Ari's Life Chapter:2

 

                                                                     Chapter 2: Hurting inside 

Life after the hospital wasn't freedom. It was just a different kind of prison�"one without nurses checking in or sterile white walls, but still cold, still suffocating. The moment I stepped back into the apartment, everything felt smaller, darker, louder. The same chipped tiles, the same fading wallpaper, the same hallway that held too many arguments, too many slammed doors. Nothing had changed except me�"and even that didn’t feel like a good thing. I wasn’t healed. I was just... returned. Reinserted into the same nightmare with fewer tools and more scars.

Days blur together. Mornings come with the weight of another fight to pretend I’m okay, even though nothing inside me feels alive. I’m homeschooled now, but that just means more hours alone with my thoughts and the endless hum of the city outside my window. The building shakes when trains pass, and sometimes, I imagine the walls crumbling down and swallowing me whole. Maybe that would feel better than this. Better than the silence, better than the panic attacks that come out of nowhere, better than the empty stares from my grandparents who don’t really know how to reach me�"or maybe never wanted to.

I spend hours in front of the mirror some days. Not doing makeup. Not fixing my hair. Just staring. Picking myself apart piece by piece. My eyes look dull, my skin too pale, my body wrong in ways I can’t even explain. I whisper cruel things to my reflection like it's someone else. I hate the way I look. I hate the way I feel. I hate that I even exist like this. And then I scroll. Through flawless girls, loud laughter, soft smiles, families that take real photos together. I get swallowed in jealousy so thick it feels like drowning. Why do they get joy? Why do I get this? Why do I feel like I'm rotting from the inside out?

Everyone else moved on. My siblings, they have lives, space, freedom. I was left here like an afterthought. A leftover. I try to write, to escape into notebooks, but even my words feel empty now. I try to find who I am, but all I find is this numb shell, walking through a haunted apartment with memories pressing against my ribs. I don’t know who I am without the sadness. I don’t know who I am without the fear. I just know I’m tired�"of pretending, of comparing, of being trapped in a body and a life I never asked for.

And yet, I keep waking up. Maybe out of habit. Maybe out of spite. Maybe because some part of me�"some microscopic, fragile part�"still hopes that someday, I’ll look in the mirror and not flinch. That someday I’ll find the version of me that doesn’t want to disappear.

Author's Note

:/