It does. It feels like my heart’s been shattered into sharp pieces that are cutting up the person I used to be from the inside out.
“…but it is more than that. What you’ve suffered is a severe abandonment trauma, in not one, but two heavy doses.” Her choice of words is not lost on me as I allow the dose of reality to ricochet among the fragments of feeling I still keep in my chest. “Did you feel the flooding sensation again?”
The couple from earlier are laughing outside the window now. He has his hands fisted in her coat lapels as she brushes her fingers through his hair. They are happy, and they are fucking idiots.
“Charleston?”
I look over at her and nod. “Yes. I did.”
“And how did that make you feel this time?” she presses.
As I curl my hands into fists, I feel my nails digging into the fleshy part of my palms. “Like I always do.”
“Angry?”
My jaw has followed suit with the rest of my body, clenching tightly while all I do is nod. Dr. Colby says it’s common to come out of the flooding sensation with anger as a result of my confusion and lack of closure, but to be honest, I prefer it. The sadness that so often works its way into my bones cripples me, but the anger… I can manage that, or even channel it. But not grief. No, grief demands to be felt and leaves no survivors in its wake. Grief is what left me sobbing on the cold bathroom floor for days until Henry found me. For all of his demons, Henry was simply an angel with no halo and one wing in the fire.
“It’s likely you’ll experience that sensation at the things that remind you of him for quite some time.”
The statement I’ve become familiar with is in no way comforting. I want to forget him. I want to hate him. But my body and mind are physically incapable of doing so, and thus, I am left this echo of a person. I’ve never felt that way about another person in my young life. Whether it was love or not, I don’t know. All I know is that it felt like our souls were intertwined, all of our hopes, fears, and dreams entangled together.
It’s as if our hearts have been tethered to one another against their own will. It truly is a tragic chaos to be attached to someone in that way and not be able to have them. It’s a beautiful mess, a constant longing, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Casualties be damned. And my stupid fucking heart is bleeding dry for a man who, for all intents and purposes, could be dead. That would be easier though. It would be easier if he had died than to accept the fact that the only man I had given my heart to disappeared in the night like a coward. No phone calls, no forwarding address, nothing. Just fucking gone.
Four months later, my brother died of an overdose.
I hear the click of the clock on her desk and nearly sigh in relief.
“That’s our time for today.” She smiles sadly at me as I go to stand. “But Charleston”—I lift my eyes to meet hers—”you need to find a way to cope with these losses, something that makes you happy, or this darkness will swallow you whole in time.”
The burn in my throat returns as she stands to hug me. We’ve hugged after every session for the last year, but it knocks the wind out of me every time. Dr. Colby helps protect me as best she can, even from myself.
After closing the door behind me, I wave goodbye to the receptionist and step out into the hallway. As I maneuver through the building, my mind starts to wander to places it shouldn’t go but often does, and I don’t notice the man coming up the stairs until I’ve plowed right into him. He quickly steadies me, mumbling an apology before taking off to wherever he came from, but not before the smell of the man’s cologne washes over me. It was his smell. The cologne he always wore.
My body starts to shake uncontrollably. Leaning one hand against the wall for support and clutching my chest with the other, I focus on breathing as the familiarity assaults my senses. This is what flooding feels like—it’s fucking awful.
“Are you okay?” a deep voice rumbles from beside me.
Turning my head, I watch a man, only a few years my elder, eye me as he pulls his gaze off my legs and back up to my face.
“I’m fine,” I snap, but manage a half-assed smile to go along with it.
The boy clucks his tongue before leaning his hip against the wall. “You sure are.”
His eyes trail over my body, and it's like I can feel the serotonin and dopamine spreading through me like fire. Ironically, it’s just like I imagine shooting up feels like, a high. In that moment, with the comically cheesy boy and his pick up line that would no doubt leave him shy of an Oscar winning performance, I feel temporarily healed. It may be a Band-Aid covering a bullet hole, but enough of them would stop the bleeding.
I can’t abuse drugs. I can’t abuse alcohol. A drink or two, sure, but drowning in my sorrows isn’t going to happen. But men? The cause of my anguish? I can use them, can’t I?
Because this high makes me feel fucking lethal, and I never want to come down from it.
Eight and a half years later.