Progress.
By the time a week had passed, something inside me had twisted into something sharp and ugly.
I told myself I was mad at him.
But I wasn’t.
I was mad at myself.
At the way I’d looked at him.
At the way my body had just — decided, without asking me first.
I didn’t have the words for it yet.
I just knew it hurt.
And I was so tired of feeling it.
My parents asked about him again at the end of that week.
And this time —
I snapped.
“He doesn’t have to come over every night, okay? So stop asking. We’re fine. He’s just busy.”
The words came out harsher than I meant them to.
I didn’t wait for their reaction. Just turned and went straight to my room, slamming the door behind me.
• • •
And then it hit.
The real one.
Not the low hum I’d been managing all week.
This was different — the walls of my room contracting, the air going thin and wrong, my chest locking up like something had reached in and squeezed. I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed because my legs just — stopped cooperating.
I knew the shape of these by now.
Knew they ended.
Knowing doesn’t exactly help in the moment.
I pressed my back hard against the mattress and stared at a fixed point on the wall — the nail where one of the band posters used to hang before I tore it down — and just breathed.
In. Out. Slow. The way I’d taught myself.
It took a while.
Long enough that the light in the room changed.
Long enough that I heard my mom moving around in the kitchen, the familiar sounds of dinner starting, and felt something loosen slightly in my chest.
She didn’t know I was up here falling apart.
