if you need me, dear, i'm the same as i was

03: if i could lose you, i would

Iwaizumi has only had one mental breakdown in his life before the heart spasm. He'd been close before then, on occasion; the rare panic and anxiety attacks weren't foreign concepts to him. When someone has Oikawa Tooru for a best friend, they are bound to get pulled into the honestly fucked up shit that occurs in his life. Emotional whiplash is par for the course.

The mental breakdown didn't happen with Oikawa, though, unlike most of the near-misses in his childhood. This occurred in the United States at UC-Irvine while studying for exams, and everything had come crashing down on him in one wave that rivaled the tsunami of 3/11.1

He'd coped well with the original move. His overseas stay would only be for two years, and in the worst-case scenario, he could come back home and try his luck at a Japanese university and company. He didn't have to do this internship with Utsui, and the chance to study at UC-Irvine was more of a package deal with the internship than a true desire to attend the university over all others in the first place.

But Iwaizumi had wanted this for himself. He wanted more than anything to succeed.

So, he'd made it work. He refused to let the new world and culture daunt him. His boss was Japanese, at least, and he'd stayed a week in the United States before this during his second year at Tohoku University. Instead of approaching his issues head-on like he'd done his whole life, he'd stuffed his anxiety and confusion into a corner. If he couldn't see it and couldn't feel it, then it simply wasn't there.

(Upon reflection, Iwaizumi realizes why he did this when it's not something he'd been prone to doing before. He was missing someone, someone who'd force him to acknowledge and deal with his emotions, because that was something that they'd always done for each other. After four years, he supposes he'd forgotten how to act with no one there to keep him in check. Not that his friends didn't try. They did. It just wasn't the same.)

He was studying for his second exam of three. He didn't notice anything was wrong, really, until he'd set his pen down and didn't pick it back up. He'd stared at his laptop screen, not comprehending any of the words because they were all in English. And he'd understood English perfectly fine.

Then he'd shifted his gaze and saw the barbecue-flavored Lays chip bag he'd been feasting on to keep some of his energy levels up. He heard the recorded voice of his professor speaking in English with a European accent so thick he could barely make out any of his words. He was sitting cross-legged at his desk, back slouched and hand cramping, in an American apartment. His T-shirt had some logo brand on it that he'd been gifted by his roommate, who was an American he had trouble communicating with on occasion, who had been very kind to him but also never understood the references Iwaizumi made or genuinely tried learning the Japanese language, who had taken him out to baseball, basketball, and football games instead of volleyball matches since those were more popular.

Iwaizumi was in the United States, but everything and everyone he knew was eight thousand miles away, so far out of his reach, and there was nothing he could do about it unless he wanted to give up.

It had taken him three days to recover from his complete breakdown. His roommate, the saint she was, had tried so hard to help him despite her own studies and work, but all he had wanted was home. It didn't help that he was surrounded by the agitating factors constantly; the western couch he was cocooned on, the American brand Pizza Hut she ordered once for him (for the following meals, she had stuck to Japanese restaurants because they were, at the very least, a little closer to his culture), the sound of her car keys, her perfect English slang in her perfect American accent. He had barely heard any of the things she said to him in the days he spent floating between panic, dissociation, and what he could only assume was Hell.