The Painful Part

[Cicada]

The Clarissa that was smiling almost screamed through her teeth and her lips. It was almost, like.

An emotion.‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

‎Insulting. That word. Clarissa had just made the biggest most she didn't even know what step of her life EVER and she had promised herself she'd be better and she felt disgusted and exhausted but none of those emotions were directed directly AT Raya and that made it even more difficult for Clarissa to process. All that and Raya just seemed confused about it.

Maybe this was one of those things about growing up that Clarissa would understand better someday.

She

did not like it much.

"I'm fine." Clarissa breathed slowly. Words, she didn't know words. It was hard to think.

Uh, really, it was always hard to think in general, unless it was a thing that made her really happy. Car went vroom, doll looked pretty and had soft hair. Mom and Dad tucked her into bed, Auntie Jacob and Sophia showed her nice cars, Raya shouted at people who shouted at her, Sylvie brought her to a big house in Silver Springs and let her hide with the plushies until the stress in her brain melted away. She hated homework that wasn't cool science stuff like learning about maps or rocks because it was stupid and annoying to think about. She only had good handwriting because she liked making loopies with her pen.

Raya staring at her with a something?? in her eyes made Clarissa feel it was important to say the words she couldn't find. She ended up kind of blurting them out.

"I just want us to get through all of this together."

Words still did not come easy to her. Trying to talk normal didn't make talking normal any easier. It made Clarissa feel stupid and like she wanted to shove something big into her mouth to make it so she never had to say words again.

Add it to the pile. The flotsam violently stirring in the storm of her mind.

She'd deal with it later,

she promised herself. When she got home she could punch her bed until her knuckles broke.

[LYourLocalAutist]

There was something there, Raya could barely make out. She was still coming out of what was a stupor of depression, after all. Thinking was still slightly fuzzy, even when it came to worrying about her friend, which she was usually really really good at. But this was something new and unfamiliar, like everything else in the past few days. She could tell she was being rude, acting like that when her friend was just trying to be nice. It made her feel a bit rotten alongside everything else. Even that didn't seem to deter this Clarissa. But there was still something.

It was like a mask.

But thinking that made Raya's heart drop in a way that felt scary, so she stopped.

Instead, she let an unfathomably tiny urge, buried in a small place at the back of her brain take over. Raya smiled a little, her eyes flitting between her twiddling fingers and her friend's face. Clarissa was happy, and trying to make Raya happy, so she should be happy. Maybe, at least just for this little moment in time, she could deserve it. She could have just a little break before returning to the sinking, when she had to talk to dad and think of mom again.

For now it was just her and Cs.

"...Thank you. A lot."

Her voice was uncharacteristically small, and still a little broken, but it was suffused with more light than had been present in any of her words combined in the past week. It carried a piece of genuine gratitude towards a friend who'd come all the way from her house to help her here even though she was being rude and sad and an idiot. Words got a little harder on her part as she tried to think of something else to say, her heart going all wobbly in that bad and scary way that kept repeating itself when she tried to think properly. Even so, she replied to Clarissa, her lips trembling just slightly.

"I... I wanna get through it too. With everyone. But it's so hard."