan sighed. "I just don't want to fail."
"You won't fail."
"You don't know that."
"Really? How many classes have you failed?"
Logan grimaced.
"I mean, none, but that doesn't mean I won't," he replied. "I only passed some of my classes by luck, and I would have failed my classes if…"
Janus sighed.
"Yes, you probably would have failed if you stayed," he admitted. "But you didn't stay. You came home and took care of your mental health, and now you'll be able to finish your classes and graduate. You did the best thing you could have done."
The words were supposed to be kind, reassuring. Janus wasn't being mean to him. And yet, Logan still felt them sting as they slipped into his brain.
"But did I?" he asked. "If I had stayed, I would be done by now. Maybe I would have gotten better, and all this was just a bunch of unnecessary drama."
He saw Janus shoot him a frown.
"Your mental health isn't drama Logan," Janus denied. "Yes, packing up and leaving school in your last semester was difficult, but you couldn't stay. You tried staying, and you just got worse. You made the right choice."
Part of him knew Janus was right. Part of him knew that, if he had stayed, he would have ended up killing himself, had already been considering it before he'd come home. But another part of him felt like coming home was a failure on his part. He shouldn't have been having so much trouble with school, and he should have been independent enough to get help on his own so he wouldn't have to leave. He shouldn't have even ended up in such a situation. But he had. And then he'd come home and spent months doing absolutely nothing productive- not school, not work, not contributing to his family or home. Just laying around, watching TV and doing more-or-less what he wanted. It was almost like he was being rewarded for running away from his responsibilities, and Logan couldn't quite convince himself that wasn't why he'd agreed to come home. Maybe he just wanted to be lazy, so he played up his problems until he'd convinced everyone he was enough of a mental case that they let him do this.
"This happens more than you think, Lo," Janus continued. "College is a lot of pressure, and it starts getting to people. There wouldn't be so many counseling services and hotlines at your school if people didn't need them, right?"
"…Most people don't leave in their final semester."
He crossed his arms.
"Maybe most don't. But some do," Janus told him. "Self-care is important, Logan. And, really, you needed to take care of yourself, and to have us support you. There wasn't much we could do with you being so far away. You're in a much better position now than you were a few months ago."
Logan let out a sigh.
"I know," he huffed. "I just hate this, and I don't want something like that to happen again."
And really, he was a lot more worried about ending up back in that state of panic than he was about the class itself. It was probably the lowest he'd ever been in his life, worse than he'd felt in high school (which was saying a lot), and he didn't know if he could survive going through that again. Each and every reminder of what happened shot a spike of fear through his heart, the reminder telling him that, if it happened once, it could happen again.
"Well, it'll be easier to stop it if it happens again. You're in therapy, now, and you have us here to help stop you from spiraling," Janus explained. "I can't promise you it won't ever happen again. But we can try to put the brakes on it faster or lessen the severity."
"I guess so," Logan shrugged again.
After that, the two of them sat in silence for a long time, quietly sipping their cooling tea. Logan wondered if Janus was waiting for him to say something else, but he didn't know what else to say. They'd had this conversation a dozen times already, and really, anything he could have said had already been said before. And even if he had something to say, the weight of the silence was draped heavily over him, holding his mouth shut with its pressure until it broke.
"Are you feeling any better?" Janus asked eventually.
Deep breaths.
In.
Hold.
Out.
No.
"I guess so."
XXX
