"and I love you like a penny loves the pocket of a priest" pt. 2

Instructions

— read pt. 1 first: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1299913420/ — James thinks it’s almost funny how they’d practically switched personalities in terms of bad days, since they’d first met. He remembers back when his feelings were like wounds, open and running, spilling blood and heartbeat and bursting out of him like a broken dam. He remembers when it felt like everything he did felt charged with emotion and every moment made him feel. He remembers when his heart could govern his life. Now, the memories are still clear, but he watches like a survivor watching a documentary on the Titanic. He cannot remember what it felt like, cannot put himself into those shoes once more, but as he watches himself, there is a grim sort of anticipation that fills him, because he knows it’s only a matter of time till the ship inevitably sinks. She was much more closed off than he was—to be fair, she still is. Just like back then, her emotions are carefully selected before display and every word is intentional. But now, her control slips when she’s affected, Before, she was able to swallow her feelings, maintain the facade and separate mind and heart. Now, she is consumed by strong emotions. Her bad days are no longer contained—everything spills out of the cracks she has given up on trying to seal, because she never learned to regulate sustainably, and now she’s out of fuel and ill-prepared on how to react. He volunteers as her punching bag, takes the hits—physical and verbal—because he does care for her and because it feeds the parasite inside that thrives on usefulness, on validation, on serving. It’s a win-win situation, really: he gets to be useful, she gets an outlet, and both of them get to feel something, even if it’s pain. His bad days are different. They are few and far between, but they consume him when they do happen. He finds they manifest not in episodes of violence and uncontrollable emotion, but in lethargic despair that makes every noise a headache, every interaction darker, and every move impossibly difficult. He spends days drifting in and out of sleep—oddly ironic, considering how long he had struggled with insomnia prior—because the calm and noiseless void is easier to deal with than his reality. Everything seems bleaker in these moments—he gets trapped in reflection, in memory, in what-ifs and wishes that he knows will never become reality, and he finds himself shutting down. It’s even more difficult to feel, perhaps because every reaction is much slower and he can’t bring himself to care about pain on any level. His world feels pointless; even emotions require too much effort to summon, and he dreams more than once of the reprieve an endless sleep would bring him. In the rare moments he’s awake, he thinks. It’s irritating, because he can’t focus. Topics drift in and out of his mind, he feels cluttered and yet hazy because he can never fully grasp a thought before it fades away, and everything starts feeling repetitive. Perhaps most tragic, he can’t even read because his mind finds it too much work to process the words. So he goes back to sleep, sinking into the fog once more before the real world can sink its teeth back in his mind. She leaves him alone during this, because he asks her to. She understands more than anyone the value of solitude, of waiting, of not being able to deal with another person. Instead, he finds small plates and snacks by his bed when he wakes, a meal in the fridge that he’ll only be able to stomach a few bites of before it tastes and feels like sawdust. He only eats enough to count as a portion, but he finds the gesture thoughtful. Their relationship is symbiotic, in that way. They feed off each other, but at the same time feed each other. It is an odd, surely unhealthy, but nevertheless somewhat functioning system that neither wishes to leave because it’s easier to just let things be as they are. In the later stages, when he’s still exhausted, still feeling nothing, but clear-minded enough to at least attempt to function, he’s more clingy. It’s nothing big, just moving closer when he needs to whisper, instinctively leaning on her when she’s nearby, using her as a pillow out of boredom, things that he’s done before, but it’s more frequent. She forms a hypothesis about the reason behind this shift one day. —cont. below—