Feelings Kept Secret

Every morning the security guards would say good morning to Adira. She always smiled and sometimes jocked with them, her hair still wet after her morning swim. She went to work early, and left really late, and the security guards always told her that she would gain time if she stayed in the office to sleep. It was always the same joke, and she always laughed at it before wishing them a good night. 

At the office everyone knew her to be focused and relentless. A moral support, a stone to lean on. Adira always succeed after hard times, always managed stressful situations without breaking down, always took more in than everyone else. She was always brutally honest, but sweet at the same time, offering her help to anyone in need, not asking anything in return. She was the one who stayed the latest, and everyone thought it was because she loved her work. 

However, Adira had a secret. More than one, even. The reason why she did all what she did was only one: she didn't want to spend too much time alone with her thoughts. Adira lived alone, and that had never been a problem, until then. The silence in the house made her realize how alone she was. She would go swimming because it was a way to stop her brain thinking about anything else, as she was focused on counting the meters she had swam. She would work long hours because, in that way, she kept her brain busy. Everyone thought she was strong, and she kept that façade, but she was broken in three thousand pieces in the inside. Everytime she smiled one of those pieces shifted places and stabbed her heart, making her wish she could cry. Her innermost wish was to have someone who would hug her and tell her everything was okay, someone who would sit down with her and ask her how was she feeling, someone who would hold her while she cried the river of tears that was trapped inside of her. 

But Adira didn't have anyone, because no one ever thought she would need someone to lean on. And every night, when she arrived to her silent home, she would wonder what was the point of living a life like that. And all the broken pieces inside of her would collapse into rubble, and the voices would break loose. Ghosts telling her that she had brought that on herself, that she didn't deserve anyone, voices telling her that the world would be a better place without her. Every night she would fight back the ghosts and put together the three thousand pieces the best she could, containing the ghosts behind a shattered wall, knowing it would only hold for so long, that she needed help to make it solid again, to heal herself. Some nights, it took her longer to recover, those nights she would catch herself with a jar of pills on one hand wondering if anyone would miss her the following day, wondering how many would she need to take to go to sleep forever.