Haunted

∞ Chapter 7 ∞

“Are you fucking crazy or something?” Olivia snapped as she barged in. My mind had been stuck on Friday all weekend. How she had reacted, how she left, how she seemed to be crying before she accelerated out of the parking lot. I had been restless all the time, an uneasy feeling in my gut. I had called her a lot of times, but she hadn’t answered any of them and I hadn’t seen her all day today at school. Honestly, I was surprized to find her at my door for her session now.  “Do you have any idea how often you called me this weekend?”

I scratched my neck. I had expected this, to be honest. “Yeah… I… didn’t really like how you left Friday. But in my defence, if you had just answered the first call, there had been no need to call that much.”

She glared at me, her arms crossed tight over her chest.

I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “Look, I just wanted to know how you were doing. That’s all. I felt bad for having ruined your moment of peace and freaking you out, okay?”

And just like that, her whole posture changed; her arms loosened until they fell to her sides and she averted her eyes to the floor, looking almost, uncertain. I motioned her to sit down as I closed the door and she sunk onto the couch, folding her hands in her lap, still not meeting my eyes. “I think it’s time to stop this,” she said. “The sessions, I mean.”

What? “Why?” I asked surprized. Where was this coming from?

“Because you’re doing things to me that aren’t good. You make me vulnerable. What happened Friday… you were never supposed to see me like that.”

“You mean that you can’t keep your emotions locked away 24/7? Having feelings doesn’t make you vulnerable. It makes you human.”

“Yes, it does,” she said angrily. “It makes me vulnerable and weak and that isn’t save. If I don’t feel anything, nothing can hurt me.”

What was that with her and that sentence? “Listen, I know you have trouble opening up to people, but it’s not a bad thing to let people into your life.”

“Yes it is!” she exclaimed angrily. “Every time I open up to people, I end up getting hurt. I don’t want to deal with this shit.” The strange thing was, her attitude wasn’t there, she really believed this. What had happened to her? I started asking myself that more and more lately. The worst thing was, I couldn’t ask. She had made it very clear in the beginning that that was off topic.

“Everyone has to deal with the fact that when you let someone in there is a possibility to get hurt, it’s normal. But I won’t hurt you,” I tried to reassure her.

“Of course you will, everyone does in the end,” she snapped. She wasn’t even trying to offend me this time, that was the saddest realization. Life had taught her this. Her experiences had her building up this safety mechanism and she had been clutched onto it almost her whole life. How was I supposed to convince her that she wasn’t seeing the whole picture? That she’d just been really unlucky.

“Olivia… if you feel uncomfortable about what happened Friday, we won’t talk about it again, I swear. And I’ll try my hardest to show you that you can trust me, but don’t stop talking to me.”

Olivia looked at her hands for a moment and then confessed quietly, “It’s not a good thing to feel. It’s dangerous. I always held people at a distance. That’s what kept me safe all these years. You don’t understand.”

But I longed to understand. I wished I could just make her see that she could tell me anything. That she could trust me. She was struggling with what happened to her, I could see that. And I just wanted to help her. Suddenly, something else popped into my head. “That’s why you are drunk more often lately, isn’t it? To feel numb again. So you don’t have to feel anything.”