.•°¤* ꜱᴛᴏᴘ ᴀᴄᴛɪɴɢ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴀᴛ *¤°•.

~8~

After that encounter with the fox, I shut down. It was too real. It felt too much like the night when I was 15; young and naive and curious, and oh, so stupid for dumping that magazine in the bin a week before the garbage truck came to the neighborhood. The fear, the panic, the absolute readiness to feel the wrath of homophobia, misunderstanding and ignorance, all in less than a minute. It all came back to me in such a way that felt like a tsunami specially made for me to experience and me alone.

I allowed myself to sleep way past noon when I went back to bed, snow still speckled in my hair and dampening my clothes. Once I rose that evening, I ignored the tweets and messages from Dream that flooded my phone screen and turned off the device. I didn’t go to my kitchen to bite into another slice of bread or fill Cat’s food bowl, I just sat on my bed. The light outside my window was enough to illuminate my otherwise dark room and made everything seem blander than usual.

The walls looked paler, my bedsheets were all the same shade, the carpeted floor seemed tamer, and any decoration that I had in my room became a lot less significant. There was a particular blue hue to the room that contrasted with the white from the snow outside. It was as if the weather in comparison to my house was taunting me and my feelings. It encouraged me not to do much of anything and I listened without hesitation. 

Even after my phone was done charging, after I refilled Cat’s food bowl, after I showered, after I did everything in between my daily routine, I still felt the dawning pit in my stomach. It became so easy to ignore feelings and situations over years of not being able to escape them. I was frightened about the fact that nothing I did deterred the thoughts and feelings flooding my mind. I felt so disconnected with myself but not any less isolated from the rest of the world. I was a caterpillar stuck in a cocoon filled with microscopic needles. 

A day passed and I felt just as hollow, if not more than previously. I did not dream, nor did I have a nightmare, my mind was empty while I slept to leave me overfilled with emotions when I woke. It was like my own brain had had enough of the abstract dreams that I rarely remembered and forced itself to shut down with my body at night. Going through my routine, I continuously rubbed my temples and moved slowly out of frustration and fatigue. 

I didn’t want to check my phone or any of the twitter notifications I was receiving. I thought it would overwhelm me too much if I even so much as turned on my phone, so I didn’t. Instead, I went to check my channel, which had boosted largely over the span of a day and a half. I was gaining a multitude of subscribers and the video with Dream had well over half a million views. Seeing the numbers was definitely enough to make my mind go completely blank, but that luxurient feeling didn’t last long.

If people like this content so much, that probably means I’ll be forced to keep making videos with Dream. I guess it’s not a bad thing. It’s good for the both of us, channel wise. And it was always an aspiration of mine to become youtube famous, but this route wasn’t what I expected to get me there. It is ultimately my decision to continue recording with Dream, but at the same time what if we do actually keep making content together? What does that mean for.. our friendship? What does that mean for our channels? Either way, I don’t think there’s a way around it.

There was, in fact, a way around it. I could ignore Dream and shut myself out from the rest of the world, but I had already done that for well over 3 years now. I hadn’t really grasped the fact that Dream was the first person in a long while to really get to know me, even if all I gave him was blunt information, it was still such a huge change. I only had this epiphany when I found myself yearning for his presence on the third day of my depressive state.

I had woken up almost at noon and got to work on a new plugin when I felt the need to talk to someone or for another presence other than my cat to be with me. It didn’t help that when I shook off that particular feeling to eat something, the absence of Dream playfully asking me out to lunch made me feel heavier on my feet. And when I gave up on eating to work on his commission, it only reminded me of him even more and the fact that my heart was betraying my mind.