Just be there

Izzie

****A/N-Just so you all are aware,chapter is going to be really heavy and focus a lot on Izzie's trauma.*****

I don't know why the heaviness started to creep in. It could be the fact that I'm about to turn eighteen, or that I'm about to graduate. Or it could be that the anniversary of my mom's death is just around the corner.

I sit on the bathroom floor for privacy, Casey is at track practice still but I want to ensure there is no sudden intrusion. Even though the heaviness started creeping back in a few days ago, I've been doing my best to keep up appearances.

I still get out of bed, take my medicine, go to school, the whole routine. I refuse to allow myself to be a burden to Casey or Elsa again. I just can't let that happen again.

Inside it feels like the heaviness is rising, first it started to rise slowly, but today it feels like it's threatening to overtake me. I stare at my socks as I think back to the argument I had with my mother the night before she died.

Her new asshole of a boyfriend kept "accidentally" walking in on me when I was showering or changing. He wasn't the first one of my mother's boyfriends to be a creep. At least he never actually touched me. I was ten the first time one of my mother's loser boyfriends groped me. I had told my mother but her response had been that I was "being overdramatic" and "had an overactive imagination". As I got older it happened with some of her other boyfriends too. My mother never ever took my side. I hadn't told anybody any of this. Not Casey, not my shrink Casey, not even my siblings. Thinking about it makes me feel physically ill. I had confronted my mother about her boyfriend's creepy ass behavior. She had quickly become livid. "Why can't you just let me be happy? Why have you always been so full of darkness? Are you so broken that you can't allow anybody around you to be happy?" She had screamed at me before turning on her heel to walk out of the house. The next time I saw her was when I ran into her bedroom when I heard Luca scream. She was already dead, but I did CPR anyways.

I think back to the party where I had danced with Casey to Yoko Ono. How I had self-destructed by kissing that loser in front of Casey. How badly I had hurt her. How worried Casey had been when I had my bad patch last summer. How she had bit her nails raw from worry.

Maybe my mother was right. I'm too broken to let the people around me be happy.

The shitty thing is I've been trying so hard to get better. I so desperately don't want to be a burden to Casey, so I go to therapy. I talk through my shit the best I can with Cindy. I do my breathing exercises to try to calm myself down when I'm overwhelmed. I take my medicine. Yet here I am, still drowning internally, sitting on the bathroom floor.

Part of me starts to wonder if it would be better if I had just never been born. I had been "daddy's little girl" until he left without ever looking back. When I was younger my mom seemed to like me, until around the time I was five years old. Than it seemed like one day she just didn't care about me anymore.

How fucked up of a person must I be that my own parents couldn't even be bothered to love me? I think about how completely both Casey's parents love her and Sam. Part of me still feels jealous sometimes. Which makes me feel small and petty, Elsa had opened her home and heart to me. Yet here I am, jealous of Casey for getting her parents instead of mine. It's not even that I want Casey to have shitty parents, because I don't. I love her too much to wish that kind of pain on her. I just wish I didn't have my shitty parents either.

When the heaviness used to threaten to overtake me when I was younger, I was always carefully able to shove it back into a box and ignore it. If I had given into the heaviness, my siblings would have been abandoned, without anyone to care for them. However, my siblings live with my grandma now they don't need me.

A quiet voice in my head almost seems to whisper to me. A voice I have tried desperately to silence all my life. "You're no good for anybody. Casey thinks she loves you, but soon enough she will realize that you are not worthy of love. Just like everyone else has. They all realize it in the end. But, if you're not careful you'll snuff out Casey's light before she realizes. You'll infect her with your darkness. She's going to leave you. Everyone one does. No one stays. Why would they? You're nothing."

I put my hands over my head and rock, trying desperately to silence the thoughts in my head but I can't.

It takes less than a second to make a choice that could change the rest of your life, or even ruin it.

When I stand up and look in the mirror, for half a second I see my mother looking back at me. I open the medicine cabinet and stare at the bottle of medication Elsa had just refilled for me. I look at the glass of water sitting on the counter.

I open the bottle and dump the pills into my mouth. All of them. I use the water to try to get the pills down, but there are so many I'm almost choking on them. I refill the glass and finally manage to swallow the rest of the pills, tears streaming down my face from the exertion swallowing so many pills at once took.

I sit back down on the bathroom floor, and regret my decision almost instantly. I try desperately to make myself throw up, but I can't. I feel the edges of my vision start to grey. I'm so sorry Casey, I didn't mean it. That's the last thing I think to myself before everything goes black.