In Body I Trust Page 10

  “So how have you been?”

  This is how she always started their sessions together. There was never an initial prompt to get her going. Miranda wanted to open the floor for Amelia to talk about whatever it was she needed to. It was up to her to decide where the conversation would go.

  “Well, I certainly don’t feel like I’m progressing at all. Digressing if anything.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Because regardless of what I do every single day, I still find myself feeling more alone than the day before. It’s like, no matter how hard I try, the depression always wins.”

  “Let’s talk about why you’re in the situation you’re in now.”

  “You mean living by myself in a new apartment? Or why I can’t for whatever stupid reason seem to get a hold of my behaviors?”

  “Remember how we try to talk about ourselves.” Miranda always managed to put Amelia in check. “Tell me about your living situation and why you chose it.”

  “Well, I moved to a neighborhood that was closer to downtown so I could try to make friends and actually feel like I was living in Denver instead of a deserted island. I wanted to live alone because I needed to prove to myself that I could recover without anyone’s help. I wanted to feel independent and removed from anything that involved Dominic.” Amelia looked around the room as if the answers would appear on the walls. “I think that about covers it.”

  Miranda turned towards her desk and wrote something down. She didn’t usually write during their sessions, making Amelia wonder what she had said to provoke her to do so.

  “And why do you feel like you haven’t accomplished those things yet?”

  “I don’t know, maybe because I’m lonely and feel like I’ll never be enough for anyone.”

  Miranda had a special power. Her insight, whether it made Amelia upset or not, was never anything Earth shattering. They were things Amelia already knew about herself and the way her brain processed information or emotions. Miranda’s power was simple. She helped her dust off the tools she’d once had and reminded her how to use them in their proper manner.

  Miranda continued her stream of thought, “So, you wanted to be alone, and now you feel lonely. Do you think it’s possible to have both? To be with other people while you continue working on your recovery?”

  Amelia was perplexed. Recovery seemed black and white, as if she had to be entirely alone so as to not risk losing herself into the arms of another person. The idea of someone as a companion had seemed out of the question. No one would be able to complement her, like blue and orange or red and green, colors that are perfect the way they are, but when they’re put together, they bring out something beautiful in the other you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Someone who exudes beauty while standing alone, only to accentuate the other instead of replacing.

  “No, I don’t think that’s possible.”

  Miranda looked up at Amelia with a half-smile, not in a condescending way but as if she were about to bring a world of wisdom into Amelia’s universe.

  “Let’s rewrite the narrative.” This was one of Amelia’s favorite phrases of Miranda’s.

  “Okay…I’m listening.”

  “What if you decided right now that having someone else in your life, man or woman, romantic or not, could also coincide with your recovery? What if you believed it was possible to live alone and focus on yourself, but also allow the human connection, understanding, and support of someone else?”

  Amelia contemplated this in silence for a few moments.

  “But what would that look like? It would just be me having to tell my story over and over again so that way people have a proper ‘heads up’ in case I turn into depressed Amelia or manic Amelia.”

  “I understand that. It’s scary having to be vulnerable with someone else. What is it you fear the most when it comes to exposing yourself for who you are?”

  Amelia paused and bowed her head towards the ground.

  “I’m afraid that when they find out the truth about who I am, they’ll leave me.”

  “Just like Dominic did,” Miranda chimed in. All Amelia could do was nod her head like a small child getting in trouble for sticking their hand in the cookie jar before dinner. She didn’t want to admit that Dominic still had control over her, regardless of how long it’d been since he left or the physical distance between them.

  She couldn’t stop the tears from falling. Miranda handed her a box of tissues, a warm and loving gesture, something she wasn’t used to.

  Amelia couldn’t escape what had happened between her and Dominic. It was a haunting battle that lingered over her like a storm refusing to pass.

  Last fall, Dominic and Amelia had gone through the worst turmoil of their relationship. Drunk at five in the morning after an overnight shift at work, Dominic woke her up by throwing Amelia’s cell phone at her. Feeling Dominic drifting away, Amelia had turned to someone she’d casually dated years before. They reconnected over social media, and for once Amelia felt like she had control of a situation. She could manipulate the relationship without any repercussions, just like Dom had done to her. But then he found their texts and became enraged.

  He threatened to take Luna away from her. The tone in his voice grew louder as he ripped photos off the wall of the life they built together, and shredded them to pieces. He lifted her cell phone above her head, reading the texts out loud to her while she cried. Dominic packed up her belongings into trash bags and threw them in the middle of the living room floor.

  The event continued to escalate when Amelia saw a large kitchen knife sitting on the middle of their empty coffee table. Fearful of what he was capable of, Amelia eventually became the one who was groveling on the floor and begging him to stay.

  They decided to give it one last shot. One last attempt to make their relationship work. They moved into a new apartment together in a sketchy neighborhood in which she never wanted to live. She had a strong feeling in the pit of her stomach that signing the lease was a terrible decision. Her body never lied. But Dominic convinced her while they waited outside the main office with the moving truck filled with furniture and household items they bought together.

