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Ever think about how easy it would be to delete? Yuuri always did.

Every single breath felt like it was being sucked into a dark, uncaring hole. A whirlpool to never come back. It would rattle inside his ribs, in his lungs, push blood that couldn’t find where the heart was with how it was replaced with a black hole. It felt like a void. That everything that there once was, it was all gone and nothing else. It was as if every emotion had packed up, picked up their safe deposit from the landlord and took off from the empty shell. The wall bare, not even white, an unattractive off color that was a mix of pale mucus from the back of the throat and the color found when a bug is squished against your shoe.

He had tried everything while growing up. From bad TV shows, watching his favorite figure skaters including his Idol, showers where he could vent his emotions, hiding himself under the cover of rushing water, nights huddled in the corner of his bedroom because his bed felt like a luxury he didn’t desire. He had tried staring at pill bottles, pausing when cooking to look at the knife, walking a bit too close to a steep and sudden edge when he left the house, and while they gave the closest bit of comfort he could find in the span of time not on the ice, none of it did anything to push away the emptiness.

It wasn’t always so much suicide that was on his mind, though it came up often in his thoughts, it was the blankness in his chest, the empty shell, the starless galaxy that ripped at him piece by piece. There was no one to talk to about it either. The few times he tried, either they didn’t understand and told him to just think of happy things, he was just being a little sad, or after finding out this entire large chunk of who he was, they stopped listening, stopped caring, turned the focus from just being there for him in these times to talk about themselves. How much harder they had it, how much they went through in life and yet they weren’t ‘asking for attention’ like he was.

Food flip-flopped between it stopping in sounding appealing, even when his stomach screamed as it shrink from eating nothing but a small handful of chips and some bubbly soda, to trying to fill the void in his chest with what comfort food he could find in his mother's home cooking. Water itself was replaced with said soda outside the rink, because if he had to be some form of hydrated, he may as well lace it with all the crap he could and maybe let it encourage an early death.

Sleep was always an issue on its own. It ran from him at all hours. When wide away, it taunted him. When drowsy, it winked and promised later. In bed it would stand just far enough off the edge of his bed that it was out of reach, saying how he wasn’t trying hard enough. Unless he knocked back sleeping medication, sleep would only embrace him with reluctant arms in the morning rays clawing up the curve of the earth.

Every smile, every joke, every laugh was fake. Even in the times they felt real to even him, it was fake. He had just gotten so good at the lies that even he was starting to believe them. Or was it that he was so desperate for even a scrap of happiness that he ran head first into his own lies? After late night confessions of depression, of how fucked his world was in the darkness of his and Phichit’s room,, he would pop up with nothing but jokes and happy words, saying it was just an odd emotion from lack of sleep. As if those thoughts weren’t his every waking moment.

Sometimes it’s easy, other times it’s scary how numb his fingers felt, how slow and heavy when he talked to people in his skating community, when he responded to those that looked up to him. How every word was just another lie, another fragment of a make up persons story, a made up personality, everything simply made up,  just an empty smile and just an act. It was scary how easy it was, and it was easy to feel how scared he got because of it all.

Ever think about how easy it would be to just delete? To delete everything? Fail competitions so retiring was the obvious choice, they would want you to quit, delete all social media, everything that connects you to people, delete all records and traces of yourself, delete every breath you take. He thought of that a lot, almost every day. Some days only for a second, other days would be for hours on end in the panic of anxiety under his sheets.

How easy it would be to delete the empty feeling in the chest. To just delete everything there is. How easy it would be because crying doesn’t help when there is nothing to cry about beyond the very fact you even exist.

So many times, it wasn’t his practice heavily schedule that kept Yuuri alone. So many times it was people just not wanting to deal with him, not wanting to accept when he did let them see a hint of who he was. He had some people that he had known years, talked to daily, who after so much trust, got to see a little of his insecurities, his self hate. Soon after they just. . . left. They just took off.

