Work Text:
There wasn’t really a singular moment in which David realized that he wanted to die.
It was a gradual transition. Like a fish in a pot of slowly boiling water, not realizing that the heat was rising before it was too late. No, it started with simple carelessness. Not looking both ways before crossing the street. Walking late at night alone without bringing a phone. Deciding that skipping a meal or three was more worth it than getting up.
At first it felt almost like a joke he told himself. A private rebellion. Standing at the curb and thinking, If something happened, it wouldn’t be my fault.
Letting the thought brush past him, light as dust, and then continuing on. He didn’t want to die. He was certain of that. He just didn’t feel particularly invested in preventing it if it were to occur.
Cambridge. What a fucking place. Stone and air and expectation. People spoke quickly, thought faster. David loved it for about three weeks. Long enough to realize his mind could keep up. More than keep up, actually, and long enough for that realization to become a trap.
Everyone noticed how “clever” he was. Teachers leaned forward when he spoke. Other students repeated his ideas back to him later, dressed in their own words. Praise followed him down corridors and into seminar rooms. Brilliant. Exceptional. A mind like yours.
No one ever asked him how it felt to live inside it.
His thoughts never slowed. They stacked and tangled, sparks jumping from one to the next. At night, when the world finally went quiet, his brain only got louder. Ideas bloomed and rotted and reformed in rapid succession. Sleep felt like something meant for other people. Hunger, too. His body became an afterthought, only something to carry his head from place to place. When he did sleep, it was shallow and restless. When he woke, his chest already ached with the effort of breathing.
The pills came into his life without any ceremony. Someone offered during a late night of studying, the way you might offer a cup of tea. Helps you focus, they said. Another, later, to help him come down. Helps you sleep. David liked how ordinary it felt. It was all rather clinical.
The first time his mind went quiet, he almost cried with relief.
It wasn’t euphoria he chased after that. It was the silence. A dimming of the constant burn behind his eyes. For a little while, the fire became manageable. Thoughts lined up instead of colliding. His body stopped trembling. He could breathe without feeling like his lungs were lagging and three beats behind his brain.
So he took another.
And then another. On a different night, for a different reason.
He told himself he was being careful. He told himself he was smart enough to know where the line was. David had always been good at convincing himself of things. It was one of his better skills. The thoughts changed gradually, softening around the edges before they sharpened.
I can’t keep up like this forever.
He stopped caring without really noticing when. He stepped into risks with the same detachment he brought to everything else. Sometimes he imagined absence the way people imagined sleep. Quiet. A place where nothing was required of him.
His work stayed brilliant for a little while. That was the cruelest part. On paper, he was initially thriving. In person, he learned how to perform. A laugh here. A shrug there. He knew exactly how much truth he could show without alarming anyone.
There were nights he lay on his narrow bed, heart racing for no clear reason, skin buzzing as though electricity lived under it now. His brain felt too big for his skull. Thoughts burned instead of sparked. Everything hurt.
Maybe that was when the thought first appeared, small and terrifying in its clarity: I need help.
It didn’t feel like failure at first. It felt… reasonable. If he really thought about it. Insomnia. Shaking hands. Gaps in his memory. The way he’d started to plan his days around substances without admitting that was what he was doing. Getting help was probably the right thing to do, in theory.
And, well.
...He tried. No one could say that he didn't try.
He opened emails and stared at the blank space where the words should go. He typed sentences that sounded dramatic and deleted them. Typed ones that sounded too mild and deleted those too. Everything felt wrong. Everything felt like a lie.
When he called home, he kept his voice even. He mentioned coursework. He hovered on the edge of honesty and then stepped back every time. He could almost hear the confusion on the other end when the conversation ended too soon. Or worse, when it ended in shouting.
Afterward, he sat with the phone in his hand and wondered how you were supposed to say I’m afraid of my own mind without sounding fucking ridiculous.
The pills stopped working the way they used to. They dulled less. They demanded more. David noticed the shift and filed it away under the “later” folder. He always was fantastic at postponing things that frightened him.
He tried again. A teacher who praised his work and suggested he take better care of himself, as though that were a choice he’d simply forgotten to make. Everything still hurt. He couldn’t switch himself off, and he couldn’t escape himself either.
There is a particular cruelty in being intelligent enough to understand exactly what is happening to you and still being powerless to stop it. David watched himself unravel. He knew the terms for what he was experiencing. He could map the trajectory, but his knowledge didn’t save him. It only made him feel complicit.
He thought of stars sometimes, late at night. How they burned and burned, how the pressure built until even light collapsed in on itself. Everyone loved the brightness. No one talked about the heat.
Someone please fucking help me.
Each time, more desperate. Each time, he was always met with dismissal. By the time he understood, really understood, that no one would come to his rescue, something inside him went very still. Something clicked into place and from then on he could only hear static. Or maybe he just stopped paying attention to anything else.
The garden was quiet. The shed door closed behind him. He wasn't really sure when he got there, or how. He barely felt the weight of the rope clutched in his hand.
And for the first time in a long while, the fire went out.
He felt guilty, for a moment, right before. He really had wanted to spend his twenty-second birthday with his mother.
She’d have to celebrate without him.