  “This will help us save money. And it’s entirely yours if you and I don’t work out.” A notion she’d agreed upon. If they were going to live together, Amelia wanted to be the only one on the lease, that way she’d still have a roof over her head in case Dom wanted to move back home to Massachusetts. But that wasn’t the case. He didn’t move back to the northeast. Amelia dropped him off at the airport for his solo trip to Guatemala. Dom kissed her with reassurance that it would only be a few weeks apart, that their separation would only make them stronger, that he would be home back in her arms before she knew it.

  The first week he was gone, she heard absolutely nothing. Radio silence as if he’d fallen into a blackhole or worse, as if he’d ghosted her like some jerk she met on a dating app. Not the heart of someone she’d devoted herself to for over two years.

  When he finally reached out, he sounded distant—like a long lost third cousin she hadn’t spoken to for decades. He was furious with her. While Amelia was having to navigate the long-distance silence, she was living in an apartment with no heat or hot water in the middle of November in a shady neighborhood that terrified her when she went outside most days. Yet he still managed to manipulate her to make her believe it was her fault.

  “These are your problems, not mine. You haven’t even asked how I’m doing. It’s always about you.”

  This was the part of manipulation that made Dominic the conniving puppeteer in her story, formulating new ways to pry further and deeper into the emotional depths of a human being, only to find Amelia’s weakest insecurities. Like a vampire sinking their teeth deep into the neck until they reached the walls of the capillaries, bursting through until they’ve tasted blood.

  The reason as to why he chose Amelia was because she was a human being with something to give. Amelia gave Domini
c the ability to work while they traveled since her freelance jobs were remote at the time. She passed along some side work to him, cutting her paycheck by a third. He instantly took Amelia’s generosity for granted. He preyed on her in a way she didn’t notice until they were too far along into their travels to bring it up.

  The way Amelia saw it, what manipulators did and how they chose their prey, only one thing mattered: Whether or not they could tap into other people’s emotions for their own benefit. Dom was gaslighting Amelia to get what he wanted—a way out of his small, depressing hometown.

  The distance grew between them. Time passed, they exchanged minimal words with each other every few weeks. They were over. They had been over, but neither one of them wanted to admit the hard truth until one day Amelia couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It’s been six weeks, Dom. Six weeks.” Amelia was fuming, barely able to keep up with her own thoughts, let alone convey them to Dominic over the phone. “I don’t want to be used as your storage unit anymore. You need to get your shit out of the apartment if you’re not coming back.”

  “Okay, I don’t see how I can make that happen seeing as I’m in Guatemala.” Dominic let the silence linger a little longer, “Can you at least mail me my laptop?”

  Amelia hung up the phone, enraged by his proposition. For a month and a half, Amelia drank and smoked herself to sleep to ignore the fact that he left her. That she was too sick, too unhealthy, too damaged to be loved by him or by anyone. She wrote him a text message saying that she couldn’t continue being left in the dark and pushed aside just to twiddle her thumbs like a good housewife waiting for him to finally come home.

  Not much to her surprise, his only response left her feeling more denied than ever.

  DOMINIC: If that’s what you want.

  Her heart had been broken before, but never like this. If Dom couldn’t love her for who she was, she couldn’t either.

  “Are you with me, Amelia?” Miranda waved her hand in front of her face, trying to bring her back to the present moment. “What are you feeling right now?”

  “I’m mad. No, I’m furious….” Amelia’s voice trailed off. “But I also feel broken. I don’t think I have what it takes to put the pieces back together.”

  “I know it doesn’t feel easy, but this is the place you have to go. This is where you fall in order to rise back up. Before Dominic, what was the hardest thing you had to go through?”

  This was tough for Amelia. Her entire life was like walking up a steep mountain carrying hundreds of bricks on her back. Everything seemed impossible and she could barely recollect a time when things were easy.

  “I guess it was when I moved to New Hampshire after college. That was probably the most difficult time of my life I can think of before now.”

  “And do you remember what it felt like when that part of your life became a story you told rather than a truth you were living?”

  Amelia thought about those two years living in New Hampshire. She’d been engaged and too young to know what abuse looked like, a pattern she continued to repeat. In a manic state, she packed up her belongings and moved north with seventy dollars to her name. Amelia’s sister came to her rescue, reminded her what she was capable of, and helped Amelia to get back on her feet.

  “I do,” she whispered under her breath. “I really do. But I don’t remember how I got there.”

  “Well, this might be hard to hear, but the truth is that it won’t look the same. These are different circumstances, despite how similar they may seem. You can’t copy and paste the timeline only to think that if you follow these guidelines or steps that you’ll magically come out the other end. This is an entirely different story. Just remember, you are the author. You can rewrite the narrative at any time. There is no expiration date.”

