I didn’t want to die, but that’s not to say I wanted to be alive either. I wanted to go to sleep in a fresh bed untainted by my nightmares and never wake up again. So I slept. Every day of eighth grade I went home and slept until dinner, then went back upstairs and slept again until the angry throb of the alarm clock reminded me that I was required in to participate in reality. In school my eyes were glazed over and I drew my skeleton overrun with wildflowers in a wood. The forest would appreciate my bones more than I did. Sometimes I would ask to go to the bathroom and when I got to the stall I would just sit on the cold tiles willing for them to open underneath my palms and let me fall into the molten core, so that my death and incineration could be blamed on a flaw in the architecture instead of my lack of interest in living. But an hour would go by and the walls did not melt away to reveal the afterlife, and the only thing I achieved with those prayers on the bathroom floor was a D in algebra.

It started at the beginning of middle school. I was eating in wild binge patterns and my weight fluctuated, I was angry all of the time. When I was little I was the happy child, calm and ruled by reason. The change in me saddened my mother, she could only watch as the indigo my father kept at the bottom of a little orange pill bottle carried over to me and stained my world in blues. I didn’t know how to put it into words, the strange shadow that had appeared behind me. My friends cried over boys and laughed at parties but there was a link missing between me and them, I never could get out from under the black cloud over my head long enough to join them. A lot of my anger turned inwards, directed at myself. When I bump into a pole I apologize, when I see cars coming down the street I will turn down a different road and cross once they’re gone so as not to bother them. It is so easy for me to feel worthless when I am shrouded in gray.

My friends tell me i say sorry too much. For little things, like asking for a drink or dropping a book. But I’m not really apologising for those things, really I’m saying I’m sorry that sometimes in the middle of lunch I disappear for unpredictable amounts of time, but the thunder in my head was just too loud. And I’m sorry if sometimes I don’t concentrate on what you’re saying but my hands are shaking and i don’t know why. And I’m sorry that I’ll never really tell you this. Because in my private world of chaos, the one aspect of control I have is what people know. There is so much power in having a secret, a little thrill in knowing that under my clothes there are fading white lines criss crossing my hips like arrows heading into nowhere land. And while you are speaking, under the desk I am pinching my arm until a miniature super nova unfolds just beneath my skin my skin. In my closet there’s a month old pack of cigarettes that no one knows about but for the street sweepers that hum by at night as I blow the smoke out my window screen and imagine letting the embers ignite my bloodstream, turning this lonely indigo in my veins to ash.

But secrets are tiring. Being alone takes it’s toll. At summer camp after freshman year, I finally realized I had to stop bottling it up. I had been at camp for two weeks and had forgotten to bring my own ipod, so I had had to make do with my bunkmates mp3 player, which was 20 skrillex songs in russian, to fall asleep. I was losing it. But a new girl came, and she understood. It was hard for me speak about everything bouncing around in my skull, so we escaped through fictional characters and when we had a bad day she would hand me one earbud and we’d sit shoulder to shoulder with the volume all the way up to drown to pounding in our minds. We didn’t want to be saved, or asked a parade of questions. Sometimes we just needed to grip eachothers fingers to keep our hands from harming, or lie so close that our respective heartbeats served as the lone steady drummers to be heard through the manic rhythms in our heads. I finally realized that telling someone I needed help could actually be a good thing. When I came home I told my mom everything about the past few years. She started looking around to get me help, for someone for me to talk to.
Finally having spoken about the way my life spiraled out of control to my family was an accomplishment, but in no way does that mean I can end this by saying I have washed my hands of it all. I have not. I am still spiraling. I cannot say that it is an old skin I have shed, it is still the tainted flesh I live in. This fall as the nights begin to devour the days, my bones recognize that unquenchable hunger in the darkness; and I am weary of my endless winter.