How will she keep this a secret? Part 3

“You come here every week and I show you this picture. Each week you breakdown and I wish I knew why the person in this picture makes you cry so much. You literally fall apart in front of me and I want to know if you are ready to talk to me about what happened, are you?” She nods.

“I try to breathe but its too hard. How many times have I lived through this moment? How can I ever show anyone how much he has robbed me of something I never knew he possibly could? I look into her eyes and I know once she knows she won’t see me in the same light, so I run.”

She left. Just like all the times before, she runs because dealing with what happened is much harder than losing progress. She doesn’t know how to live, how to move forward, she doesn’t even know how to look at herself without feeling her insides crawling to her throat and stifling their way through her. She left, but she’ll be back.

“I lay in bed and wonder how I function. I hear my phone ringing and as I pray for the strength not to answer I still do. Its my best friend, she’s worried because I didn’t come back to the office today. What else could I do but apologize and invite her over. I feel the need to let her know I’m fading and that my heartbeat is too faint to recognize. I’m ready to tell her that I have lost many pieces of me and I will never get them back as they are buried in a place no one can find. I fall to the ground and I weep, not for what has happened to me but because I can already see how her eyes will gaze over my body, searching for the scars I have successfully masked. She’ll look into my eyes for the dust and the stone because she’ll know my walls are no more, she’ll know like no one else, the agony I have endured as I tried to be there for her. She’ll know how being in the profession I am is like pulling out a tooth from my mouth each day. But how will I start and will I ever be able to finish this alive? Could it be that the wall that shields my pain is the same fortress that holds my soul together?”

As Alicia arrives, she looks through the window. She reaches under the bed for the chest that lays there and she struggles to place it on the bed.

She opens the chest and Alicia looks with nervous wonder as she sees someone new before her, someone so torn it hurts to stare at her. She sees a dress, she sees the blood and she knows instantly, she won’t be able to see her best friend for a while… Maybe she was never really there all this time.