The Party (GxG) (Camren) **EDITING**

Chapter 17

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A/N:
HAPPY NEW YEAR BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE <3 <3 <3
Hopefully 2017 will be filled with joy and happiness for us all!
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Heartbreak is a funny thing. To even describe it is often difficult unless it has truly been felt.

In the dictionary it is characterised as "a crushing grief and anguish due to the pains and strains of love, that can oft be felt as a physical pain". To a person who has once experienced it, they would describe it as one of the most painful things they have ever had the misery of surviving. To someone who has seen it, they would describe it as the helpless ruin and destruction of a beautiful soul. And yet to a person experiencing it...
"A fate worse than death" doesn't even begin to describe it.

As Camila dragged the final bin bag containing her childhood with Lauren to join the other piles of trash, the reality of heartbreak had never felt so accurate. She felt used up and spit out, like an abused and abandoned runt that couldn't meet the impossible standards of the life set out for it. How could one recover from a guilt that she could neither comprehend nor be forgiven for? After all, what really was there to really forgive other than loving in the first place?

That is the funniest thing about heartbreak though, even if that love is returned, sometimes fate invites heartbreak's untimely and ill fated presence, like an unwanted guest desecrating the temple of the body and soul. And oh, how Camila wished that she could rid herself of such a tormentor! The tormenting scourge that reawakened her inner demons and set back upon her the curse of anxiety that seemed to echo and echo and echo endlessly the doubts and fears that plagued her vulnerable mind...

Her inner demons that would tear away at her mind from the outside in, shredding any semblance of reason, of confidence, of hope and leaving her stripped bare for ruin. Those very demons that had reawakened in her mind as soon as her very heart began to mourn for Lauren. The ones that were rapidly gaining possession of her senses and of her thoughts, twisting everything to their sadistic liking. Those that turned her against herself and made her feel foreign and alien within her own brain and own body.

Within moments she was painfully collapsed on her knees, screaming and gasping as her hands were plastered over her ears. There were things inside her, attacking her from the inside out and from the outside in until nothing remained but the memory of her desperate cries for help. She tried to focus on breathing, but the oxygen caught in her lungs and the noise of doubt deafened her bleeding ears. Her eyes opened and shut, opened and shut in the hope that each time the shadows had disappeared. Yet even with her eyes squeezed tight, she could feel them - see them.

Fingers and hands, spikes and claws, screams and whispers, hate and fear compiled into a indefinite mass that haunted her mind. Various scenarios and memories were flung about haphazardly into a scrambled mess of confusion. False happenings reconfigured to inflict the most amount of pain and suffering imaginable; to convince the susceptible mind of a conceivable yet false "truth".

All reason escaped her tortured mind as the panic ensued. She felt trapped, boxed in with no escape, the walls gradually squeezing in until there was no room. Tears spilled unabated down her trembling cheeks, shaking from the uncontrollable chattering of her teeth. Her hair was plastered to her face and neck in a pattern-less mess, held by the salty glue that naturally wept from her pores and coated her body like a second skin.

Deep down she knew that she was having a severe anxiety attack.

It had been a long time since Camila had experienced a full-blown panic attack. She had experienced them ever since she was a child, but as soon as she hit 14 years old they had increased so severely that she had been hospitalised for a week under the guise of a family holiday to Hawaii. In that period and at weekly intervals in the years following, she underwent intense therapy to learn to overcome the crippling insecurities that plagued her mind and debilitated her confidence. After years of various psychologists and medicines, she was finally able to live a productive life without the constant threat of irrational and crippling fear.