Camryn Quinn is finally getting what she wants...sort of. Moving into a dorm and away from her not so supportive father is a good first step, but like everything with him, it comes with strings. She must attend the college of his choosing for at lea...
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I spent the entire next week stuck inside my own head. As if I hadn't already spent the last eighteen years there. I'm used to being painfully buried in my thoughts to the point that each neuro pathway has felt like my own personal prison. I've spent years creating a holding cell of the worst things I could possibly think, true and false, about myself, about others. Trauma can do that though.
It can hold you captive, binding you to painful experiences, making you believe things to be true even if they could never feasibly happen. It got to a point that I would do anything to make the thoughts stop, to free myself. And every single time I ended up back in the same place with a temporary consultation, but never an actual permanent escape.
I became an expert at compartmentalizing and pretending I was fine. Until The Incident happened, and I was forced to face my demons head on. Even after years of therapy, I'm still working on healing those parts of my brain. It's a conscious effort, one that only time can advance.
But even in the best of times, relapses are possible.
I've found myself compartmentalizing again this week. Except this time for a completely different reason. A shiny new case has been built just big enough for two green eyes and a pair of cowboy boots.
I've worked myself ragged trying to avoid thoughts of him. I've practically begged my brain to reinstate the original image of him in my head. I would give anything for him to just be a carbon copy of my brother or our dad. Just another football playing asshole with no regard for other human life.
I still refuse to believe that he didn't somehow slip rose colored glasses over my eyes when I wasn't paying attention. It's the only explanation or the shift in my brain, or the reason I don't entirely hate it.
It didn't even cross my mind until a few days after the night at Harry's. Of course I had replayed our conversation over and over. Rolling the tapes back was strictly to try and understand where it all went wrong.
It wasn't until I saw my leather journal poking out from beneath a stack of stuff on my desk that the epiphany hit me. Pulling it out felt like letting go of a sigh after a particularly exhausting day.
For the first time in years, I wanted to write it down. I didn't just want to let the memory live in my head. I wanted to commit it to print, to have something tangible to remember it by. I wished I had taken a picture of him, of us. It could have even been the milkshake we shared. Anything to commemorate the moment I realized I didn't hate him, that I didn't mind it.
Something about that night made me realize I wasn't as alone as I let myself feel sometimes.
I arrive for our next session with the new outlook, but I'm still not sure what to expect. I don't even want anything to change. Best case scenario, Taylor will just keep fucking with me until we find that familiar pattern.
