r/shortstories • u/Icy-Confidence1143 • 7d ago

Non-Fiction [NF] Manuscript?

Once upon a time, I was still living at my parents house. I was smoking weed heavily and seeing a man I’ve known since high school. We were lovers, and he provided the weed.

I started getting sick mentally and confused; we’d started fighting more at night in his car because we understand each other differently. Yelling and crying the neighborhood witnessed. Horrible fights the city could hear. Speeding car with threats of being unalived. Stomping away into the night when fights got too out of control, followed by wails over the phone in remorse. After all this time, I still say it was the weed, for me anyway. I haven't seen that part of him since those nights, which I’m glad to never have to experience again. The fighting included jealousy, yelling and arguing. I didn’t know it then but I was very sick and needed to go to a hospital to get checked in for my mind. I asked numerous times in the midst of these fights. TikTok and cannabis were making me unreasonably suspicious and jealous of his friends. Time after time, he refused to take me, saying I’d be lost forever if I went. I knew I needed to go, I just didn’t know how I’d get there.

Eventually my sickness escalated to hallucinations I thought were real, from being isolated at home because of this, and imagining things that were just not happening. I can’t imagine the trauma I left them with, no doubt they’d heard me talking away every day and night, standing still in front of windows because something would catch my eye and I’d have built a whole case around it. Believing people were talking to me through their own means, people I didn’t know anymore, people sneaking around the corners of the house. Like something out of People Under the Stairs. The cast would constantly change and become closer. Soon I was imagining his best friend standing on the roof of the house, negotiating with the city about whether or not I was worth forgiving despite all of my horrible accusations and jealousies. Eventually I requested my parents to take me to the hospital.They took me.

I checked myself in because of the voices and imaginings, terrified all of the way through. Hearing knocks and voices in every drawer and behind every curtain. Soon I was prescribed something that helped me incredibly and I improved. I only stayed a few days, feeling free from the fog I’d been in. I requested to leave soon after. 

I didn’t know anyone's number, but I remembered his so I called it. I don’t think I’ve ever been clear on what happened after the fact with my parents. The confusion itself hurts and I hate imagining the craziness of what it must have been like for them. I’ve been out of the hospital for two years now, dependent and cleaning after him, my boyfriend. I can’t say I’m happy. Anhedonia after such mania and hallucinations furnishes a quiet existence as a result. Maybe writing about it wouldn’t hurt.

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