They left him without a single word of why, without care. It was the normal once he hit eighteen, when he accepted that this was just another side of how people were when his little support system was torn off in an entirely different continent across what was essentially a vast bathtub seasoned heavily with salt. You couldn’t let anyone know you, the mask had to be there constantly. Phichit had seen hints, but every time, he laughed it off as being sleep deprived, over working himself to land a certain jump. He couldn’t accept that if his best friend saw it all, he could possibly think he was pathetic, a pity case, weird. That none of it was true. Look at these comedical stumbles over his skates and silly falls, aren’t they funny? Aren’t they stupid? Aren’t they fake? Aren’t they pathetic and forced? Don’t they just tell a stupid story that covers up the normal, the boring, the pathetic they become over time? Don’t they symbolize everything he is? Don’t you feel better once they fade from existing and leave your life? Of course they do, because over time, nothing matters anymore.

With his job, it would be nothing at all to ‘slip up’, twist ever so slightly in a jump to land wrong, not only give up the dreams that once kept him going as a child that now meant nothing to him, but also to give up the hopes those around him had of his own future. It would hurt to hurt them, sure. It would feel like he was being put to his knees, head down, muzzle to back of his neck, to the spot between his eyes, under his jaw, in front of the spot he was suppose to have a heart instead of a black hole and just give up on him with broken hearts at what he could have been. But in a way, it would make things so much easier, to not have those high expectations pushed on him.

Really, the topic came to mind rarely, at least anymore, but it came up. There was something to be said about what he went through, that he could tell the difference between those who gave up, those who tried even a bit for any reason to survive this, what the chemicals in the brain refused to give and refused to do their best, and between those who romanticized the every day fucking suffering of his anxiety, haunting depression and self hatred. The people who thought it was so fucking beautiful, the scars, physical, mental and emotional he walked with every day on his soul. Those who thought having a single bad day could be compared to anything like this. The ones wanting to talk loudly about what they thought it was like, that made everyone uncomfortable because how hard they tried to be ‘beautiful just like you people’. The same people that thought the daily pills that kept every day barely survivable were a curse and should be banned.

These were the people that always seemed to be there in your life to rub salt in every wound. You can't do this as well as me, you didn't do how I want you to do it, you don't do enough here and there, and any attempt to show your own view of it, to explain, open your mouth for once and actually speak, it's just rubbed in harder, cutting off your voice  that they have a high expectation of you, they obviously know more and their experiences are more important than anything. Don't like a certain food? Well it's my favorite, it's so good. Don't like a certain type of animal? Not only did I rescue mine from a horrible place but then they saved my life! Fear of something? Oh how I adore this thing, what a silly thing, my own fear is far worse and harder to handle. Work your ass off with bloodied feet trying to land a quad Salchow? Ha! I got it on my first try.

People often make dark emotions worse, they backhand with making everything about their lives when under the guise of helping and caring, then throw in ‘well if you were only more like me with this subject’ in the end. People feel just as much as a cancer as the deep anxiety that roots against the ribcage and lungs. If anxiety is a cancer to the lungs, depression as a heart’s black hole, then people are the ones cutting off someone's feet then scoffing about how tired they are walking, a nail gun to what should be a support system.

It was something so hard to accept. That not everyone was grinning as they watched you fail in front of them, fail yourself. It was something that took years and years to build any kind of trust to open up, accept any help. It was the hardest thing he had ever had to do to say outloud and not in the dark corner of the room at night with a tight chest that he needed help, an intervention before he was truly taken over by the hole where he should have a heart. It was almost impossible for so long to swallow down the reality that he could be loved, that there wasn’t hidden hatred and pity towards him by a tiny handful of people. It wouldn’t ever fix him, nothing ever would, but in time, it eased him through some of the panic so he could keep trying for dreams.

The extended hands, those who shared his blood, the best friend that sat with him for years in a tiny dorm room as he cried into their shoulder without asking, never pushing Yuuri for answers he didn’t have, the glowing ball of wonderful of a man who pulled him into a warm lap, crook of a neck with soothing knuckles along his spine when he felt nothing inside. They were all the ones who tried, that started to notice more and more once he let them see past the blindfold he forced on them. While they couldn’t fully understand, never would, they didn’t judge or leave him, they worked their asses off to prove it when his doubt raised and continued to love him and be next to him, holding his hand when he needed it.

Ever feel like you should delete? Everything would be better? That feeling would never leave, but it could be slightly dulled, a hesitation to the button so easy to press.