Page 78 of Before You Fell

Willow

Ihave been at my parent’s house for three weeks now.

Three weeks in my old bedroom, surrounded by every version of myself I thought I had outgrown.

There’s a little dent in the skirting board from when Phoenix dared me to throw a hairbrush at his head and ducked too late. The faded band posters I was too sentimental to take down and the chipped white desk where I wrote my first real song. The stupid glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to the ceiling because thirteen-year-old me thought wanting the sky closer made me deep.

And the photos.

Jesus Christ. The amount of photos of Phoenix and me shoved onto the side of my mirror, tucked under the frame, curling at the edges from years of heat and dust. There is one of Phoenix at thirteen, his arm slung around my neck, grinning as if the world had not touched us yet. Phoenix at sixteen, flipping off the camera while I laughed beside him. The photo Mom took of us under the tree in our backyard, where Phoenix has his guitar across his lap and my notebook open between us. Both of us looked so young and so hopeful. We had no idea life was already sharpening its knife.

I know I should take them down and throw them away but I don’t. I just stop looking directly at them.

Three weeks is long enough for my clothes to end up back in drawers that still smell faintly of Mom’s detergent. Long enough for the room to seem less like a place I ran to and more like a place I was sent back to because I fucked up adulthood too badly to keep pretending.

Long enough for Mom to stop pretending she is not listening outside my door when I go quiet.

Dad starts carrying anger through the house, too. He carries it in his shoulders, in the hard set of his jaw, and in the way he grips his coffee mug as if it might be Phoenix’s throat if the universe had any sense of justice.

It’s not loud anger. Graham Hart doesn’t need to shout to make a room seem smaller. He can do it with a single look.

Sometimes Dad looks at me as if I am something precious and cracked. Something he wants to put back together with his bare hands. But one wrong touch might split me open for good if he isn’t careful enough.

While Mom just watches me differently. She notices the food I push around my plate, the tea I forget about until it goes cold, and the way I flinch when my phone lights up.

Her worry is softer than Dad’s but somehow worse.

They both watch me as if I have come home with bruises beneath my skin.

I tell them both that I’m fine.

I say it in the morning when Mom knocks on my door to ask if I slept.

At lunch, it comes out before Dad can say anything about finding me at the kitchen table with my notebook open and not a single damn word written on the page.

By night, when the house goes quiet and their worry starts pressing through the walls, I say it to myself as well.

I’m fine. I’m fucking fine.

The words lose shape over time. They stop meaning okay and start meaning please stop looking at me. The truth is, I am awake most nights until my body feels thin and scraped out.

I can get through the first few hours of the day if I take a pill before breakfast and smile when Mom sets toast in front of me.

By afternoon, my skin feels too tight, my thoughts too loud, and my chest too full of all the shit I refuse to face.

So I take another. Not because I’m out of control. Not because I need them. I just need the edge gone. The rawness dulled. The memory of Phoenix, his mouth swollen from mine and his hands on someone else, cut down to something I can breathe through.

I need to stop hearing him say we should get back out there, as if I had taken a wrong turn on the way to something better.

Mostly, I just need to stop remembering.

That’s all it is.

A pill in the morning so I can sit at the table without shaking. Another in the afternoon so I can answer Mom without snapping. One at night so the room stops spinning with every version of my life I no longer have.

It becomes an ugly, silent routine.

Wake up. Swallow. Lie. Survive.