Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I scrolled through my short list of contacts and found her number, hitting call. It was early on a Saturday morning. She wouldn’t answer, but that was okay. Things weren’t at crisis point… yet.
Her automated message kicked in and I waited for the beep. “Hi, Dr. Katy. It’s Harleigh. Harleigh Maguire. Something happened, and well, I think I need a session. I’m okay… but I feel… I feel restless. Anyway, I’ll talk to you soon hopefully. Bye.”
I hung up and stared out at the horizon. I didn’t want to relapse. I didn’t want to end up back in Albany Hills again. But it wasn’t something I could necessarily control.
The emotional pain of finding my mom dead, of being ripped from my life in The Row, and being abandoned by Nix, was something I didn’t allow myself to feel often. It creeped up on me sometimes though, striking without warning, like a huge weight being dropped on me, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t escape out from under it. I’d gotten good at distracting myself from those intense feelings. Whether I refused to let them take root or focused on inane things instead, I’d learned to manage them.
To live with them.
But seeing Nix again, being forced to face the truth of the last nine months and having the intimate details of my life banded around school… it was too much, and slowly every defense I’d built over the last few months, even my coping mechanism, was being eroded away.
I wanted to be strong, to believe that I could do it. But the truth was, I was tired.
So freaking tired.
My finger ran absentmindedly over the ugly raised scar along my wrist. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t. I hadn’t wanted to last year either, not really. But things had gotten too much to bear. The pain and grief and heartache had become a living breathing thing inside me, blotting out every shred of light until the darkness had slowly consumed me until I was desperate for a way out. A way to make it all stop. Just for a moment.
I wanted to believe that things would get better. That one day, when I was far far away from Darling Hill, I would be happy again.
But sometimes, I found myself wondering if maybe it would be just better to end it all.