Chapter 18
18
CRYSTAL
It was the best day I could remember for such a long time. Definitely the best since, well, since everything that happened. I actually forgot about it all, completely, for those few hours. I started to feel like I belonged somewhere again, like I had a family of my own. And although that was exactly why I knew this whole thing was dangerous, it made me so happy, and helped me to get through the rest of the weekend and the next few evenings on my own. So I refused to think about the danger.
If I’d been honest with people about it – people at the self-help group, for instance – then I know they’d have warned me, told me it wasn’t a good idea – that, yes, it was dangerous. Not dangerous to anyone else, obviously; no, just to me. To my mental health, my recovery, my chances of… possibly… one day coming out the other side of the nightmare I’d been living through. Of getting my life back. Of regaining everything that really mattered to me. But of course, I didn’t tell them. If anyone asked me what I’d been doing lately, I fobbed them off, told them I was doing what I normally did: working all day, sitting on my own every evening and weekend, watching the TV. To keep everyone happy, I occasionally mentioned that I’d had lunch with a new friend at work. They liked that. They liked to think I was making an effort.
But I was getting closer and closer to the date marked in red in my diary, and I’d already had a phone call reminding me about it – as if I needed a reminder. Every time I thought about it, I felt myself go weak and my heart started racing. I didn’t even know if it was excitement or dread: probably a mixture of the two. There’d been so many times I’d looked forward to these trips and then the whole thing ended up being a disaster, as usual, as always. And instead of coping with it the way I’d been schooled by everyone to do, I’d got myself into a terrible state, putting my recovery back all over again, as well as my hopes of ever getting things back to normal.
But then again, what was normal for me, now? Normal had gone forever: it had gone when that bastard turned his back on me. And chose the very worst moment of my life to do it.