chapter two: mario kart 8

 

my mother said goodbye to me and walked out ahead of my father.

i suppose she couldn't handle seeing how easily i was able to belong and blend

into the sterile facility with fake spasms of positivity on the walls in carefully arranged artwork featuring cliche quotes about hope.

my mother was the first person to look into my eyes and realize that the only thing i succeeded in killing the night of my suicide attempt

was my hope.

i made no attempt to get it back those first few days because

it was her that taught me how to be scared of having something good in my life.

 

my father hurriedly kissed my head and trailed after her.

that week, it seemed he always hurrying to get away from my dark eyes and cataclysmic wrists wrapped in pure colored bandages.

 

i met a boy on the inside named bastion.

he would get mad at you if you called him sebastian, because “that's not even what it's legally short for!”

i asked him what it was short for.

“it's not short for anything!”

i laughed and he stopped being angry, for the time being.

bastion was bipolar and he came into the hospital on a stretcher,

his wrists were clean because he said he wasn't stupid,

but they were strapped onto the sides of the stretcher as if his wrists were his ultimate tools of destruction.

he was yelling when he came in, but only because he was annoyed, he said.

lots of things annoyed bastion, but

he said i made him calm down and regret throwing a rock through his step dad's car window.

i laughed and he stopped being sad over his memories of home.

i was his ultimate distraction from his pain

and he helped me work through mine.

 

bastion was kickass when it came to playing mario kart.

we bonded the most while playing that on the wii in the main room next to a small round table where morning meetings and meals for those on precautions took place.

the tiny table was snow colored and made me feel cold just looking at it,

the rest of the interior furniture was wood or colorful to contrast with the white walls and white beds and white shelves and my white bandages and my roommates white scars;

that table was a reminder that maybe we could never escape the bitter snowstorms our minds liked to put us through.

i hated that table.

bastion did too, but when

i was alone every other day painting or drawing at that table,

he sat beside me and wrapped his foot around mine to remind me that i was not alone,

that even when he was annoying, he wouldn't leave me alone, and

i let mario kart become my distraction

and escaped into the sound of bastion’s laughter as he splashed me in the pool and put me on his shoulders

so i could “see what it's like to rule the world”, he told me.

 

he told me to be careful of life on the outside so

i told him that he felt like home and

he thanked me.

 

he asked me to talk to him in private before i left a week later and

i ran away, because

my father taught me how to break boys hearts and

my mother taught me to be scared of having something good in my life.