Stagnant

Despondency

Most people don't realise when someone is depressed because most of the time all the person has to do is master a fake smile. We smile to hide our pain because if we don't the tears may fall and never stop.

It's awful when we have to fake a smile to hide how miserable we are inside but imagine how far gone you have to be to not be able to fake a smile.

I can't fake a smile and the only time I properly smiled was when thinking about killing myself. 

Seventeen muscles are used with every smile, seventeen muscles flexing and contracting while thinking about death and the end of my life. How depressingly poetic.

However there are forty three muscles used when frowning. My forty three muscles are being used as Jackson Ryder grabs my hand, pulling me along with him in the rain, wind and storm.

I wanted to ask him where he's taking me but I physically did not have the motivation to open my mouth and force words out. I hardly spoke to anyone in the last year and not wanting to see or speak to anyone to suddenly being forced in to a conversation wasn't exactly how I envisioned my night going. I had this thing called a social battery, where you can only talk or be around someone so long before you feel your energy diminishing and you don't want to be around them anymore. I could feel my social battery at an all time low, it wasn't all that high to begin with but right now it was in the molten core of the Earth.

It wasn't long until we walked in to a house, a neat and well organised living room with sofa's and a TV hooked on the wall. I knew it was his parents house when the scent attacked me, washing over me was a mix of what he smelled like; citrus but with a rough edge.

"My parents aren't home so go use the shower, I'll set some clothes outside the door and then I'll put your clothes in the wash and dryer." He smiled down at me as I continued to study the cream painted living room.

"Can I have a long sleeved top?" I ask quietly. "I get cold."

He nods. "I'll also get food for us."

"For you." I mumbled back, my eyes never straying from the room.

"What?" I heard his confused voice in the air. "For you as well. You look like a toothpick."

I looked like a toothpick.

Subconsciously I wound my arms around my, trying to shield my body from his view.

I looked like a toothpick.

I knew it was meant to be a simple
sentence, just for him to try and make me understand that I needed to eat but to me... it was both an insult and an attack.

I looked like a toothpick.

My mind wasn't a normal mind, not anymore. It took the simple things and turned them against me, making me hate myself even more. I didn't really know what I looked like, I avoided a mirror for the last few months, not even wanting to take a peek of myself but I knew from the lack of meals I ate that I had lost weight and that it most likely wasn't pretty.

I wasn't pretty and I looked like a toothpick.

"You know it's a very dangerous thing to comment on someone's body and weight." I simply say, walking past him and up the grey carpeted stairs, listening to his faint instructions on where the bathroom was.

I shed my clothes, hanging my mac over a hook and putting my boots in the corner while leaving my heavy and drenched clothes on the floor. I took this time to actually look at my body for the first time in months.

Bones.

That's the first thing that came to my mind.

We have two-hundred-and-six bones in the human body and I can pretty much see all of them.