S A R A

Ch 45

45

I only drove to and from doctor appointment those days.

Several in, my doctor informed I said I thought I was going to die to her.

I never said that, I said to her.

She made me fill out these questionnaires each time, and her letting me know this was supposed to be some sort of assurance to me that I was not doing better.

Though that took me aback.

It happened all the time though, she told me, I have clients saying they thought they were having a heart attack – going to the ER and everything, but no, she would say cheerily. Always asking me how the weather was, as if to test my own perspective on the temperament of the sky would give her insight to my at risk state.

How could I explain to her that I literally felt my heart break that night?

I never took the pills.

It was my version of control.

Instead, I would carefully count them out each week, flushing down the toilet the appropriate amount needed to get a refill from the doctor.

To give me more time...

I didn't know for what.

At the regular appointments, the therapist talked about differentiating between the facts – what actually happened – and out feelings and the thoughts in our head and how large it may have seemed to us.

I retorted with the statement that I've never been addicted to heroin, but I imagine this is what it would feel like in the withdrawal, abstinence stage.

She didn't find that funny.

It was a time where, even if someone had asked me directly how or what I was feeling, I wasn't sure I was able to answer it myself.

There are people who are writers before they even know it themselves.

So, I wrote.

I wrote like I there was a fire burning from the inside, and the only to get it out was to convert the flames into words on a paper.

I wrote the way one writes under the influence of something greater than us, deliriously.

I wanted to cleanse myself of everything and everyone.

I wanted to understand why I allowed myself to accept to be hurt in the same place over and over again.

I wanted to find that damaged part inside of me and hold it and be gentle with it. Tell it I'm sorry and start all over again.

I wanted to shake off the dust of my heart. A heart that was waiting for something never meant to last. I wanted to stop making room for a pain that was futile. And yet, in that writing and, in that futility, there was a new kind of meaning. Something that was simultaneously my own and shared by the emotions of the people in the world.

I wanted to know my self-centeredness and abolish it.

To look inwards in order to be able to live outwards.

And I guess, above all, I wanted to live.