I know what Beth is going to say before she says it.

Like so many others before her, she truly believes these words will make a difference. I inhale, brace for impact as she says, “Holding on to what happened only hurts you.” It’s the therapist’s equivalent of forgive and forget–which she doesn’t say because she’s known me for two years now, enough time to know I don’t believe in that. I want to tell her that I’m not afraid of pain, that I’ve always been a bit of a masochist. I need her to understand that the opposite of forgiveness is memory. That the possibility of an apology is naive and idealistic but this thing I do is real. This thing where I’m the living, breathing ruin staring you in the face, knife in my teeth, daring you to forget, is real. I suppose that’s what the problem is: that I’m not afraid to bleed.

She defines radical acceptance as “a distress tolerance skill designed to keep pain from turning into suffering”. I don’t know how to tell her they’re the same thing. 

I just turned eight years old. I am reading about Icarus and for weeks I am the angel on fire. At night, I stare at the ceiling and think about the way down– a death spiral. That memory, engulfed in a glorious flame, remains, but that was ten years ago.

 I get the image tattooed on my back. When asked about it, I say “it’s a reminder that some things are worth getting hurt for,” and for some reason everyone finds it beautiful. The light at the end of the tunnel is brilliant, yet blinding and it’s all they see. I think–caught in a loop–about endurance and tenacity, the precursor to the light, synonymous with suferance. 

I wonder if the brief escape was worth it: if the self-immolation was premeditated: if the allure of the story lies in his martyrdom. Beth says I have a knack for compartmentalising. Numbing. Being unaffected. She’s aware of the irony in saying this. I don’t know how to forget like I know how to feel– would you even know yourself if you weren’t bleeding? Everything hits me like a freight train. I miss the doses of little blue pills, meant to help me because I am sick with remembering and the only thing worse is forgetting. This is hallowed ground. This is sacred, this means something, this is the kind of thing you get down on your knees for. 

They call the bellies of churches sanctuaries. I know the pews, the bowed heads, the raised hands, the statues faced up, mouths in perfect O’s, their copybook bodies waiting for absolution. I know the belief in something I do not believe in. In these holy chapel walls, they want me good and pure yet broken enough to still be saved. There is redemption here. I don’t look back on my way out. I know the road to the grave I have dug for myself. 

Beth says, “You’re doing it again, thinking it’s black-and-white, all or nothing when it’s not.” I think it’s funny Beth can’t accept that I might not be wrong. I have a lifetime of evidence she tells me is not reflective of the rest of the world. She says, “what you went through isn’t normal.” And I know she means it as a form of comfort, but this is part of the problem: that I’m an exception. That no one has lived this, that the people who claim to understand know nothing, that the words and the movies and the art on walls all resemble the thing but aren’t the thing.  That the earth has spun for 4.543 billion years and the things that swallow me whole only swallow me whole: an experience only known by me, this is one of many absolute truths that keep me up at night. 

Last week I thought my world was ending, my skin crawled, my scars felt unknown–like rubber. My tears burned like acid, every tear, a testament to the pain only I could feel. I imagined this was what it felt like to die slowly,  to watch cancer metastasise in someone’s lungs and not do anything about it—I wish she understood when I told her I was rotting from the inside out. 

But everything is amplified now. 

I’m sitting down in front of a window I’ve never looked out of before. She sits across from me. And there’s a fake plant and a box of tissues, never used, on the table next to me–it feels staged. Carrying a notepad, she types into her computer. I notice her short brown bob and sad brown eyes, the colour of mahogany, everything about her seems polished. Most days, she’s more optimistic than I know how to be. 

It’s quiet, I hear the keyboard keys clacking. The air is thick and suffocating. As my throat swells up and my airways close, I feel the sweat drip down my eyes: this room feels like a hospital. I have the urge to run. It’s with this feverish intensity that I feel everything, everywhere–always–at once . I feel stripped back, like I’m at the end of a performance with a curtain that never closes, a carousel which never stops.

I tell her about the boy who called me a drug last summer. Recount the way his downturned eyes glazed over when he said, “I feel like I’m under the influence around you.” This time last year, I was getting into a stranger’s car, carnal and trembling under the pre-dawn sky. 

She has this look in her maternal eyes, like a mother seeing her daughter for the first time. She asks about my need to be wanted and I bite my lip so hard I taste the blood.  But she’s not my mother and I don’t fear bleeding. I think about the duality of her words. That I have this insatiable urge to be loved and never let anyone close enough to do it. That I chase fabricated moments of ecstasy with bad people knowing they could never give me the thing I desire most. 

I wish she knew pain was a fond friend, a constant in this world of instability. 

I thought I was crazy the first time it happened. Like I was following Alice down the rabbit hole. Looking into the mirror, I saw the Mad Hatter staring back at me, hair wild, eyes bold and unblinking.  I have this habit of pushing myself to the Everest of good even if that means come tomorrow I’m crashing. It’s a vice of mine to play life like a poker game in which the odds are all in my favour even if in reality I’m playing it blindfolded. Sometimes I think I could dance til my lungs collapse and I never chase my liquor and on a bad day I’m running down the street with my eyes closed at 2am chasing what it felt like to be seventeen. There are places only I go. Beth might chalk it down to delusions of grandeur or a god complex or my tendency to make impulsive decisions but some days I’m convinced I could be good forever. That that high could stretch out until the sun was no longer a star. I chase it everywhere and anywhere, always at once. I am more and more and then some.

As I continue, I hear the drag of her mouse across the pad. With a click, she schedules an extra session this week. 

Beth calls it mania.