Welcome to the Family

”You did WHAT?” I cried, hoping the few steady words Matt had just said would somehow vanish. It felt like someone ripped my heart out of its cage and pulled all of my veins out of my body, just to lay them end to end on the bathroom floor. In addition, my lungs were spread out right next to them, making it unable to breathe.

I never thought hearing about something like betrayal could actually result in physical pain, but now I knew. That’s why it was called heartbreak. There were sharp, shooting pains inside my chest that no painkiller, no morphine could numb and I was almost sure I was dying. I'd known about my bad heart all my life, but I'd been good for the longest time.

For the next few weeks, I lay inside my bed at my parents’ house. I refused to eat, and when I did, I couldn’t keep it down. I couldn’t fall asleep, and when I did, I had nightmares.

The demons were out to get me, to take me into their darkness, of that I was sure. Whenever I fell asleep, they managed to crawl closer and closer in my dreams. I was slowly going insane. I refused to see anyone, and late at night I heard my parents cry because they felt so helpless. I’d cried for three full days, but ever since then, the tears just wouldn’t come.

Matt came every single day. The first day, my parents let him into my room. He apologized a thousand times, he sang to me, cried by my bed. But I just lay there, my back facing him, silently staring at the white wall. In the evening, when Mom brought me some soup, I took all my strength to say, “Please don’t let him come inside my room anymore.”

I haven’t spoken since. I just haven’t found the words, and when I did, my mouth just felt dry and they didn’t come out.

Matt still came early in the morning and sat in front of my room’s door until the late am. He just talked to me, not even expecting a response. He said he loved me a million times, but that didn’t matter anymore, did it? He’d said those words, too, on the phone, just hours before he slept with his ex. Sometimes he brought flowers, sometimes his guitar.

He played the same song over and over again, Little Lion Man by Mumford and Sons, one of my favorite songs. He played it until I felt dizzy, and his words never once left my mind.

But it was not your fault but mine. And it was your heart on the line. I really fucked it up this time, didn’t I my dear?

I wanted to scream, wanted to tell him that yes, he had fucked it up. I wanted to tell him to leave, wanted to tell him I never wanted to see him again, but at the same time, I wanted him to crawl into my bed and hold me and tell me everything was going to be alright.

I wrote long letters whenever the words came to me. I noticed my steadily deteriorating state of mind when I re-read them in some light moments. The first ones were ordered, the handwriting neat. The middle ones were confusing.
There were repetitions, unfinished sentences. Sometimes it seemed like I had forgotten what I wanted to write while actually writing it. The last letters I ever wrote were a mess, German and English words basically scrambled and thrown into long, inconsistent “sentences” that seemed to never start and never finish.

The day before the guys went on their Nightmare tour, Matt begged my parents to let him into my room and they eventually gave in. He sat on the bed and cried, giving me a long talk about that he was leaving on tour, and he’d call me. He said that he missed me so much, and that he wouldn’t give up on me. They had a new dietician now, a guy.

He eventually fell asleep on his chair next to me and I watched him breathe steadily. I knew I couldn’t live without him. I needed him in my life. When he woke up, I let him feed me soup and he almost cried tears of joy. When he left my house, he didn’t know how much it hurt me.

I started seeing white mice three days after he left. The voices came a day later. My parents didn’t know what else to do, so they had me institutionalized. When they carried me into the car and drove me to Linda Vista hospital, I thought I was flying. Linda Vista, oh the memories, I thought bitterly.
I couldn’t believe that it had been only a few months that I was there, starring in the Nightmare music video, just before the whole Matt-thing started. Two times during the car ride, my dad had to brake sharply because I screamed. I was so scared he would run over one of the mice. They were, after all, the ones keeping the demons away from me, just like the voices.

I was diagnosed with acute posttraumatic disorganized schizophrenia after they ran dozens of tests with my almost lifeless body. I had also suffered a stroke. They didn’t understand. In my mind, it made perfect sense. It wasn't a stroke, it was a heartbreak. I wasn't schizophrenic, there were just demons fighting talking white mice, and I needed the mice to win. And now, they started killing the white mice.
My mind was a mess and I wasn’t able to think in sentences anymore. What remained were wordless thoughts, no interior voice.

I heard the doctors talk to my parents one day. They said I was apathetic, but inside there was a functioning mind. I swallowed countless pills and got countless shots. In the beginning, I spent 17 hours of my day sleeping. I was largely drip-fed because I couldn’t keep food. The doctors also explained to my parents that my heart wouldn't carry on much longer after the stroke, that I needed a donor heart or at least a catheter, but only I knew the truth. It was broken, how could they imagine it to function properly?

Matt called, he really did. I spent my wake hours listening to his cracking, crying voice on the phone, telling me how sorry he was over and over and over. I wanted to believe him, I really did. I wanted to answer, wanted to tell him I would come back to him, but I couldn’t. It was as if I knew I never would.

I spent my birthday in the hospital, and he sent me a giant teddy bear along with a video of him and the guys performing Little Lion Man. In the end of it, they all wished me a happy birthday and asked me to get back with Matt.

My parents cried by my bed and it broke my heart to see it. I wanted to hold them, tell them that it was alright. I was comfortably numb, and I was sure that, if I ever got out of my cloud of numbness, life and the actual pains would smother me. It was easy, though. I didn’t feel a thing anymore. Whatever it was they gave me was good, great even. The mice became blurry and eventually faded, and the voices grew quieter and quieter until they vanished.


I heard the doctors tell my parents that I was stabilizing, but that they didn’t know what to expect. I would be significantly impaired even if I did make a full mental recovery. My heart was weak, and so were my organs. They told them if I couldn’t get surgery, I wouldn’t be able to do sports anymore, wouldn’t be able to eat certain foods, wouldn’t be able to go to certain heights even, and that included flying.

My parents cried because they couldn’t afford the treatment. It was then that I first felt the desire to die. The life they predicted wasn’t worth living, after all.

One day, my doctor came and told me I was scheduled for a heart surgery, and that someone had paid for it. I was finally strong enough for anesthesia. Nothing complicated, he reassured me, just a cardiac catheter, so if my heart failed, it could resuscitate me. He had done it multiple times. I didn’t care. If I were to die during the procedure, I thought, then be it. The nurse poured a colorless substance into my venous access, and when darkness surrounded me after a few seconds, it truly felt like coming home.

I woke up, though. I was in sharp pains and I couldn’t feel my legs. I wanted to scream, wanted to cry, but I stayed mute. The days passed by and it never got better. The nights came and went, and so did my parents, Matt’s frequent calls and the doctors.

I knew that by now, I didn’t understand what was going on with me anymore. I only knew that something had to be wrong when I was moved to another room and couldn’t have any visitors anymore. Doctors came in special suits and never said much, they just stared at me with a pitying expression.

Notes

uh-oh. Didn't see that one coming, did you?
What do you think happened?