Blonde Ivory

Number Thirty-One: h.m.s

Hayden Sterling

Diary Entry #8

Date: January 10th

I've made the worst mistake of my life, Journal. How can I make the conscious decision to try to be better; to actually make an attempt at getting through this dark age of my life and then just throw everything I've accomplished away? I thought I was getting better. The people around me thought that I was getting better.

My medication is working. My brain is working. My body was working slightly better because my muscles weren't always one step away from collapsing. I was beginning to think straight. My thoughts were comprehensible and actually had logic behind them.

The harsh truth that I have to accept is that I can no longer blame my mistakes on my body or my mind or my mental illness. I am the one to blame. I knew what I was doing. I'm the one who agreed to do what she asked me to do. I was fully conscious when my lips wrapped around the word "yes".

I'm the one at fault. I'm the one responsible for what happened. I did this to myself. I did something that I knew would hurt not only my sanity and road to recovery but also Connor. I made that decision. Nobody else did. Nobody forced me.

Even though I know that I'm at fault, and I know there are no excuses for my actions, I still want to explain why I did it. I want you, Journal, to understand why I would do something so stupid.

I'd gone into Dr. Townsend's office with no intention of doing what I did. In fact, the night before I was explaining to Connor that I was going to interrogate her and get to the bottom of why she prescribed me a medicine that was dangerous at such a high dosage. I was also planning on asking her why she didn't tell me that I suffer from schizophrenia. That seems like something your therapist is supposed to tell you, after all.

Regardless, I had an appointment just fifteen minutes after Macha's because hers ran a little late. The thing with Dr. Townsend is that appointments never run late. Ever. I was genuinely shocked to hear that because every time I go to Dr. Townsend, she asks me to talk about my immediate issue and then she tries to solve it by giving me advice. That whole process takes maybe thirty to forty minutes. My appointments with her never take up the entire scheduled time. I'm never in her office speaking about my issues for a complete hour.

So I walked in expecting to see stacks and stacks of papers on Macha's case. That wasn't at all what I saw. I walked in to see Dr. Townsend standing in front of her desk, slipping on her kitten heel shoes and buttoning up her shirt.

I paused in my place and she looked up at me, meeting my gaze for maybe five seconds before she walked all the way around her desk to her seat. When she looked up at me again, I noticed her cheeks had reddened. I closed the door behind me and paced up to the front of her desk.

"What's going on here?" I'd asked. She didn't answer me. She closed a yellow folder that had close to nothing in it and straightened up the contents of her desk.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, Hayden." She murmured.

She was messing with me, of course. Her eyebrow twitched upward. She was testing me to continue and unfortunately I took the bait.

"What, huh? Ruining one minor's life wasn't enough? You needed to ruin Macha's life too?" She rolled her eyes at the urgency in my tone.

"Macha is not a minor anymore." She blinked her eyes slowly.

This was an action I knew to be seductive, but I paid no mind to it at the time. I don't know why I disregarded it at the time, but now it's become obvious that she knew what she was doing. I suppose I was too angry at where my thoughts were taking me to notice.