The Trouble Is

Chapter 52: Tyra

I haven't seen Laura, my therapist, since the week after the funeral.

"Just let yourself talk, Anna," she says. "I know you think you will never be happy again, but you will. Not at first, but one day soon for a few fleeting seconds. It will be there and gone again so fast you will doubt it ever happened. The next time may be just a little bit longer, long enough for you to take a deep breath. And so it goes. It's really not years that make a life, you know. It's moments. Life is a series of moments—some good and others not. One day you will begin to imagine these moments before they happen. You will imagine yourself happy in a moment. That's when you will begin to think that you might be OK in the end."

We think about that for a while. I try to picture myself happy. It seems like too big of a leap to go from here to there.

"Tell me what you were thinking about just now," Laura says.

"Selfish things," I reply in a whisper.

Laura waits. Laura is excellent at waiting.

"Things like who will help me choose bathing suits and go with me to get a tattoo someday. Who will be my maid of honor or push me to do things I'm afraid to do?"

"Those are not selfish things," Laura says. "Those are the things that make a friendship. I read somewhere that friends make the good times better and the bad times bearable."

"I keep grabbing my phone to text her," I say, "and then I think, well, I can just tell her this when I see her tonight. But there is no tonight. Or I'll think that when 'we' go to the mall again, I'll look for a new purse. But there is no 'we.'"

Laura thinks about that while I wipe my eyes.

"I remember some things you told me about right at the start of summer break," she says. "You talked about how you and Katie had your summer motto. Do you remember that? We didn't talk after that, but I'm guessing the motto stuck."

Tyra. It was Tyra so that we would remember to be fierce.

"Katie is gone," she says. "But the things about you both that formed that bond, that friendship, still remain. Perhaps you can focus on those things.

"It takes courage to move forward in life," she adds. "And courage to look at what you once had that was wonderful and life changing about your friendship and then let it happen again."

"So your advice is to go find it again?" I ask.

"No," Laura says. "My advice is to simply be fierce. It will come to you again if you let it."