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Red is his favorite color. He hates the color red. It's a sensitive dichotomy. He could wax poetic sonnets about how much he loves it. He could fill notebooks with essays on how much he can't stand it.
It's his favorite color when he's watching it flow, finally feeling calm. It makes him feel lighter, his head quiet, the ever constant pressure sitting on his chest temporarily lifting, allowing him to finally feel like he can breathe.
It's the color he hates the most when reality starts to sink back in, the brief lull ending, the peace fleeting, and shame settling heavy in his gut.
It’s his favorite color when he feels like he can finally breathe again. When the tears are drying on his face and a blissful numbness is washing over him.
It’s his least favorite color when it drips and stains the towels. When he’s having to scrub it from the bathroom tiles and the numbness in his mind lingers longer than he’d like.
He loves not having to feel anything for a moment, but the relief never lasts. Sometimes the feeling stays, but he almost wishes it didn’t. It’s not a relief then. Sometimes it lasts too long, and instead of craving the red to stop feeling too much, he craves it just to feel anything at all.
Sometimes he’ll watch the red running down his skin with rapt attention, as if he can see his problems temporarily flowing out of his body with it. Other times he watches with a strange sense of detachment, as though the color has nothing to do with him, like he’s merely observing from the outside.
He’s not sure if he’d call himself suicidal. He’s not trying to die but if he did he’s not sure he’d be too upset over it. Either way, he likes to pretend that it doesn’t mean anything serious.
This is unhealthy. A voice in the back of his mind pleads with him to see the reality of it all.
It’s helping us. A different voice argues.
No, it’s destroying us. He disagrees with the voice and tries to pretend both don’t sound suspiciously like his own.
If he goes too long without it he can feel an itch under his skin, like he’s almost eager to seek it out again. He ignores the fact that sounds like something he heard when the school had a speaker come to talk about addiction. That’s not what this is. How could it be? Addiction is for things like drugs, or in his father’s case, drinking. Following in his footsteps would be the thing to call unhealthy. Compared to that, this isn’t a big deal.
That voice in the back of his head pipes up again to tell him how stupid that argument sounds. He dismisses it like usual.
So far, no one’s noticed. He’s terrified a day might come when the mask slips. It’s getting out of hand and he knows it, despite the effort he puts into forcing himself to believe otherwise. He’s scared he can’t hide it forever. He’s scared he might not want to keep hiding. If someone knows then he’ll have to stop. He doesn’t want to.
Deep down he knows that’s a lie. He’s starting to have a harder time denying the fact the voice in his mind is his own. He’s having a harder time stopping himself from admitting the voice is right. It’s not that he doesn’t want to stop, it’s that he’s not sure he can.
Blaine hates the color red, and he hates that he also loves it.