You gasped, unable to breathe suddenly.
“Not particularly” flickered through your mind, but you were more preoccupied trying not to curl into a ball and shut out the world. Ah, fuck it, you thought, and excusing yourself from the room, you ran to your room. To your safety. Your asylum.
Bolting into the room, you grabbed your iPod and earphones. Block out other sounds, block out other thoughts. Focus on the music. You can do this.
As your hands scrambled across the cluttered desk, scattering hundreds of paper stars that you had yet to put into your jars and jars of paper stars, tens of paper cranes that flew nowhere besides the ceiling from which you hung them on thin thread, stacks of papers and notes that you had so meticulously organized and taken to help you study for that test, you finally remembered that you weren’t looking for anything. You were already holding your earphones.
Play the music now. See if it’ll help. See if it’ll be able to fight me.
Rushed, you changed out of your dress clothes, tossing everything but your underwear onto the pile of clothes in the corner. I need to fix that, flickered through your mind, It’ll bother me later. But for now, you threw on the soft t-shirt and crawled into bed, pulling the covers above your head. A brief flicker of a room, with cream-colored walls, various posters of various musical groups, origami littering the ceiling, and a desk far too cluttered, passed your eyes before the blackness that was the inside of your blanket took hold.
Empty your mind. Focus on the music.
You listened with focus on the song that played from your earphones, focusing on the lyrics. Think of nothing but the lyrics. Don’t think. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about—
About how lovely the stresses of studying are? About how everything’s going smoothly, and yet we’re still here? Panicking? About how much you’ve missed me, this feeling of tightness, of something’s wrong, of stress and anger and anxiety and frustration and tiredness and envy and—
Block it out. Block it out. Breathe.
Listen to the music. It’s a new song. Listen to the lyrics. Focus on the lyrics.
Slowly, you breathed. Letting out a sigh, you focused on the lyrics. Just as you told yourself you needed to. Slowly, the voice stopped pestering you. Slowly, your anxiety faded. Slowly, you could think again without increasing your heart rate. Slowly, you focused on now, and not on later.
A knock sounded at your door. Peeking your head out, popping an earbud out, you tentatively asked, “Yes?”
The knob turned, the door cracked open. Your best friend’s head peered in.
The door closed. You sighed tiredly.
You couldn’t tell. How do you talk about something like this?
They’d just think you’re blowing things out of proportion.
Shut it, dickwad. I know.