darker_london | Some days (Stephie) (Reply)

Some days Stephie could sense the bad day coming and some days she couldn’t. The day before might have been good and the day before that and the week before that, but sometimes she woke up and she was back at zero.

On those mornings the only thing that got her out of bed was Marie. She would hear Marie chattering to herself in her room, or Marie would come into Stephie’s room, and Stephie knew she had to get Marie fed and dressed and pack her bags and send her to Thomas’s house.

Some days she only managed feeding her, and both Stephie and Marie would show up on Thomas’s doorstep in their pyjamas. Sometimes Marie would put up a fuss with breakfast and flip her cereal bowl or slowly, while holding Stephie’s eye, pour her apple juice onto the floor. And Stephie would be putting all her energy into holding everything back – the frustration at this stupid messy little bitch and the desire to hurl Marie’s bowl against the cupboard and scream and the anger at herself for this reaction – so she wouldn’t have the energy to continue breakfast and she’d show up at Thomas’s almost in tears (holding Marie’s hand who was half the time crying as well) saying “She hasn’t eaten and I can’t find her clothes and you have to take her today because I can’t I just can’t.”

And Thomas would take her and Stephie would go back to Victoria Lane and crawl into her bed and spend the rest of the day hiding in her room. Or she’d go around the corner to Josie’s house and spend the day with Josie because Josie understood when the world felt black black black with no hope at all.

(A lot of her friends understood this, but Josie would not be gentle about it. Josie would be a bit hard, a bit of a bully, and this gave Stephie a reason to be a little bit angry at Josie which helped because it distracted Stephie from getting too angry at herself.)

And usually the next day would come and she’d wake up and there’d be a little more hope in her morning. She’d go through the careful ritual of a shower, and putting on clean clothes, and eating even though she was rarely hungry, and she would go with Jinx or Deirdre or Astrid and Icarus for a walk around the park and usually by lunchtime (when she’d eat again, even though her stomach was still a hard wretched knot) she would be feeling sort of okay.

Then she would find some of Marie’s toys or favourite clothes and take them over to Thomas’s to surprise Marie.

Twice since Jude left London, Stephie had gotten so bad she had checked herself into the hospital because she had wanted to destroy herself. Not just kill herself but do it in such a way that she took everything and everyone with her. She was so angry she shook. She was so angry she couldn’t see. She was so angry she wanted to throw things (Marie, Icarus) right out her bedroom window. Her intrusive thoughts grew so vivid and so encouraging that it was a vicious, painful, battle to stop herself, to bang down one of her housemates doors and demand that they take her to hospital instead.

The first time she had been in hospital for a week, seeing only her therapist Maiya before she trusted herself to see her friends again. She’d started with Thomas, five days after admitting herself, and spent the day with him walking around the hospital grounds. They had a picnic. Thomas did something to make her laugh. Then she’d cried for almost an hour, but by the time she went to bed that night, she felt like the poison was starting to drain out of her.

On day six she’d met Jinx for lunch off hospital grounds, and after spending a few hours with him walking aimlessly around the city, and not thinking about stabbing him once, she thought maybe she was ready to come home.

Then a week after she’d checked herself in, she went home and slept for two days.

A little while after that she started flying the helicopter again, though she didn’t fly solo. She picked up a few hours at Apocalypse Records (because over the summer Mr A’s quiet blond girl had taken off on an unexpected road trip and there were a few casual hours to cover, and because even on the days she couldn’t handle Marie, she could still handle customers.)

And life, for a while, was okay. She coped. She spent a lot of time with her friends. She climbed over Thomas’s back wall and had coffee with Daria; she went for long runs (in the safe hospital grounds) with wolf Marcia; she had long phone conversations with Scarlett; she and Josie drove up to Cambridge and visited Jude; she got drunk with Jinx and didn’t kiss him; she stayed up late and had heart to hearts with Astrid; she had a long conversation with Scott next time he came to London and they decided to break up.

It was one of the most reasonable, grown up endings to any relationship Stephie had ever had. It was also a serious turning point in her recovery; she’d made a decision for the sake of the mental health of them both, and no one had been hurt.

And life went on.

The bad days continued to roll in out of the blue, and there was no telling how they would end. Some days she would just be sad. Some days all she could do was sleep. Some days bought panic attacks. Only on the worst days did the blinding rage take her over. A couple of weeks after Christmas she put herself in hospital again, but this time she only stayed three days.

She hadn’t hurt anyone.

(The hole in her bedroom wall would be to differ.)

But she hadn’t hurt anyone since Jude.