I kissed Pete fucking Wentz, and my mind is hell-bent on making sure I am cognizant of that, igniting every crisp document of prudence with a black fire screaming inside me.

But what my mind doesn't know is that with something like this, you can suppress it. Whatever. You can shove it deeper into the closet, as if you haven't been doing it for years already, and you can allow yourself to forget.

But you never do, so you keep coming back and find the coffin you buried, the coffin that isn't able to be opened anymore, but you nevertheless retain the persistent urge to know what's been hiding inside, so your fingers crack from your effort to pry the lid off, and in the unlikely event that you actually succeed, it's as empty as the void in your soul.

So basically, we're all screwed in one way or another. The people who remember are haunted, while the people who forget are constantly itching for more.

I've understood that method forever, yet I'm still confined within my arms to a bathroom stall whose lighting plays peek-a-boo intermittently and dangles mania in front of me like a string to a cat, and therefore my anxiety is everlasting.

My hydrogen peroxide isn't capable of being stored inside my pockets, and my obsessions are as dynamic as ever, so a damp paper towel will have to suffice. It's not the real product, though, so my vision is attracted to everything else in the room while it rots.

Subdued voices nurse the patrons' ears, some opting for a slurred pedagogy, some consummately sober, all far too shrill for my fondness, but it's similar to engaging in a conversation — at least for me, because psychologists claim my conversations are often unrequited.

Shoes waddle in a muffled exhalation, circling the room so that they're invariably visible below the plastic walls as they complete the task they entered this place to do, somehow mocking me for lingering in here with tears mauling the floor in prolonged intervals of five seconds.

And it becomes a game I play as I wait for my emotions to be flushed out in the form of deoxyribonucleic saltwater, wide eyes chasing the pellets of my own production as they languish in the smooth tile and mimic my prior death.

Unlike me, however, they behave with indomitable grace, plunging their arms into elegant twirls and bows, and they transform death into a work of theater. They make dying look beautiful, even when it is not, and it converts suicide to my taste, dipping me over the edge of a cliff with a smile kindling my lips, because it's my desire transfused in someone else's actions, and I'm finally earning my wish.

Death is a perplexing concept, and though I jokingly shame Gerard for feeling the same thing, the captivation often sojourns in me, too. Every time my eyelids eclipse my curious pupils, visions of graves and falcons and awe sashay through my trail, but they never fracture my bones, never paint my shadow with blood.

Rather, they transport layers of crystal streams to my aching figure and soothe my brittle heart with tender fingers contrived from silhouettes just as fearful as I am, and they cherish the fact that I'm fucking alive, because like me, they are bloody, bruised, and broken by the voice in my head that orders flames to lick their flesh until they're as dry as skin washed in hydrogen peroxide, and they have battled by my side since their birth out of fallen leaves — a birth that sentenced the visions to death but didn't, for they were cunning enough to diagnose the sound of swords being unsheathed and ran for their fucking lives.

But alas — where have they gone now that my tears represent the leaves from which they sprang? Perhaps once they saw the DNA soaring from my eyes, they decided it was time for them to do the same, so they split away in a lurid fragment and obliterated their own leaves. Now when I close my eyes, all I see is a sneer and a vacant road, and it's like befriending the kind of death that's disagreeable to the optimists.

Because of the visions' unwillingness to stay with me, I'm still isolated in a bathroom stall for many minutes after I last acknowledged my location, and the tears continue to evacuate with a perpetual intensity that I can't seem to govern.

That brings me to my next point, noting upon the fact that governing tears is trivial when you have death on your side. The feat is that I've learned there is a way to present suicide as charming: make sure no one sees it happen. You'll be safe then, buried in an enigma once the tears have been annihilated, and it's ensuring someone will care for a little bit. It's ensuring they'll glorify you, praising even your flaws when they were the things that got you killed in the first place. It's ensuring they'll glamorize the decease of teenagers, while simultaneously oppressing those who were just like them, as if they need more funerals on their schedule. It's ensuring they'll curse your grave for occupying space that could've been utilized for their beloved war veterans that probably died from typical heart disease. It's ensuring they'll hate you deep down, with the worst part being that they won't even confess to it. It's ensuring that you're better off in the ground.

