Trauma Bond

Chapter Seventeen: Picking Up The Pieces

A few weeks had passed. You spent a week in the mental health facility, having improved after finding the right combination of prescription medications and visiting with many different mental health professionals every day. They set you up with outpatient care, starting out with one visit a week, and eventually getting you worked up to once every two weeks then once a month once they deemed it necessary. 

You had returned to work, arranging a short meeting with your boss to explain your situation and ask for leniency with being able to make time for your psychiatrist appointments. You provided documentation from your discharge paperwork, fully expecting your boss to either fire you or refuse your request for needing some extra time off, but they were very accommodating and understanding. They granted your request and gave you extra break time on the days that you needed to go to your appointments. 

The medications helped a lot, but of course it didn't completely erase the effects of the breakup and all of your trauma, which was why you continued to work through it with your psychiatrist. You had stopped smoking cigarettes in this time, since you weren't able to smoke while you were staying in the mental hospital, so you were able to get help with finding other coping mechanisms that helped. 

Sasha was the one who brought you home from the hospital, offering to let you stay at her house for a little while until you felt comfortable going home, which you gratefully accepted. You really wanted to go home, but you also weren't ready to face the memories that your apartment had waiting for you, since you were still in a fragile mental state. You stayed a few days with her and decided you were ready to go back home. 

Once you got home, you did all of your laundry and got caught up on household chores that were neglected while you were gone. When you went into the kitchen, you were faced with the flowers that Eren had given you that day. They were dying. It was as if the universe was throwing it in your face that, just like the flowers, the relationship with the person who gave you to them was dead.

You had to take a break to allow yourself to cry. The medication caused you to feel emotionally numb for the most part, but you still felt the pain from your broken heart. You had accepted it, but it still hurt. You felt the urge to go smoke a cigarette, but you decided that you needed to let that habit go in an effort to better your life, and instead focused on the different breathing techniques that you learned. 

You sat down on the couch, making your back straight and closing your eyes. You took a deep breath, holding it for three seconds and slowly exhaling. You did this five times, which helped some. You opened your eyes and got up, going back to the kitchen and throwing away the dead roses and finished cleaning up the kitchen. 

You cooked yourself a quick dinner, making a simple pasta dish. Since you were gone from your house for a little bit over a week, you had to toss a lot of the groceries in the fridge because they had gone spoiled, but luckily you still had some ingredients to use for tonight's dinner. 

You made a mental note of going grocery shopping after work the next day while you made a sauce for your pasta. The thought of doing regular, everyday things gave you a slight sense of hope. You were living by yourself for the first time in years, leaving you to take care of just yourself. Maybe being on your own won't be so bad. Sure, things weren't exactly going great, but this was a start. You needed to take baby steps to get back to some semblance of normalcy.

You finished making your dinner, sitting down on the couch and mindlessly watching whatever came up on the tv once you turned it on.

After eating dinner, you cleaned up and decided to get ready for bed early. You were overwhelmingly exhausted, partially as a side effect of your medications, but mostly because you hadn't had a good nights sleep in weeks.