3:06 AM

[Skraal]

With the press of a button, the painfully bright glow of his cell phone's screen disappeared, plunging the room back into darkness. Unfortunately for Nicholas, it didn't appear that sleep would be coming easily tonight. He sighed as placed the device back onto the nightstand, closing his eyes once more. A guy from church had once told him that lying still with your eyes closed was seventy percent as good as sleeping, and though it felt like bullshit, it was better than just scrolling through his phone, reading internet articles that inevitably made him feel like garbage. Not that it had ever stopped him before - it almost was some sort of an addiction at this point. No matter which of his hobbies he decided to read about, it would never be long before he ended up back on some social media feed, scrolling endlessly through content algorithmically determined to appeal to his worst emotions due to the constant corporate drive for increasing "engagement". Getting up for school was going to be hard enough without adding that issue to the mix.

To be perfectly honest, though, it wasn't like the thought of getting up was something particularly appealing. After all, what point was there in waking up in the morning if you didn't have anything to look forward to? When thinking of the future, all Nicholas would picture was a black hole, each day blending into the next and forming little more than a sludge devoid of colour. It was difficult to even fantasize about being happy when he had no memories of the feeling to use as reference. Even when he was a little kid, the world seemed dull and grey. In the words of a cartoon character that he had seen posted online a long time ago, some people were meant to be happy, and others were just... different. The quote had always been one that particularly stuck with him, its line of thought punctuated by a jab of discomfort as he rolled onto his other side and brushed his legs together just enough to remind him of what lay between them. Nicholas took a deep breath, willing himself to ignore the feeling of vertigo that had begun to rise within him, with middling success.

It wasn't completely true to say that he had no memories of feeling happy; it was just that most of them involved being referred to as something that he wasn't. A familiar feeling of shame began to swell within his chest at the recollection of one of the several happy moments where someone accidentally assumed he was female due to roleplaying a female character, and how hard it was to eventually bring himself to correct the misunderstanding. No matter how much temptation there was to let the charade go on forever, he knew that he couldn't. It just wouldn't be right. He quietly sighed, biting down hard on his lip as his legs began to move upward, shifting his body towards the fetal position. It was no use dwelling on it, he knew. No matter how much he wished that he could have been born with a different body than the one he had, nothing could change the reality that caused him so much agony.

Everything about the situation was just so confusing. He wasn't "delusional" as he had heard family members say time and time again about people like him - he was painfully conscious of the fact that his body was physically male, and he held no sort of belief that he was physically the same as his female classmates. He couldn't even really say that he "felt like" a girl, because he had no idea what a girl was supposed to feel (or how a boy was supposed to either, for that matter). At the same time, saying that he just "wanted" or "wished" to be a girl didn't accurately describe how he felt either; something about the thought of being treated like one felt appropriate, with the reverse feeling wholly unnatural. It was like something in his brain had been miswired to expect his body to be something other than what it was.

Not that any of this mattered in the end, anyway. Even if he could describe this to himself, he had little hope of getting anyone to understand who hadn't felt that way themselves. As far as a large portion of the population were concerned, his feelings were completely undeserving of empathy. He still vividly remembered having to listen to his brother ranting about how this was just some sort of disgusting fetish, biting his lip so hard that it nearly bled as he prayed for some opportunity to change the subject. No matter what part of the internet he found himself in, venturing out of a small safe corner inevitably resulted in him being reminded about being the butt of countless jokes, with even people who supposedly considered themselves "progressive" perfectly willing to make their disgust for those like him known at the slightest provocation. He slipped a hand into his sleeve, running his fingers across the row of raised scabs that marred his skin. It just felt unfair on some deep, cosmic level, that these feelings which he had been slapped with without his consent and which caused him frequent misery on their own, also made him an object of disgust and hatred for huge swathes of the human population, maybe even the majority of it.

Nicholas rolled over yet again, pressing his face into his pillow and failing to hold back the tears that were beginning to well up in his eyes. He couldn't keep living like this, but his other options weren't very good either. Even if he did manage to get the proper healthcare for himself after however many years it took him to become financially independent from his parents, what sort of quality of life could he have? He would have to go through what seemed like an obscene amount of effort modifying his appearance and retraining his voice just for the chance that he might be treated in a way that would make him happy. Even if he tried his hardest, there still was a good chance that he just wouldn't be able to pull it off, and as much as he hated his life now, opening himself up to being viewed as a subhuman by a huge percentage of the people he'd encounter on a daily basis was a terrifying thought. He already felt like enough of a freak as it was, and seeing that opinion reflected by others, conscious or otherwise, in their interactions was absolutely intolerable. Even in the miracle scenario, where he passed perfectly, he'd still end up cut off from his family and most of his social support network, and he was far too shy to rebuild anything close to that. His choices were to either live miserably, maintaining a lie, or to be more honest with himself, and through that honesty destroy everything else good that he had going for him.

He just couldn't stand it. He knew what people online would always say, or at least the ones that at least pretended to be sympathetic to his sort of plight. People would always say things like "it's your life, and if your family can't accept you, then too bad for them". The problem with that always was that those statements were easy to make for people when it wasn't their family who they were discussing cutting off. Despite all the pain that they had caused him, he still loved his parents and his brother, and the idea of alienating them completely felt like amputating a limb. As stupid as it was, it filled him with guilt to know that he'd become yet another example to them of the supposed cult of gender ideology tearing children away from their parents. His parents had always been the arbiters of morality in his life, and no matter what anyone said to him, it was difficult to feel like going against them in this way would be anything other than a betrayal on his part. He knew that even hinting at the issue would result in them questioning his love, and worse than that, his faith. To be perfectly honest, he still wasn't sure where he stood on the matter of God (though the idea of being purposefully consigned to this fate by a supposedly loving creator was admittedly quite difficult to accept at this point), trying to explain to his parents how he felt would only bring them the grief of knowing that their child had consigned himself to hell.

To be perfectly honest, with all this in mind, it was hard for him to escape the conclusion that he'd be better off dead. Though the pain that his suicide would cause his family only exacerbated his guilt, it did little to increase his will to live. If anything, it just made things worse - not only was he stuck in this life through no choice of his own, he was also chained to it by his own fears, both of how much it would hurt if he actually managed to make a suicide attempt and of the horrible consequences that his selfish decision would have on those he left behind. The more he thought about it, the worse he felt, thoughts of increasingly damaging acts of self-harm continuing to force their way into his mind despite his best efforts to keep them out. The air in the room began to feel stiflingly heavy, choking off his ability to breath as a horrible cold feeling of despair continued to spread out from his chest, towards his limbs. He sat up in bed, looking around the room with eyes now fully adjusted to the dark, passing his gaze over various objects in his room before finally setting on the CR helmet lying on his desk. He swallowed, the overwhelming temptation to just put it on and forget about his problems for a little while met with the understanding that spending any significant amount of time with it would ensure that he was going to feel like shit the next morning due to the lack of sleep. The conflict didn't last long, however. He needed something, anything to help him escape from these horrible thoughts, and besides, his sleep for the night was already ruined. Sighing, Nicholas shoved the covers off his body and trudged barefoot over to his desk, grasping for the device and carrying it back to the bed. It was only a matter of seconds more before the device was on his head and he found himself desperately searching through his various sources of escapist fantasy, eventually landing on one that was enough to finally take his mind off of all this pain.

After all that, it wasn't much of a surprise when his alarm went off in the morning and he found that he had fallen asleep with the device still on his head.