I am suffocated with this knowledge.

I try to picture Maggie giving up like that, just lying down and dying. Because she was so strong, so stubborn. I never saw her cry. Never saw her upset. She was stone while I fell apart over everything.

"My point to all this, Vince, is that you were the first thing in a very, very long time to come into Maggie's life that gave her purpose again." The sincerity in his eyes is too much. "If you're not okay, then let me help."

Yes. Yes, I want help. I want to not...feel like this anymore. Except then I wonder what it's like to feel normal because if you take away the things I've felt all my life—the insecurity, the pain, the loneliness, the absolute dissolution of any sane or rational thought during one of my more manic moods and the helplessness when I realize one of said manic moods is creeping up on me (like right now)—what's left after the fact? Emptiness?

I take medication that makes me feel absolutely nothing. Medication that scoops out my insides and leaves me hollow. Sometimes I take it because that emptiness is the only way to keep my heart from crumbling to pieces. This is what it is like inside my head, Harold; all these emotions and I do not know how to get them out.

So I smile without meaning it and I say, "No, really, you're overreacting. I'm totally okay."

And I apologize, but I'm not hungry and I have plans and I can't breathe, so I need to go, and I leave him there alone with his coffee.

CHAPTER 14

Good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people. I don't consider myself one or the other, so I can't help but wonder if that's why I'm like this. Why I can feel so little in one second and so much in the next. Why it gets difficult to breathe and my chest hurts and my brain is full to bursting.

I rush home and barricade myself inside, huddling on my bed, and every breath is a conscious effort. In and out, in and out. If I weren't getting enough air, I would've passed out by now, right?

I want to call Casper. Or Adam. I want to hear the voice of someone who might reassure me it's okay and I am not crazy and it will pass. Casper would probably tell me to stop being overdramatic. Adam might sit right beside me and say nothing at all, but his nearness would help. It would be enough.

Corey would freak out and not have a clue what to do with me. Like she did last time.

To be fair, I sort of misled her into thinking I was normal. I guess. Any freak-outs I had, I never let her see. Any thoughts one might not consider exactly ‘normal,' I bit back. You know: if you can't say something sane, don't say anything at all.