Who needs hard drugs when unrequited feelings can wreck your nervous system for free?
It's pathetic, really. After everything, I still craved comfort from the exact person who broke me in the first place. I wanted him close, even though he'd very clearly chosen someone else. None of it made logical sense, which is the worst part about feelings—they don't care about common sense or self-respect. They just show up uninvited and ruin your week.
"Do you still like him? Even now?"
Dr. Skyrim's voice echoed in my head—gentle, calm, and annoyingly perceptive, like a surgeon locating an infection I was trying to pretend didn't exist. I could practically see him sitting in the corner of my dark bedroom, those dark, patient eyes waiting for a truth I was far too cowardly to say out loud in his office.
"I don't want to," I whispered to the empty room, my fingers picking at a loose thread on my comforter until my skin felt raw. "But I do."
The confession hung in the dark, heavy and irritatingly undeniable.
I was lying flat on my back, staring blankly at my ceiling fan like it held the answers to my terrible life choices. My thoughts kept circling back to that night—the night I made a decision I couldn't take back. Sure, I'd had a few drinks, but I wasn't nearly drunk enough to claim temporary insanity. Who was I kidding? I knew exactly what I was doing when I started things with him.
I groaned, rolling onto my side and pulling my knees to my chest.
The sheer embarrassment of it all was suffocating. Reaching under my bed, my fingers brushed against the bottle of cheap whiskey I'd stashed there—because apparently, I had officially entered my sad-movie-montage era. I unscrewed the cap and took a sip, grimacing as it burned all the way down.
I knew it wouldn't actually fix anything. Warm whiskey out of the bottle never does. Still, I wanted the ache in my chest to take a five-minute break, even if the relief wore off before the burn faded.
"You're overthinking," Dr. Skyrim's voice chimed in again, smooth and steady in my memory. "Your mind is running in circles, replaying everything, imagining all the what-ifs. You can't keep blaming yourself for someone else's failure to love you the way you deserve."
I took another small swig, wishing I could borrow a fraction of Dr. Skyrim's zen composure—or at least mute his voice in my head while I was busy making questionable choices.
I tried to tell myself I could just move on. That there were plenty of other people out there, and other versions of me that didn't revolve around a guy who had shut me out without a backward glance. Deep down, though, I knew better. You don't just casually bounce back from someone who makes you feel electric for the first time in your life and then abruptly cuts the power.
The ache didn't just disappear because I wanted it to. It lingered in the way I checked my phone every ten minutes for a text I knew wasn't coming. It showed up every time I walked into a room and caught myself scanning the crowd for a silhouette that wasn't there.
It was a ridiculous, exhausting loop where I was somehow both the prisoner and the warden.
I squeezed my eyes shut, and there he was behind my eyelids—the way he used to look at me before the switch flipped. The way his touch made me feel like the center of his universe, right up until the second he pulled the rug out from under me.
Why? The question echoed louder than I wanted it to. Why did he stop? What changed?
I glanced at the whiskey bottle in my hand, decided I was already tragic enough for one night, and screwed the cap back on. Tomorrow, I'd figure out how to pretend I was fine. Tonight, I was just going to stare at the ceiling and hope morning came fast.