Maya - Chapter two

Chapter Two

It’s ironic really; when I was younger I longed to be crazy, to find some way in which I could excite people or at least excite myself. Boredom was a disease that infected my upbringing in a quiet, Lancashire town and the only cure was recklessness. Not that people could see it, well, not for a while anyway. I did what I had to do: studied a bit, sat all the exams expected of me and got mediocre results. It was when I got older that chinks began appearing in my armour, revealing to those closest to me a rusty, tarnished paint job, with the lacquer peeling pityingly off.

There were good things about me, qualities I liked to boast by example: my ability to talk to anyone, my laughter, my generosity with money, my being the last one to always leave the pub, the bar, the club. I became high on the way I perceived people saw me; a great social butterfly they flocked to be around. I started to forget to catch myself. I never allowed myself to put down the drink, to refuse a toke on the joint, do another line, to climb down from the table and join the real world. I didn’t want to. The real world contained so much throbbing pain that if I let it in I felt I would implode, leaving nothing but the scattered debris of who I wanted to be. Up there I was untouchable, unreachable, adored.

New Year 2004: a broken nose became my reward for falling headfirst into a table of champagne glasses. Blood was running down my cleavage, giving splashes of crimson to my alabaster winter skin. Smiling like a wide-eyed clown, I laughed and laughed, pointing at my messed up face, squashed comically to one side. Falling over open-mouthed friends, throwing my arms around a disgusted boyfriend’s neck and throwing back my head so the blood flew from my face. And shrieking, shrieking with laughter.
Birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, New Years, the weekenders, the quiet nights at the pub, the trips away, all began to blur into one big showcase for my spiralling irregularity. Each one a bedlam making high, crushed to a pulp by a dark and terrifying low.

At some point it had to end. But, to make it end I had to find the beginning.