girls bathroom // lance

You haven't stopped crying since the day you got here.

Heartbroken, wide eyed, you'd found yourself wailing the moment you understood where you were going and what you were going to have to do. Fear had so easily ignited itself, heart fluttering and gasping for air- it was as if invisible claws, monstrous and atheryl had snaked themselves beneath your skin and where crushing you from the inside out. Head cracking, blood seeping, choked and gurgling screaming- these images fill your waking days.

You yearn for peace of a mind so empty and void you might as well be dead and so you mourn the life you can feel the memories of leaking away, slipping through the cracks to be never remembered again. You yearn for quiet, the world here is too loud and overwhelming and even the walls scream at you- you cannot even find solace from the window, lights of all the colours you know the name of fill the window of your room. So bright that it makes you feel sick.

And so when the man named Teddy, a monster with soft heart and kind words, tells you it's time to go downstairs. You oblige but only because the look on his face on that first day when you scream and cry and beg him to let you go home instead breaks his words as he tries to tell you he can't makes you sad too. You always want people to be happy and you hope that you going downstairs will make him smile.

It does not.

You do not keep your promise to learn from the men and woman there and you seek shelter in the empty bathroom. And that is where you hide, tucked away against the glittering tiles in the furthest stall, curled in on yourself as your heart thuds in your chest and you clammy skin sticks to your skin. Even here is so blinding, so bright, that your heard spins as your wails echo off the walls, a heart broken song broken by stuttering breaths, deep inhales for air, drowning in the sorrow that fills your mind and weaves the song of your cries.

So absorbed in your darkening world, trying to shut out the real one around you, you do not hear the door to the bathroom opening.