semi-automatic | joshler

14. flower heart

Play the song: "Graveyard Whistling" by Nothing But Thieves.

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Tyler promised to visit his childhood house for a weekend to meet his family and to go to an appointment with his therapist almost a month ago and it still didn't happen, so he has to finally show up there today.

Honestly, he doesn't want to. He doesn't know, what is waiting there for him, and he doesn't want to know. That's why he's been procrastinating the visit until today. The more he's delaying, the more anxious he gets, because he can't get the reminder out of his head.

He still goes regularly to monthly therapy sessions even though he doesn't say a word during them. Others would say he didn't quit to show people he cares about it, but it's not true. He does this effort to do everything that's necessary only to be left alone.

His parents made a decision about the therapy when he still was laying in a hospital bed. It has to be done as fast as possible, even though everything had been lost at that point.

He has gone to therapy sessions enough times to finally understand, that anything that happened wasn't his fault and he didn't provoke anybody to do anything, nor deserved it. But when they tell you that something was completely and utterly random, they're also telling you something else; that no matter what you do, it would not matter. It doesn't matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules. Evil will find you anyway.

He would go to support group meetings, too, but he hated them with a passion even before he stopped talking. He never understood, how listening to somebody's bad stories would make him feel better. He is in his own body and in his own mind, and he shouldn't care about others. It isn't even thinking in an egoistic way. Comforting somebody by telling them that other people have worse life is such a terrible thing to do.

Everybody sits in a circle and tells the most drastic events they've witnessed in their life. He doesn't feel safe when he is surrounded by people being as destroyed as he is. The only feeling that floods his chest is danger, anxiety, and everything related to being uncomfortable.

Now, it got even worse. When you don't talk, only listen to everybody else and send them fugitive glances, people slowly start finding you as an enemy and they stop trusting you. Like if you were stealing somebody's pain, but not offering anything in return. They really do look at him as some sort of thief.

He's got to hear about rapes, hate crimes, gunshot wounds, and he got to hear it from people who knew their murderers and the ones that didn't; people whose assailants were punished and the ones' that weren't, at all.

He couldn't even feel sorry, because he felt like he wasn't able to have any good emotion towards others. Even if that wasn't true, he kept reminding himself he didn't have a heart, he didn't deserve anything besides pain, that he was being rude, without heart and without feelings, that his murderer took all of this away from him.

Every week he had to try to find a comfort in eavesdropping somebody's nightmares and stay silent himself, receiving hostile glances from people who had no idea why he was there. But he wanted to yell, shout from the top of his lungs, tell them that they were wrong and his story wasn't any less painful than theirs, and that he paid it the same as everybody else in the room.

He just couldn't. It was too much.

He doesn't need many things from Debby's house, as he has still most of his old clothes back at home. Hopefully his old room still exists, maybe not looking like how he left it the last time. He only borrows some of Debby's make-up products to make the dark circles under his eyes less visible and his face looking more alive-like, so his parents will think things are getting better and they hopefully won't make him come back to his hometown.