Cry Until You Bleed

14- Hockey

“Ana, this is in your best interest,” Dr. Lombardi tells me during our session on Monday as I’m sitting in the comfy chair across from hers, absentmindedly twirling my dark hair in my fingers.

“No,” I say stubbornly. “I won’t do it. You’ll have to physically force me or inject it into me for me to take those pills. I will not do it.”

“Why are you afraid of them?” She asks me. “They’ll just help you sleep.”

“Yeah, they help me sleep but then I go into this deep sleep or something and I start remembering things that I don’t want to remember. I have nightmares and they’re really dark and I promise you that they’ll do more damage than good. I had one small little nightmare, that doesn’t mean that I need sleeping pills just to make those nightmares even worse. Where is the logic in that, really?”

“Okay, well we’re not going to force you to take your pills,” She tells me and my shoulders slack with relief because I was honestly terrified that they’d throw me into solitary and put a needle in my arm if I resisted. “But they will be there for you if you ever feel like you need them.”

“I will never feel like I need them,” I assure her. “They’re the reason that I’m here in the first place.”

“What do you mean by that?” She wonders, cocking her head to the side, tapping the bottom of her pen on the edge of the paper.

“I mean that at first, I was depressed which was understandable, so they gave me these sleeping pills so of course, I start taking them because I think that they’re going to make me better. But before I started taking the pills, I didn’t remember anything about that night- it was all just a big blur and I only knew what the doctors could tell me. Little did I know, however, that they started bringing back all of these hidden memories from that night in the form of nightmares. That’s when I really went bonkers. I only tried to kill myself after I started remembering. If I could just forget again, everything would be so much easier,” I explain to her.

“I know that I’ve said this before but I really just want to stress that I think that if you just go through what happened, and you open that door instead of trying to shut it off completely, it would really help your healing process,” She tells me sincerely.

“Or it could just make everything 200% worse,” I suggest. “And I’m not willing to take that chance. I don’t want to think about it. Just thinking about thinking about it makes my skin crawl right now.”

“Okay, I understand that,” She nods. “But maybe it’s just something to consider for the future.”

“Speaking of thinks go consider, I have been thinking of that thing that you told me to think about. Reasons to live and whatnot,” I tell her, referring to the crummy list that Niles was able to scrap up yesterday. Once I rudely barged away from him yesterday, he apparently gave the piece of paper to Nurse Sophie because later, she came up to me and handed it to me during dinner time. Now, it’s tucked in my journal up in my room for safe keeping although I almost wanted to just throw it away.

“Really? That’s fantastic,” Dr. Lombardi grins at me, seemingly proud of me and I don’t know why, but that kind of makes me happy. “Have you come up with anything so far?”

I shrug. “Not really. Macaroni pizza, Nsync, and Dickenson poetry is about it. I also want to live long enough to at least finish this book that I’m reading by Virginia Wolff because it’s pretty amazing. I’ll have to add that to the list when I get upstairs.”

“You have a physical list?” She wonders, apparently surprised that I actually wrote down all of this stuff.

I nod, leaning forward with my finger still twirling through my hair. “Yeah. This guy, Niles, he was kind of helping me with it yesterday so we brainstormed. It was humiliating.”