Happy Friday everyone, and Happy Anzac Day to all of my Aussie readers :) I would like to thank gypsy rosalie and skye for their dedicated readership so far and their reviews :)
Chapter 3
'I'm scared that there's something wrong with me, I'm scared that I'm crazy,' Alex whispered. This was the first time she had been able to voice her greatest fear aloud. She examined herself in the mirror, looking into her own eyes as if trying to see through them into her mind. Her mind, it was the thing she was most proud of, the thing which made her who she was, and it was the thing which was letting her down, the thing which held the capacity to destroy her.
'I'm not crazy, am I?' Alex's voice sounded feeble in the quiet of the empty house. The truth was she was unsure; she longed to be able to read other people's minds, not to learn all their secrets, but to see if she was the only one who thought this way. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she found herself thinking that this was not the way normal people thought. But what constitutes normal? Aren't we all a little crazy? She yearned to believe that, but there was a small part of her brain, a part completely disconnected from her intelligence which undermined her stand. It was that part of the brain which told her that everyone else in her family was happy, that everyone else around her was just fine, and that was why she was considered strange.
Tears welled in Alex's eyes as she looked at herself and she turned away from her reflection, crawling into bed and letting the hot tears roll silently down her cheek. Crying was something she did a lot more now too, every so often an excess of emotions would build up and pour out unexpectedly. She would find herself getting worked up over ads on the TV; she would be overcome by a feeling of such despair while reading a textbook that she would have to take a break, unable to read at all through the tears which inundated her eyes. It was nice though, in a weird way, to feel something, so much of her time was spent feeling numb, or shut off from the world that it was nice to have a recognisable human emotion. Still even with the small pressure releases, there were so many emotions inside of her, so much chaos and confusion. How was she meant to even begin to express them when she couldn't even find the strength to begin sifting through them? It wasn't as if she liked being this way, she would give anything to feel more human, it was just...she was exhausted from just breathing, and being conscious, there was barely anything left over for anything else. There had to be another way, surely everyone wasn't walking around feeling this way?
Alex felt as though she was a ticking time bomb, constantly mere seconds away from a complete emotional meltdown. One day the timer would go off and she would become one of those people who crowds parted around, who people would get off the bus five stops early just so they didn't have to see the craziness. Should she just cut her losses and check herself into an institution? Should she start seeing a psychiatrist? Should she simply trade her brain in for a new one?
In her frustration Alex kicked a pile of her SAT textbooks off the end of her bed, feeling satisfaction in lashing out at something. She longed to have one of the cliché teenage 'trash a room' montage moments, but that would be too teenage angsty, and Alex detested clichés. Besides, while it might make her feel better for a moment or two, the cleaning up wouldn't help lift her spirits. She angrily wiped the tears from her face, she was constantly simultaneously torn between being angry at the expression of emotions and needing desperately just to spend a whole day screaming until she lost her voice and crying until there were no more tears and she was left, a shaking bundle curled up on the floor. Perhaps she needed to lose her mind, to go so crazy that she got it out of her system and was able to leave it behind and move on with her life. Alex was always so steadfast, so certain, but now she didn't feel as though she were sure about anything anymore. Her life had become a tangle of threads and she wasn't holding any of the ends.
*sigh poor Alex, I'm afraid it will only get worse before it gets better. Please leave me a review, let me know if this is straying into the angsty domain instead of just emotional. Anyway until next Friday please leave reviews, I'm off to see the latest MF episode set in my own country :) :)