Ink | Soulmate AU | ✓

one | oxygen

a quick author's note: thank you so much for finding my book and clicking on it! this is my first story on wattpad, and i'm inexpressibly grateful to everyone that has taken the time to read it and to anyone who has enjoyed it. anyway, i really hope you do enjoy this story as much as i enjoyed writing it, and have a nice day. ♡

***

Out of nowhere, I suddenly remembered that I was breathing. That I had been breathing my entire life, even though I hadn't necessarily been aware of it, and that I hadn't always appreciated my dutiful lungs, working silently around the clock to keep me alive and my tired heart pumping blood around my body.

   I remembered, as well, that I was a bad person; that I was a criminal simply for existing, and the very fact I was still breathing was some kind of cursed miracle. As someone had once told me, I was a lone doe in a world of hunters, rifles at the ready, my chest locked in their sights to put a bullet through the bloody contraption beating beneath. A master would aim for the eye, perhaps the temple: a quick, clean, painless death. Not these. The heart was the messiest, the most symbolic; they aimed for the heart. The heart was victory.

My imagination and paranoia had always been irrevocably linked. Attempting to snap myself back to reality, I blinked away tears. I didn't have time for this poetic bullshit. Point was, I should've been dead but I wasn't, though there was a side of me, however ungrateful, that wished I was.

From that point on I controlled my intakes of breath with conscious thought, not wanting to rely on anything else to do it for me. The air around me smelled like stale coffee, and I wrinkled my nose involuntarily; I had never much cared for that smell.

It stunted my concentration a little, as all my thoughts had turned swiftly towards maintaining the process of inhaling; waiting; exhaling. Trying to ignore the smell.

My brain managed to convince me that if I didn't repeat the cycle constantly in the very forefront of my mind, I would somehow asphyxiate. And that maybe it would be better if I did. But I pushed the thought away, trying to convince myself that before I had come to the realisation of my breathing I had done so flawlessly, without needing to interfere, and that everything would be okay.

I tried to forget about breathing, to let my instincts kick in and be able to continue once again on the real task at hand — my artwork — but I simply found myself focusing too hard on not breathing, and subsequently began to cough and splutter aimlessly for lack of air.

I gave up and held my breath.

Pencil in hand, I looked down at my work. It wasn't very good, even though it was my final assignment for this particular project; we'd been studying collages. This piece would decide my grade for the term. And when I say we, what I mean is that everyone else had been studying collages, and I had been falling asleep in lectures, missing deadlines and generally failing the course.

Come on Archie, I told myself, trying to reign in my wandering mind. Focus.

What did I need? Then I remembered something else: I had forgotten to buy glue again. How was I supposed to complete this thing without the ability to attach smaller pieces of paper to a larger one? That was the literal point of a collage. For God's sake— how had I even reached this point without noticing I didn't have any? And – my number one question – why was I like this?