In My Head ❌

In My Head-Part 2

A/N: From here on in text messages will be identified by *message*

I was lying in bed lost in my thoughts again when my phone buzzed and the screen lit up. I sighed and looked at the notification expecting it to be from the group chat, however to my surprise it was a personal message from Ant. My heart rate sped up as I read the text while my mind was already starting to panic.

*Stephen I know you were pretending to be asleep, your acting skills aren't quite that good. I don't know why you pretended to be asleep in order to avoid us or why you have been avoiding everyone at work these last few days. However what I do know is that when Dec and I get back we need to talk to you. -A*

My heart was racing now as I began to panic even more realizing that I hadn't fooled him, and even worse I realized that he was probably mad at me now as well. While I was worrying about all this another message came through; this one was from Dec and I had no doubt in my mind that Ant had told him I had been pretending to be asleep. I began to feel even more worried because I know how Dec's temper is, and the fact that I had lied to him by pretending to be asleep was going to more be than enough to make him mad at me and earn myself an angry lecture as well. Ant and Dec are usually very nice people, however you do not want to be on the receiving end of one their angry lectures when you have done something you knew was wrong and shouldn't have done in the first place. After a few more minutes of worrying I somehow finally managed to calm down enough to read the message.

*Stephen don't think your getting out of telling us what's been going on with you lately, you've been acting odd and avoiding everyone these last few days. When Ant and I get back we are all going to talk, so don't pretend to be asleep again because I won't fall for it a second time. -D*

Oh no I thought, what am I going to do now? What can I tell them that will justify my behavior? Not the truth that's for sure, I can't tell them how I feel or about the thoughts I've been having; they would see it as me being dramatic or worse just looking for attention. They were already upset with me for pretending to be asleep in order to avoid them, and I knew that lying to them again would only make matters worse. I felt panic setting in once again as my mind desperately tried to come up with a good story or an excuse to justify my behavior over the last few days before they got back. I didn't think that anyone had noticed my absence over the last few days or how distant I had been, only now did I see how wrong I had been to actually think that no one would notice. I didn't know why it seemed to matter so much to them in the first place, they had more important things to deal with and worry about besides me, it was just me after all. It's not like my problems and feelings were anything special enough for anyone to be concerned with, so why were they so keen to find out what was going on with me?

I began to feel tears in my eyes as I started to get more worried and even a little frustrated by the fact that I couldn't think of anything to tell them, I started to think that maybe they don't really care what is going on with me and they are just looking for something to gossip about with the judges. I felt even worse as my mind came to this conclusion, however I didn't get to worry about all of this much longer as I felt my eyes getting heavier and my tired brain slowing down. I started feeling very sleepy and the panic started to ease as I felt exhaustion overtaking my body and my mind.

I yawned and started to feel even more tired as I tried to remember when the last time I had a proper sleep was. I slept most nights but I usually only slept a few hours at a time if I was lucky, because recently I was often awakened by awful dreams in the night. These dreams always shook me up so badly that I was unable to go back to sleep afterwards. This led to me only getting about two to three hours of sleep every night and some nights the dreams were so bad that I was too afraid to sleep at all. So the past few weeks I had been walking around in a sleep deprived haze made even worse by the awful thoughts that kept buzzing in my head.