I laid in bed just staring at the ceiling. The thought of my alarm, which was due to go off in exactly one hour and twelve minutes, made me feel sick. It wasn’t the alarm itself, but what it meant the second I heard the first few notes of Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometimes. It meant work. Facing the outside world. Putting on a fake smile that told everyone that I was fine. Which, in reality, was the biggest load of shit I’d heard in my life. I wasn’t fine. Far from it. Bordering on suicidal, and most probably clinically depressed, but I hadn’t had the guts to make an extra outing to the doctors to get myself checked out. The only person I ever saw socially was my older sister, Maddy. And when I say socially, I mean her dropping over to find me either in bed or on the sofa in scruffy clothes. Then we’d spend the next couple of hours curled up together, with me crying, and her crying for me, then telling me I needed to see someone. Both our parents had died a few years ago, at the same time my long-term boyfriend of four years, had decided he needed someone even younger than my twenty-four. So, pointing out the obvious, everything had plummeted severely downhill for me from then. And man did I feel it. I felt it every night I cried for hours in bed, and every time I curled up with my sister and sobbed, and every time I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, having dreamt about cutting my wrist, or jumping off a high building. I hurt more than I ever could have imagined humanly possible. And even though I knew with all my heart that I needed serious help before I did something I’d regret, or never have the chance to regret, I just couldn’t bare the thought of getting up and going out, especially to let someone other than my sister know how extraordinarily messed up I was. Every time I thought that I’d book an appointment at the doctors, I then thought ahead to what that meant, as I always did. And like most other things, it meant putting on a fake exterior, so that I could make a trip to the outside world, where no one knew that I felt as good as dead inside. I never went out more than absolutely necessary, in fear that I’d be too exhausted to keep up my guard, and end up letting it down accidentally and freaking out. I was so aware of what everyone might think of me, if I appeared to look a little down or miserable. If I let myself look slightly down while I was out, it could end up with me letting myself gradually look worse and worse. And then who knew where it was going to end after that. So I stayed neatly tucked away in my two bedroom semi-detached house in Gravesend. My location didn’t help much. It was possibly one of the most depressing places I’d been to, excluding a PGL trip I went on with my school when I was twelve. Gravesend was small and dingy, full of teenagers in hoodies, scratching cars with their keys and shouting down the street in the middle of the night. I needed help, but I was seas away from getting it.
Rolling over I dropped my hand down the side of my foot high double bed and felt around for my phone in the faint sunlight. On finding it I lifted it in front of my face and pressed a random button, making the screen light up. My eyes instinctively flicked to the digital clock in the corner of the screen. 6:58am. If I had wanted to, I could have cancelled the alarm and just got up, saving myself from hearing the opening notes that I knew so well, from my favourite film. But I didn’t. I watched the clock change to 6:59 as the screen went dark. Again I pressed a button to get the light back on and just watched, waiting for the inevitable. 7:00. And along with that, the alarm. I just lay there and listened, as the music went on, and the lyrics came to a start.
Change your heart. Look around you. I knew what was coming next, and sang with it quietly, almost on autopilot, going through the routine I went through every morning before getting up and putting a cold washcloth under my eyes to reduce the swelling from my tears the night before.
Change your heart. It will astound you. And I need your loving, like the sunshine.The music built up very slightly, with some acoustic guitar and violins, at a marginally quicker pace.
And everybody’s gotta learn sometime. Everybody’s gotta learn sometime.