blackheart ➵ m. clifford

➵ one

➵ jett

"It was the day after I 'met' Michael, that I had my very first anxiety attack. My memory wasn't very fond of that morning, and nor was my stomach. My heart had thundered in my chest and bile had risen to my throat, the taste lingering on my tongue and the frigid air biting at my skin until my brain became scattered and I passed out in my own vomit. I had been so positive that I was going to die, and I hadn't stopped crying until my foster mum rushed me to the hospital in nothing but one of my brother's jumpers and my underwear, my tears burning my cheeks raw.

It was that very same day that I decided that Michael hadn't been real. He was a figment of my imagination, a tendril of my every fantasy, a hallucination so non-fictitious that I thought I could feel him on my skin. He was just a desperate contemplation that danced on the back of my brain.

And for three months, I had been falling for my own thoughts.

My surroundings were like they always had been; a scarcely-lit basement bedroom that had walls plastered with posters, and a floor that was barely a floor, littered with paper and empty takeaway containers that smelled of onions and mustard. My foster parent couldn't find it in her heart to force me to bin the unintelligible scribbles of words that probably didn't exist yet, or the foul-smelling styrofoam that made her feel queasy every time she stepped foot in the basement. I kept them, though, because I preferred the company of my thoughts to Amy the Foster Mum, and the smell made it a rarity that she would venture into the depths of the basement.

I liked to see Michael, too, and it was only when I was alone and sober that he would appear behind my eyelids. His dark brown - almost black - hair would be swept down into a fringe, and he would be wearing the same Misfits jumper he'd worn on that first night in July. His skinny jeans would be too tight for him to sit cross-legged, and I would force him to kick off his boots before he tracked mud onto the floor that wasn't a floor. We would fall asleep cuddled within mountains of dead lyrics and half-finished poems, with our legs tangled and our arms wrapped around each other.

Michael stopped coming, too.

After my first anxious breakdown, the doctors simply assumed there was something wrong, and I had a MRI scan to look at all the pretty colours on my brain. According to my file, there was a chemical imbalance somewhere in there, and that was when I made another friend, the friend that stopped me from seeing Michael. Her name was Zyprexa, and we met every morning before breakfast, and she would fix my brain and make me normal again.

No matter how much I wanted to see Michael again, it was impossible. He wasn't allowed in my room anymore, he wasn't allowed to lie on my bed and wait for me to get home from school. And I missed it, I missed Michael.

"Jay, sweetheart." Amy's voice jerked me from my thoughts, and my eyes drifted up from my soggy Cornflakes to the pretty brunette who sat on the opposite side of the table. "Your train leaves in forty-five minutes." She looked up at the clock, and I childishly followed her gaze.

I didn't feel seventeen anymore.

Eleven, maybe, but seventeen, no.

With a nod, I scooped the rest of my breakfast into my mouth and rinsed the bowl, moving down the terribly cold concrete steps and through the old, wooden sliding door that lead through to my bedroom. It did smell bad, maybe a little too bad, and I sighed, vowing to clean it when I got back from my weekly rendezvous with Dr. Vega.

Dr. Vega was an intelligent man, with tanned skin and thick, black eyebrows that I had sometimes daydreamed of plucking for him, and a too-big button down that made him look far scrawnier than he actually was. He was nice, he always complimented something I was wearing, or tried to talk about my friends - or lack thereof. Dr. Vega didn't mean to, but with his tone hushed and his eyebrows raised, he treated me just the same as everyone else. Like an eleven year old in the body of a seventeen year old.