Three a.m.

Avoiding dark thoughts was hard to do during the day, but at three a.m. Alyson realized it was impossible. She sat in her bed, a cup of tea in her hands, and the covers bunched up into a wad at her feet. This was her third cup, and like the first two, it was doing nothing to soothe her taught emotions and tense muscles. Alyson put one hand on Bambi and sighed deeply. 

“What am I doing?” Alyson shook her head. “What am I even doing? I’m hiding on the other side of the world pretending to be some amazing philanthropist, like, ugh! Why? I make myself sick. How did I even end up like this? Why… Ugh.”

She took a sip of the scalding beverage and winced. Her tongue was already burned from the previous cup that she had tried to drink too quickly. Things were spiraling, and she rubbed her stomach over and over, breathing in and out as deeply as she could in an attempt to stay afloat. The black cloud of thoughts pulled her lower and lower into their murky depths until she was biting the skin on the back of her hand to keep from screaming. 

“No. No, Aly. No. No. Stop. You’re fine. You’re fine. It’s okay. Stop. It’s okay.” Alyson’s cheeks were wet with tears as she stumbled from her bedroom to the bathroom. She looked at her face in the mirror and bit her bottom lip. The teeth marks on her hand were highlighted with red. “Aly, you have to stop. You have to be okay. You have to. It’s going to be okay… It’s… ”

The self-soothing didn’t change the twisting in the pit of her stomach, and Alyson had to try a new tactic. She snatched up the charcoal pencil off of the kitchen table and ripped a page out of the sketch book. She tossed them onto the floor and sunk down onto her knees. Blinding tears fell onto the paper, but Alyson didn’t stop. Her lines were sloppy and it looked nothing like the image that Alyson had in her mind, yet it somehow made her feel better that it was turning out so horribly. 

“I hate this feeling! I hate it! I hate feeling so dark and alone!” Her words came threw clenched teeth. “It’s my own fault I hate myself! It’s my own fault! I did it! I ruined my life!”

Sobs halted the heated drawing, leaving Alyson’s shoulders shaking and pencil rolling across the floor and under the stove. After the frustration abated, Alyson crawled over to see if she could retrieve her pencil. It wasn’t in sight or within reach, so Alyson went to get a new pencil from the box that sat on the coffee table in the living room. When she returned to the kitchen, she studied her drawing and was surprised at what she saw.

“I guess I can draw something,” she muttered under her breath. 

There was the curve of a face, the halting lines of angry lips and tightly closed eyelids. It was definitely a rough sketch, but there it was, the picture of herself that she was carrying around inside of her. It was like an anchor pulling her to the depths of a bottomless sea of black. Black and heavy. Black and heavy and…

Alyson lay down on the floor next to her drawing and swallowed a few tears as she promised that she was done crying and ready to pull herself together. The cool tiles touched her cheek, and she sighed. She placed a smudged hand over the drawing, her fingers trembling as she lightly traced the outline of the face and followed the path of the black tears. Seeing it there on the paper, in the light, in the open, the ugly perception of herself that she carried internally was freeing.