Informing Dr. Saporta that I don't experience suicidal thoughts is becoming more of a strain to my fidelity, but it's necessary, and even though that's exactly what he calls my compulsions in relation to myself, it's nevertheless viable.

It's not like I'd physically mangle a gun until it's centered around my temple, because the people from school would be required to attend my dreary funeral teeming with the citizens of Newark that frankly don't care and just want to watch a football game, and my death should symbolize more to them than an obstruction, because this is the one and only final passing, the passing that prevails outside of my thoughts, and my chaotic world has been silenced for it.

And then the last tear before I run dry slips from my parted eyelashes and cascades to the floor, where its ankles contort and beckon death to its beauty, proving that it's not so armored as the world expected, and for once, I'm disappointed because of that.

The tear's silk dress is tattered and riddled with holes, whose texture is that of the stars, and the being trips dishonorably on the mess in an attempt to pirouette one last time. Blood digs a trench in its pallid face, illuminating entirely the delineated lips who are loyally glimmering white from the reflection, and towards me its lucent eyes glance, pleading inaudibly for deliverance.

The water modifies a whimper to a ripe howl that pierces the tile cradling its minuscule form — treachery of the domestic variety, which is arguably the most painful — and its whole body eventually collapses to the floor with the whisper of a yelp cleaving to its lips.

It can no longer dance for me.

~~~~~

Checking the clock has never been my specialty, and by effect, time evades me on a constant basis, but it's most definitely been a century since I arrived in the bathroom — I at least understand that.

Pete must have been searching for me as my eyes were distributing its fluid children, but the last time he burst through the door of the bathroom, he ended up lecturing me on why hydrogen peroxide is bad for my skin and my mental health, and it may have been more remorseful for him than for me.

However, I just fucking kissed him a few minutes ago, and that's a reason to stress about me even more than earlier, because someone such as myself doesn't purge guilt as easily as others, and he's aware of it.

But why should I be guilty for kissing him?

Because you have social anxiety, dimwit.

Social anxiety or not, Pete brought me back to the strawberry fields with the flavor that clung to his lips, and it was like tasting the childhood we were never given, the childhood we contrarily deserved, the childhood that reeked of flagrance, because we were children, yes, but we were children of rue, and only we knew how monstrous that was.

Pete knew the most out of us all, so as an anecdote of sedition, he glossed his lips with the aroma of strawberries, using only his middle finger as an applicator, and he gave no fucks. To any person whose brain is injected with happiness, strawberries are but the fruit they consume at the dinner table every night, but to us, it's a force that clashes against the stench of disease, and Pete Wentz is undeniably our savior, if only to the ones who are familiar with him.

On the flip side, Pete's nowhere to be seen, but that's due to me not scanning the room enough, as well as the staggering amount of homosexuals clogging up my senses and naturally prohibiting me from doing so.

Gradually, the blockage clears to unmask the tenuous lateral view of Pete Wentz, clustered by a glass of something a little stronger than water and aiming to submerge his regrets in alcohol — though, by the equilibrium of his posture, it's his first shot.

Energy surging through me, my dress shoes stride forward to accost my friend until a hand tangles my arm inside its tenacious grasp, barren of the incentive to surrender.

The affinity is uncanny, the brawn definite, the shape of the slim fingers adept, the feelings evoked grim, and I'm not even obligated to turn around to catalog him, because an indelible mark such as the one on my arm is an identification itself.

But I whip around anyway to face those fucking sapphire eyes that never scrapped a single tear for me, those sapphire eyes the color of the water strangling my lungs, those sapphire eyes that puncture me every time they penetrate my security with a simple stare that shouldn't mean anything but does, because I've known it all too well before.

But it's gone; it has to be, because the mental entombment was immune to any resurgences. I fucking buried those memories and stomped over the dirt — I know I did, so why the hell are they showing up? Why am I choking?

Those memories were snuffed out a while ago — two years, to be exact — but with the mere glistening of impeccable teeth, the harrowing images flood in one by one.

"Hey, Patrick!" the man greets, a height to his brow. "Remember me?"

~~~~~

A/N: i'm cackling ur all fuckign dead

just wait lmao it gets better

current vibe: how I put this video at the beginning of another chapter, but the person who posted it deleted their account so I had to find it elsewhere

~Dapootlovatoa