"I'm Not Crazy"

XXVI.

I want to be able to say that it was eye opening, and short lived. It just wasn't.

Riley walked away and then did not come back. There wasn't a way around it. He did not say goodbye. He did not express regret. It was over, and the conversation was closed.

In the time that followed, I felt very much validated in my decision to not make friends when I was growing up. I was thrown between homes and programs so frequently that I had just intuitively known it was better. Losing friends hurts quite a lot. It practically burns.

"It's not your fault," Bryn had told me on the drive home from her mothers. Several days had come and went. It was already the new year. I thought more than a week had passed, or maybe even two. I did not understand time anymore and relied solely on the calendars on my phone sending me alerts about happenings in my life. I'd felt this chaos broiling. I'd set the reminders immediately upon my return before falling into it.

Bryn simply did not understand the scope, I thought.

"He's throwing a tantrum," she'd said. "He just can't reign himself in around our mom."

Maybe that was true. I'd seen him fall to putty in her presence, but it wasn't the full story. It wasn't just her.

"He gets like this sometimes," Bryn assured me.

And she grabbed my hand the way Riley had, and she looked me in the eyes, and I remembered that look in her gaze as if it were burned into me. Bryn was a nurse. She was trained to look beyond the flesh. She knew how to use a gentle voice to get what she needed. She knew how to coddle bad news.

I'd looked away, because I was well versed in the sympathetic face nurses made.

I knew she was wrong about this one. It wasn't true. He was not experiencing a phase or a lapse in his own ability to function. In truth, Riley had seen the trap that I was. He'd seen the reality behind the farce. I'd given him a glimpse of the things in the pit.

I was the villain and now Riley knew. Maybe he didn't know circumstance. He certainly didn't know the details, but he'd seen what was left of Matthew and he now knew I was responsible. He couldn't look at me the same after that.

It didn't help that he was right.

I had not called him, and he had not called me. Silence reigned in the air, and I was moving on to my own life again just as I had before. Riley was likely doing the same.

I'd seen my therapist the day or so after Christmas. She told me she had spoken to the caseworker and that the caseworker had spoken to my mother. My mother had reported that the holiday went well. We'd enjoyed a family Christmas. Everybody was so impressed by how well I was. I'd shaped up into a wonderful adult. I was impressive. I was something to marvel at.

My mother had not called me either. She hadn't reached out, even when I'd texted her a direct "Merry Christmas," on the evening of the holiday.

At the very least, she seemed to agree with me in that the therapist and the caseworker both did not need to know that the event had gone so sour. They didn't need to know that no gifts had been exchanged, or that no carols had been sung.

"It was nice," I'd said just to agree with her.

Everybody was so proud to see a family reconnected.

She'd asked me about my meds. She'd asked if I felt like things were going well, and if I was taking them. I confirmed that I was, and that I had responsibly taken the ones for panic when needed.

"You're doing amazing," the therapist had told me. "Anniversaries can be so hard, but you trucked right on through this rough patch. It's admirable Charlotte."