Until I Met You

33: Until I Met You

Chapter 33

4 months later

Ever since my mother’s accident, things had slowly started to look up.

Diana, with limited injuries and damages, recovered in just a few short weeks, while my mother – who obviously got the brute of the injuries – took a little longer to heal. By the end of January she was back at work, taking it easy at first, but by the time February came to an end, she was as good as new.

I, however, took a little longer to recover from the events of that January night. For weeks after the accident I had woken up in the middle of the night after having a nightmare. Most of them consisted of the same thing; my mom slowly dying in a beat up car while I was frozen, watching the life and blood drain out of her from the sidewalk.

Nobody knew about the nightmares at first, my mom was on sleeping pills that let her sleep through the night, and I hadn’t uttered a word about them, not even to my closest friends.

Near the beginning of February, when the nightmares had started to appear less frequently, I fell asleep at Cason’s. We had been having a movie night, and around midnight I had fallen asleep in his arms as the movie continued to play. When the haunting scenes started to play out in my sleeping brain once again, Cason had woken me up before the end and asked me what was wrong.

That’s when I broke down again.

I admitted to him the nightmares I had been having in the past weeks, and he wasn’t mad, just comforting. He sat there with me, even though it was three ‘o’clock in the morning, and made me feel better just by being there.

After Cason found out about my reoccurring nightmares, I decided it was time to tell my mom what was going on, and it was probably one of the best decisions I had ever made.

Between the two of us, we decided that it was best for me to go to a couple of therapy sessions, both alone and alongside my mom, to get out all the pent up feelings I had been keeping inside over the last couple of years. I was there to discuss my past with bullying, my feelings over my father’s sudden death, and the realization that things could happen in a moment’s notice – just like my mother’s accident.

The first and second sessions were quite hard, trying to open up to a complete stranger about my past, but with my mom sitting there beside me, I was able to get comfortable and give the therapist everything she needed. When it was time to go at the sessions alone, I already felt comfortable around the woman, so it wasn’t all that difficult to open up.

Now, even three months after starting the sessions, I still made a bi-weekly visit to just talk about how I was feeling and getting on with life.

Since arriving in Avondale, Cason had been trying to get me to open up, and I thought he had finished his job before my mom’s accident. What surprised me, however, was the fact that after my therapy session, I knew I still had one more step to go.

I had learned to accept the fact that my father’s death was a tragic accident, but after leaving home so quickly after the accident, I never got the closure I needed to truly move on.