Ponyboy with suicide ideation/passive suicide and an iffy relationship with food, especially post Johnny and Dallys deaths, is so important to me but idk maybe I’m just projecting
Like it’s canon that depression is something Pony struggles with after everything happens, and if I’m not wrong, it’s mentioned that he just didn’t eat much after either (in the book it’s like the “everything tasted like baloney” scene and in the musical it’s Darry being like “Ponyboy please you gotta eat something”)
And like idk it’s just so interesting to see that written in a book from the 60s—not to say that books in the 60s didn’t feature characters with mental health issues, but it definitely wasn’t talked about or normalized as much as it is today.
But with Pony, I feel like he gets those days where everything is just like. Gone. Yk? Idk how to explain it, but I had one of those moments a few weeks ago. One night, I was on my way to my cousins birthday dinner, perfectly fine, and then on the way there, I suddenly got hit with this like CRAZY depression, and it was like that for like 2 days after. I didn’t go to school, didn’t talk to anyone unless I had to, didn’t eat, didn’t even get out of bed to go to the bathroom. The only time I ever got up that day was after staring at my ceiling from 10 AM - 1 PM, when I remembered that I had to text my friend that I wasn’t going to rehearsal. I literally had to FORCE myself out of bed, after like an extra half hour of telling myself to move.
Anyways, back to Pony. Yea I feel like he gets like that every so often, where he just kinda goes motionless and the thought of eating makes him want to throw up. And when he gets like that, he couldn’t care less if he died. He’d never kill himself, but post book, at least for a while, he doesn’t look both ways when he crosses the street. He thinks about taking one too many aspirins. He secretly hopes that his head gets kicked in a little too hard at a rumble. It’s not something he’ll ever act on, but it’s something he thinks about. A lot.
It worries Soda and Darry when they come home to see him just kind of floating, if that makes sense. It scares them when they see the empty bottles of Aspirin that Darry swore he hid, the full plates of day old food gone cold by Pony’s bedside. When they try to talk to him and he just stares past them with glassy, gray eyes. Again, idk how to explain the feeling so sorry if this is confusing lol, but it’s as if ur lying on ur couch and you feel like you’re just sinking into it.
But then, randomly, one day he’ll wake up and it’s as if nothing even happened. He just wakes up as normal regular Ponyboy. He eats breakfast, he packs his backpack, he goes to school and track practice. He acknowledges the fact that, just last night, he wanted nothing more than to be six feet under, but he just kinda goes on with his life until it happens again. Until it gets bad again. He knows that it will.
Maybe that’s what scares Soda and Darry the most.
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