Page 1 of When Night Falls

1

where is my mind?

Lucynda

PRESENT DAY - October 6th

“And how does that make you feel, Miss Claire?”

I wince at the formality. Only because there is nothing formal about the shell of a broken girl sitting on a cracked, orange leather couch in an attempt to have a discussion on trauma, and the road to healing that trauma, to a therapist who insists on grotesquely sucking on her own lipstick-stained teeth while incessantly clicking the butt of her bedazzled pen.

I think this alone could be the cause of trauma. But I have to find some kind of release somewhere, the voices in my head won’t leave me alone and I’m not entirely too stubborn to know that I have a lot shit to work through.

“Miss Claire?” My therapist is an older lady with a head of dirty blonde curls that remind me of that one obnoxious lady fromHarry Potterwho always wore pink outfits and snickered like a little deranged kid.

She dresses rather neatly compared to the lack of awareness she has for her face makeup which is smeared, faded, and caked unevenly. Me on the other hand, I choose to go bare face. I'd rather not hide behind a face of makeup when I'm already hiding behind my childhood trauma.

“Lucynda?” I snap out of my judgmental daydream and force my eyes back onto my therapist.

It's only my first session with her. I've seen one other therapist and that was in high school about a year before my dad's death. I didn't love the idea of sitting down in front of someone you’ve never met before and spilling all your deeply truthful feelings and how they came about, but my school counselor saw that I was struggling with classes and maintaining attention span so when she approached me, she promised to keep my sessions just between me and her. Though despite that deal, I was never honest about what was going on at home and then it didn’t matter because he died.

Now, I recognize that I can’t just push it down into the pits of my mind. I have to expel the unfortunate events and work through the pain that I do tell myself doesn’t exist.

But this experience is not panning out to be a successful one as I tempt adulting and mental health care because this therapist is staring at me like I'm a tough egg to crack even though she hasn’t said much since sitting down forty-five minutes ago.

She pulls her top lip into her teeth and makes an inward blowing sound, and her finger keeps pumping the pen’s retract button at a rather annoyingly quick pace almost in anticipation. I make the conclusion that she really doesn’t want to therapizeme and is more concerned about answering the buzzing phone that's been going off since she first asked me my name.

Maybe this was a mistake.

On that note, I start to feel the anxiety creep its way into my body like someone is plunging their hand into my chest, trying to squeeze my heart to a pile of dust. The buildup of anticipation kick starts the unintentional labored breathing fits, and I can tell I’m starting to have a small panic attack. I don’t know why I choose right now to have a meltdown, but the heat of the room causes my thighs to sweat against the leather couch, and the sound of Dr. Laramie sucking on her front teeth combined with the pen clicking and clicking, and the clock ticking and ticking motivates my heartrate to speed up.

Breathe.

A ghostly whisper tiptoes its way into my ears. I close my eyes on instinct to seek the comfort of this delusion. It’s been going on for weeks. In the moments my panic starts to arise, a deep and soothing voice always seems to find its way into my mind and I welcome the conjuring of the invisible coping mechanism, listening to it talk me down from a full-on anxiety fit.

Just like that. Breathe.

I take a deep breath in through my nose, hold it for six seconds. Then release it slowly out through my mouth and listen to this made-up voice start its countdown from seven to signal the start of a new inhale.

I unclench my fists, seeing the crescent moon shapes I began to dig into my own palms with the curve of my nails. I drop my shoulders, relieving the tension I held in them as I take my last exhale of breath. And just like that, I’m calm again.

Some days, I really do feel like I am delusional or pathetic. Just a few names my sisters would call me. My whole life I've dealt with name calling and feeling like such a disappointment to the world and after escaping the horrors of my family life, I thoughtmoving out would put a calm to the terror. It did. But navigating the result of just how damaged I am proves to be the harder task, because I didn’t have to really deal with it then. I simply had to survive. Now I have to unpack it all while facing the fact that I might be alone in my pain for the rest of my sad life.

I just want to feel some semblance of normalcy and do more than just numb the pain that was inflicted on me. I want to forget the abuse but also forgive it all. I want to be able to bury the way I feel about myself;fragmented.

I want to be truly free of my past.

“Lucynda, is everything okay?” The old lady’s frail voice sinks into my ears as an indicator that she recognized my reaction, but it doesn’t stop her from continuing to pursue those same actions that nearly sent me on a path of destruction just now.

I try my best to give her the benefit of the doubt, relaxing the tension held tight in my body as I think about her question.

Is everything okay?

Let's see. I turned eighteen three weeks ago and was finally able to escape the leeching grip that my stepfamily had on me which is a traumatizing feeling to appreciate in itself.

I felt happiness when my dad died. Some would consider that a very morbid or troubled concept.

I’m hearing voices talk to me but they mostly calm me down rather than rile me so I’m not sure if that really needs fixing or not.

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