No one knows me here.
They don’t know what I’ve done.
Not like back home, where questions and accusations linger in every gaze. Where reporters flitter around like blow flies to a corpse. Where people gawk and whisper and speculate. They never want the truth, though.
They want the spectacle.
The sensation.
Fodder for their dinnertime dialogue because they’ve run out of things to talk about. They like feeling a part of the tragedy, almost as if it’s their claim to fame. You can hear them in conversations saying,I’m from there, you know. Like that makes them special. Like they know anything of what really happened that night.
Frozen in this ever-present anxiety, I watch a little girl in a unicorn helmet ride past, pumping her tiny legs to propel her glittery pink bike forward. I smile at her tired-looking parents. A picture-perfect family, able to venture out into the world together.
Envy coils tightly around my core before I smack it away, reminding myself I know nothing about them. The dad could be a cheater for all I know. Driving his wife to drink during the day. A friendly smile can hide so much.
The parents struggle to keep up with the little girl, whose legs have carried her all the way to the end of the sidewalk. The dad’s belly jiggles with each step, sweat gathering at his thinning hairline. He pauses to check me out. From here, he can’t see my patchy dye job, taking my hair from auburn to an orange-blonde.
I wonder what it would be like to have him on top of me, humping and pumping away. I shudder at the turn my imagination has taken, knowing it’s been far too long since I’ve gotten laid. With the way I live, I don’t have much opportunity. I make plans to visit with my vibrator later tonight to take the edge off. I’m clearly in need of the distraction.
Eight minutes.
My heartbeat has slowed, but the effort to keep calm claws at my psyche. A constant battle of wills. Some days, the anxiety wins. Beating me down until I’m a shivering mess. Some days, it’s easier. This extreme reaction doesn’t hit me all the time. Other times, I can walk around the block or take a trip to the grocery store, the library. And then there’s today.
Maybe it’s the date or the fact that the sun is too bright. The wind too crisp. The car noises too loud, my sweater too scratchy, my sleep too ephemeral. But mostly, I think it’s the date.
Not a day has gone by that I don’t feel the scars of that one decision. That one stupid game of Truth or Dare.
A blaring beep breaks my thoughts, and I scramble to shut off the timer on my phone. Fingers grip the cool metal knob as I thrust myself back inside, feeling the instant calm of being within the walls of my house settling over me like I’ve stepped through a veil of magic.
It’s not rational, but it’s how my brain works, somehow believing I’m safer now than I was mere seconds ago.
My heart calms to its regular cadence.
Steady and safe.
Familiar.
I manage to set my coffee cup down that I’ve been clutching for dear life, so hard that there’s an angry red indent from the handle across my palm.
The thought occurs to me that I spend an insane amount of time trying to be okay enough to function, which has me letting out a humorless laugh as I run my index finger down the crimson crevice in my hand. Oh, how far I’ve come from the girl I once was.
“So, how did the exercise go?” my therapist asks from her tiny window on my laptop. Her gray hair is expertly thrown up in low-slung bun, and her deep brown eyes peer from behind her thick, round glasses, almost as if she can see through all my carefully crafted bullshit.
My eyebrows raise on instinct at her question, and my voice trails out tight as I lie through my teeth. “It was fine.”
My legs are folded beneath me on the fuzzy pink office chair I bought last week to make the space feel a little more homey. A little moreme.Funny how I can be drawn to bright, happy decor while I’m so utterly depressed. Maybe it’s my subconscious trying to get me to snap out of it. If only it were that easy.
“Mallory, we’ve gone over this. I can tell when you’re lying to me.”
While that is true to a point, she’s never seemed to catch on to my using a different name with her. Or she doesn’t want to press me to disclose my real name. I find giving her this fake name easier than having her inevitably dig up the old news articles. Ones that journalists hounded me for. Stood outside my house for. And showed up at my school with cameras in hand, waiting to take my picture. All my other therapists would end up looking into the case, prodding me for information I didn’t have. Wanting to fix the gaping hole in my memory. Or worse, believing what they have written about me. One even threatened to go to the police, resulting in yet another move. Another town. Constantly on the run from my dark past. It’s fucking exhausting.
“It was challenging.” I amend my answer to her, running my fingers over the pink fuzz, channeling the anxiety into somethingtangible. Some part of me believes that if I stay busy, the stress won’t catch up to me.
I want to get better, but sometimes, avoiding the truth comes easier. She jots something down on her notepad, and the scratching of the pen digging into the paper sets my teeth on edge. I’m already strung tightly from my panic attack this morning, not to mention the weight of today hangs heavily about my shoulders, while guilt cinches my chest like a corset.
“I want you to do the same thing tomorrow and see how it goes, and we will meet back at the same time, Tuesday. How have you been feeling otherwise? Any side-effects since upping your medication? Hallucinations? Dry mouth? Tremors?”
“No, nothing.”
