See Me

51

"You could have told me."

I looked up at him in surprise. In all the weeks it's been since that night happened, since the news broke and the rumours circled, he hadn't mentioned it. He hadn't mentioned anything about it at all.

The only time we've gotten close to the subject was when I told him about the pills. It was the guilt that made me tell him. It's guilt now, that rules me. Instead of fear. Don't get me wrong, the fear is still there. It's lessened now, though. The threat has been contained. Well, kind of. Enough.

The guilt feels uncontainable. There's a lot for me to feel guilty about.

They all say the same thing, though. They say I don't need to feel guilty. My therapist. My dad. Austin. They tell me that I was acting out of trauma. Trauma responses can not be used to gage who you are as a person, they say.

It makes sense. Yet I can't ease these feelings of guilt.

"I couldn't." I said as I shook my head, smiling softly.

"I know. You couldn't." Austin agreed.

Even though he's been visiting me almost every day, ever since he found out, he still looks out of place in my room. His large body stuffed onto my pale pink chair, his hands gently running over the fabric of the throw pillow, his fingers picking at the white sequins.

My dad hadn't been keen on letting him in the house the first time that Austin rang the doorbell. It was surprising, actually, that my dad had been acting like... well, a dad. Though he didn't understand, he tried. Not that I could blame him for not understanding. How could he? I couldn't even understand my own actions. I couldn't understand what happened. I couldn't understand Jax, I couldn't understand any of it.

Though I was trying to. I was.

My mind had been like a tightly wound ball of elastic bands. All of them mismatched, and different colours. Wrapped tightly around each other, intertwining and forming knots. I had been barricaded in my room, leaving only for the three hours a week I met with my therapist, trying desperately to unravel them.

Each time I was able to snap one of those elastics bands, breaking it free from the tangled mess, it was another thought, another action, another reaction that I was able to smooth out in my mind and try to begin to understand it. I had hope, that eventually I would be able to snap all of those elastic bands and smooth them all out, laying them neatly in a straight line, and understand them all.

And then, just maybe, I could use the leftover rubber to make a waterproof raft, and I could sail on top of the ocean wave. It might be rocky, it might be a fucking horrible ride, but hopefully I wouldn't be dragged down into the currents again.

The problem was, the ball of elastic bands was just so big.

"How's it going with the therapist?" Austin asked me, and I knew he noticed the way I had fallen into my thoughts again. He was trying to bring me back.

"Slow." I sighed out. "I don't know. The things she says- they make sense, but at the same time they don't."

"It's not going to happen overnight, Seren. It hasn't even been a month." Austin threw the pillow onto the floor. He glanced at it for a second, as if he thought about picking it up, but he didn't. He got off the chair and walked over to my bed, sitting down beside me. Austin wrapped his arms around my shoulders, pulling me into him. I leaned my head on his shoulder, exhaling calmly. I knew he was right. It's one of the first thing my therapist had told me, that this was going to be a long journey. It might not ever end, she said. I knew she was right too, but I wished she wasn't.