Displacement // Shawn Mendes

Fourteen: The Abyss

They were screaming. He was screaming. I was screaming. They have opened me again. The wounds feel cold and fresh inside me. The words have stuck their razors into my chest, digging and digging but finding nothing.

They forgot to sew me up.

It burns, and then it doesn't, and then there are the ten second increments in which I am at ease.

Then the world tumbles again. I am falling, drifting away from the object of my body. Nothing feels real anymore. Is it supposed to?

My mind is still fuzzy, I can feel it trying to build a wall to protect me from whatever just happened, but I don't want to be protected. I want to go home, but I don't know where that is anymore. I feel so tired.

"Pull over." I hear, but my eyes do not blink, nor does a single muscle in my body flinch.

"What?"

"Shawn, you don't want to die tonight, believe me. You need to pull over." Her voice breaks the wall my brain has been trying to build, and the world begins to feel all too real for me to handle. Even the barely lit, deserted road ahead of me makes me feel as if I am suffocating, unable to gasp for air. I pull over, hoping to feel some kind of release, but the lump in my throat grows larger – I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe.

There is nothing left inside me, I decide. It was all ripped away the second I walked into that house. That empty, godforsaken place I used to call a home. I am filled with so much sorrow that it begins to numb the nerves inside me; dull the sharp edges of the thoughts and feelings that cut me open from inside, ripping me apart to the point where I feel nothing. There was no solace within those bland walls and posed family portraits. Even now, as the black sky ahead of me pours its emptiness into the vehicle, I find myself wishing its comfort could take me with it – swallow me whole until there is nothing left to hear, see, or feel.

I can sense her eyes on me, the only light I have found in the darkness of the abyss. Still, her presence does not feel real, I do not feel real, and neither do the moments of tonight that have begun to play on repeat in my mind. I am wishing for them to go away, and for a brief moment, there is a fragment of hope in which I tell myself things will be alright. I hold onto this for as long as I can, but I am quick to realize that things won't be okay. At least, they never are down here.

I do not know how long we sit in this stillness; maybe hours, maybe minutes. But she says nothing the entire time, and I don't blame her.

"Mine left when I was nine."

The words take a while to process, like my brain is a slow-working filing machine, but I think I can understand what she's talking about. I turn my head slowly to see her facing away from me. Her body is structured into a compact manner, trying to make herself small enough in hopes she'd disappear. I shift in my seat, not entirely understanding why she is telling me this. She always seemed to be building an entire palace around her, almost as if it would give her the shelter she needed to survive the cruel and unforgiving blizzard we saw as the world. She is grabbing the scars that cut into me not too long ago, and is rewriting the pain on scars she thought she'd never have to open again.

I don't say anything.

"It was a note on my nightstand. He thought I wasn't awake." She looks at the road ahead of us blankly as she feels the quietness that surrounds us like an ocean. Her eyes water as she chews on the side of her cheek, and I know she still resents him for what he did. "I was awake. Long enough to see him walk out of my bedroom door with a suitcase."

She turns to look at her fingernails that are poorly painted, chipped and scratched. What did the note say? I want to ask her, but cannot will my mouth to form the words I want to speak. My head leans on the steering wheel, and I watch her with weary eyes as she rejects the stubborn tears that prick the corners of hers.

"It was a long letter," she paused, an attempt at what I assume was to fight back her tears, then said, "To make a long story short, it basically said he loved mom and me so much, that leaving was what was best for him. Can you believe that?" She laughs bitterly. "Who says that to a fucking nine-year-old?"

"He sounds like a dick." Is all I can say. She laughs bitterly, scraping what's left of the blue polish off her nails.

"I don't really care, anyway." Without turning to see her, without being fully attentive , I know it's a lie. Of course she cares. She loves him without even trying, even though it's the last thing she's ever wanted to do. She has to love him.

I love him, too. With every closed fist and open hand that has stricken against my flesh and the surface of my heart, he is the hot road trips to Arizona, the candy from the store my mother never bought me, he is the man that told me he loved me every morning and every night of my young life. There is no way I cannot love him for that.

But he is also the broken bottles on restroom floors, the holes torn into our bedroom doors, the man whose words feel like salt on an open wound, and whose hands feel like barbed wire against your skin.

I love him without even trying. I love him because it is an old habit I've become accustomed to, and as much as my own hands claw at my throat to rip his name out of my heart, I love him with all the hatred inside of my body. He does not deserve my love. He deserves nothing from me.

Yet, I have given him everything.

I have been falling for so long, endlessly and infinitely, trying to find solace in my thoughts, but finding none. I am drowning and no one is saving me, simply watching as I extend a tired hand out of the water. I need to stop swimming. I need to stop falling.

I need to drive.