This isn't weird.

Left Unchecked

GSR, her therapist had called it in shorthand—Guilt, Shame, Regret.

The endless vicious cycle that had danced her around like a puppet on a string for as long as she could remember.

Perfectly normal, Dr. Nusbaum ("You can call me Nora, if you're comfortable with it," she had said on multiple occasions, but Millie never was) had assured her, but easily amplified by trauma, and destructive if left unchecked. Destructive if left unchecked—the words could just as easily be describing Millie herself, she sometimes mused while she was staring at the ceiling on bitter nights when she couldn't fall asleep.

Guilt, shame, regret. It felt so fundamental to who she was. A part of her, like a tumor that always grew back no matter how many times it was excised, eating away at everything inside until there was nothing left but a visceral instinct to fight or fly.

Guilt, shame, regret. That was what had compelled her onto that Greyhound the night she left home for good. It was what had stolen her out of Walt's life, convinced her that no matter what he had told her when they said their goodbyes, he would never be able to look at her the same. It was what made what should have been an obvious lie plausible, allowed her to accept Tess's words without question, and what whispered into her ear that receiving Arthur's kindness obligated her to swallow back her grief and give him what he wanted—herself. All of which were just more things to feel guilty, ashamed, and regretful about.

Now, speeding without direction over loose gravel that sent her car skidding at every turn, she was thinking about that night on the Greyhound. Eighteen and alone in the world for the very first time, vaulted all at once into a new life populated only by strangers. For the first few hours, she had curled up in her seat, hugged her knees to her chest and silently wept, but eventually, sleep took her. She awoke some hours later to discover an unfamiliar landscape rushing by her window, a sweeping panorama of feather-soft grass swaying in the wind and distant mountains gleaming in the sunrise.

That was the moment when her younger self was no longer making an escape, but a journey. Her life was beginning. The coming onslaught of strangers wasn't something to dread, but to celebrate. Nobody in her future had to know that her family tree was white trash right down to the roots, that neither of her parents had finished high school, or that her father had married her very pregnant mother in the chapel of a rehab clinic.

They wouldn't know that, by the middle of freshman year, both she and the janitor had given up trying to scrub the constant graffiti off of her locker, which had at least desensitized her to the sting of being called dyke and slut. Nor would they know that the only reason she hadn't been expelled for assaulting Hoyt Harrison was that he was too embarrassed to admit that his nose had been broken by a slutty dyke.

Nobody would know where she had come from.

Nobody would know what she had done.

She could be whoever she wanted to be.

Millie craved that feeling now, the freedom of knowing she would never again have to look anyone who knew her secrets and her shame in the eye ever again. To be a fresh-faced little leaf on the wind, beholden to no one and nothing, her expectations for the future erased and replaced with a big, shiny question mark. To outrun the guilt, shame, regret before it could eat her alive. To go on a journey.

What was stopping her?

Ben, her heart replied.

And yet she recoiled at the thought of being anywhere near him. Every time she tried to imagine it, she saw instead a crystal clear memory of the last time she had seen him, when she had destroyed everything in sight, and he was the one who ended up bleeding in the debris.

Destructive if left unchecked.

What was she thinking, baiting him into calling her? She'd already proven herself incapable of treating his heart with the care it deserved. Every ill-conceived step they had made toward a romantic relationship served as anti-proof of concept. She had abandoned him, driven him into depression, toyed with him, abandoned him again. The petty mistakes she'd once held against him were trivial compared to what she had put him through. She had done him real harm, inflicted the kind of damage that would stay with him for life. It was cruel of her to have engaged with him again.

If she really cared about him, she would leave him the hell alone, let him move on with his life and find a woman who wasn't selfish and toxic and irreparably damaged, a woman who deserved his love.

A woman who was not, as he had so accurately diagnosed, doomed to live out her own special version of an inescapable white trash blood prophecy.

Jewish, probably.

She kept driving.

 Sunrise found her in Nowhere, Oklahoma, where the adrenaline of her flight at last dipped and left her struggling to keep her eyelids from drooping. Forced to accept her limitations, Millie pulled over. It was time to find somewhere to sleep. She rifled through her bag in search of her phone. Which pocket had she put it in?

The bag was packed so tightly, she realized, there was no finding anything without dumping out all of its contents. It wasn't worth the energy. She was on the highway—it wouldn't take too long to spot a motel.

She continued on, aimless and exhausted, until a roadside sign promising a vacancy came into view. It was run down, nearly deserted, and no doubt a reliable place to score some heroin, but it would do for a few hours of rest. The obvious lack of business did nothing to dull the venomous glower Millie received from the woman at the front desk for interrupting the subtitled telenovela she had been watching on the grainy old CRT television mounted in the lobby. Minimal words were exchanged as she checked Millie in and gave her a key (a real key, rather than the magnetic card she expected), but her animosity was renewed when Millie returned ten minutes later with a meek request for a pen and some paper.

Walking back to her seedy little room, a battered steno pad in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other, Millie decided that she would wait until checkout to inquire about the possibility of an envelope and stamp.