Head Case

The voices are back, playing in my head again. I blame the impending breakup for their reaccurence, but maybe the voices caused the breakup.

I might as well be laying on the table getting my test done, I can hear them so loud. I might as well be bleeding through the sheets, staring at the ceiling and crying still, like I was last June. Months pass but nothing heals. There is still a festering scar left.

"Mattye, please don't do this to me."

"Really, I'm kind've glad, that we had some last, good memories together."

"Well I'm so glad I could make you feel better at my expense, again!"

"Please. I can't come back from this alone."

I hear Hannah crying in her bed like the world was ending, the night they checked her in. Overlaid I see, just like I did that night, what I never had to really see, never had to take responsibility for, Mattye's collapse. At least not once I got in. I hear Mattye, fetal and childlike, reduced to the brainless nothing that Hannah always was.

I was such a coward I couldn't even take that. I went up to the nurse's station for a sleeping pill. It was a long time before I could take the sound of someone else crying. When we went to the gym, I flinched away from the sounds the ball made, the echo. I didn't know then how horrid music had become, but there was plenty of time for that.

I kept my room orderly, books behind the curtain where the camera couldn't see them, bed made and clothes folded on the shelves. My journals, which I had no pencils for, lay stacked to the left of my bed. Only when I knew that my room was perfect would the voices stop. Her face was still there, but her voice, and her body, were not.

When my room wasn't clean, I saw her curled against my tub, bruises rising on her arms. I saw her face... I knew the cruel severity of what I had done, and there was no greater pain. I could not, and most people cannot understand the depths of pain she can feel, has felt. I came to learn a lot about human pain that night.

On the drive out to Hickory, I blinked it away from my eyes. I was shreds, pieces belonging to her still, pieces that wanted to go back, pieces that wanted to go home, to die, to be safe, to go to the hospital. I went to protect her from me, I went to protect me from her, I went to protect me from me. I wish I could've protected her from her too.

I wrote letters, addressed to Kaitlyn, but really to Mattye, who's name I refused to think, about why I went, about what I had done, about what it meant. About who I was. Her face, in my mind, believed nothing. I wouldn't let it. It would kill me if head-Mattye took me back, while my Mattye did not.

It was she who had told me what to say, what kind of questions they would ask, about the STD test and the blood drawn and the endless, endless questionaires about sex and drugs and emotions and all the good things we couldn't have in there.

Do I want to kill anyone? No (I already did, or close enough) Did I want to kill myself? Maybe (which part of me?) What drugs have I ever used? None, I've puffed a cigarette. (Maybe we would've been okay, if I had given in and used the same drugs as her?) Have I ever slept with a man? No Have I ever slept with a woman? Yes (Oh, yes. Yes I have, thanks for bringing it up.)

Jessica had come the day I did, drugged out of her head, angry eyed, but tearful. I didn't know you could be both until I saw her. I wondered if I looked like her... surrounded by all those youth with all those problems, but completely alone in my head, with my sick barely-ex girlfriend screaming and sobbing at me from within my skull.