Blxck

         You're riding in the passenger's seat of your boyfriend's Cadillac when a song starts radiating through the speakers. Not just through the speakers, radiating through your bones. The chords send you spiraling back to when things were bad. The lyrics force you to feel those feelings again, the ones that you tried so desperately to forget. Feelings of failure, loneliness, and self-loathing. A scream is threatening to break through your gritted teeth, but you swallow it whole, not wanting to reveal your secrets. The song ends. You survived.

         It happened last year, the breakdown. I was in my second year of university when the hole opened. It was a large, enticing black hole and I was a curious, emotional girl. I dove in head first, into the blackness that awaited me. Afterwards, every direction I looked, all I saw was black. Up, black. Down, black. Left, black. Right, black. Except, to me black was now synonymous with          loneliness, emptiness, failure, isolation, self-loathing. The blackness warned me not to reveal it to anyone. They would tell me I was crazy, depressed, anxious, weird. They would want me to get help, help that would take the blackness away. What would I do without the blackness? It was my only constant, my stability, my rock.

         Life becomes monotonous when the world is black. The alarm goes off, you get ready, catch the bus, go to class/work/volunteer, return home, study, dinner, television, sleep, repeat. Every day becomes the same, nothing memorable, nothing to fish you out of the blackness. You begin to not care anymore. Your grades are slipping? Oh well, what are grades good for anyways. You haven't seen your friends in weeks? Who needs friends when you have the blackness. You follow your daily routine because you have to. If you don't, bad things could happen. Things that you don't know about yet and that is terrifying, so you stick to the monotonous, black routine, careful not to stray too far from the path.