  Amelia knew she was right, but it was easier said than done. They sat in silence for a few moments while Miranda waited to see if Amelia wanted to say anything.

  “So, what’s the next move you’re going to make?” Miranda asked. “What’s one thing you will do to start rewriting?”

  Amelia played with her ring, fidgeting as she searched within the filing cabinet system within her brain. There were tons of things she could do, they all just felt unattainable, but she knew what Miranda meant. She needed to make just one decision. One move that would push her forward.

  “Well, I’ve been wanting to quit smoking for a while now and feel like every time I try, I fail. A few hours later I’m back at the store buying the next pack.”

  “You bring up your smoking quite a bit. Why do you think there is such shame associated with it?”

  The first time Amelia quit was one of the most difficult things she’d ever done, but she managed to kick cigarettes and shape up her life for two solid years.

  “Maybe because I hate myself for starting again. For having Dom influence me into thinking it was a good idea.”

  “How can you rephrase the part about hating yourself?”

  There she was, putting her in check again.

  “Okay, okay. I don’t hate myself. I was vulnerable and because of that I was easily influenced to fall into old habits that used to be a crutch.” Amelia said back sarcastically. “It’s a lesson learned, and still a lesson failed.”

  “It’s not a lesson failed. But I’m going to tell you something that I want you to take some time to sit with.”

  Here we go, another mantra or something.

  Amelia became defensive when she knew Miranda was right.

  “Cigarettes.” Miranda took a brief pause to reiterate the importance of what she was about to say next as she leaned closer to Amelia. “Cigarettes. Don’t. Make. You. Skinny.”

  “I don’t think…” Amelia stopped talking. Of course she thought this, every single day. The only reason she’d started smoking again was to prove something to Dominic.

  “Do you think I’m pretty?” Amelia’s need for words of affirmation as her love language prompted her to ask Dominic this after a few months of dating.

  “Obviously I do. Do I think that there are people more attractive than you? Ya. I mean, I know I’m not the most handsome guy in the world and you probably look at other guys all the time, just like I look at other girls.”

  That was the same night she lit her first cigarette in two years. Dominic was anxious, looking around at other people smoking at the bar in Vienna, Austria while he pulled at his vape, clearly wishing it were a cigarette. Amelia was also anxiously scanning the room with her eyes, only she was busy comparing herself to the beautiful European women at the bar she now assumed Dominic was admiring. She couldn’t take sitting with the pain of his hurtful words anymore.

  Amelia marched over to a stranger standing near the smoking section. She pointed at his cigarette in his hand and put two fingers to her lips, miming a request to bum a smoke. The man laughed and responded, “Sure thing,” in English. She put it to her lips, nerves shaking her from the inside out. The man lit her cigarette and with one puff, she was back on them. The chain reaction from the nicotine monster had started, and so did her eating disorder.

  Miranda could see that Amelia was drifting somewhere again and needed to bring her back.

  “Let’s try to think through this together. That’s what I’m here for, so you don’t feel like you have to do everything alone.” This was another feeling Amelia was uncertain how to navigate, someone insisting she didn’t have to go through a difficult situation alone. Amelia fell silent, unsure of what she was expected to say next.

  “I have an idea that I’d like for you to try. Something small, but it’s something we’ve talked about before. Instead of looking at ways in which you can completely change the course of your life, why not start small. Why don’t you try giving your eating disorder a name? Give it physical characteristics, a personality, and create something tangible you can face. That way, when you’re ready, you can write a letter to it. Address it head on. Call it out on its shit and name it for what it really is.”
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  There it was again. Having to face the demon that lived inside of her like a monster under her bed. The monster she ignored because it was easier to be at the very bottom of the well than it was to climb back up. The metaphorical rope burns along her hands would singe her skin, knowing her biggest enemy was sitting at the top waiting for her.

  “I’ll think about it. I’m not sure I’m ready yet.”

  “Amelia,” Miranda paused. “You’ll never be ready, and that’s the scariest part for most people. They sit around and wait for a specific moment or a blinking sign above them saying that they are. But it doesn’t work like that.”

  “I hear you, I really do. But what if I personify this illness and I still can’t handle it? What if I fall even harder?”

  Miranda took a deep breath and looked Amelia square in the eyes.

  “You have to put the car in drive. No one’s ever going to be able to get you where you want to go but yourself. Not even me. But don’t forget, there is a passenger seat for a reason.”

  Chapter 10

  It was Friday, the end of the week. Or at least it was for the average person amped up for an adventurous weekend. For Amelia, a normal week was like running through quicksand without anyone there to pull her out.

  What’s normal anyways?

  She sat on the balcony with Luna sleeping soundly on top of her cold, veiny feet. Luna quickly popped her head up and wiggled her nose. Emmett must have been right around the corner, either sitting on his stoop or walking nearby with Kerrin. Luna had such a love for him already that she could recognize his scent from three floors up, followed by incessant begging towards her mother to go to him.