Category:

Last Christmas

I'm so sorry, he writes on the blank piece of paper. It's more of a scrawl than legible handwriting—he's always been told he writes like a doctor, all pinched and slanted and jumbled, like he has better things to be doing than scribing longhand. But who writes by hand anymore? It's an unnecessary skill, penmanship. He's trying his best, though, to make it look thoughtful. He knows that much is important.

He pauses. Pinches the bridge of his nose. He has a headache. This doesn't feel good, to be doing this.

But he must. 

It's for the best.

I have led you on, he continues. I am not good for you. Please forgive me, and let's not speak of this again...

He sighs, staring at what he has done. 

"You'll regret this, you know."

He looks up. He didn't realize he was being watched.

"Maybe," he replies, and his headache gets worse as he folds the paper and writes her name on one side.

CHAPTER ONE

I am floating. I am floating on the crystal-clear water of whatever ocean laps around the sandy Greek shores of Preveza. Is it the Aegean Sea? Hmmm. I should probably know that. I'll google it when I'm back near my phone. Obviously I don't have my phone in the water. It's just me and presumably some fish, early afternoon sun bringing my skin—and if I wouldn't get laughed at by my ridiculous family for poetic hyperbole, I'd go as far as to say my very soul—back to life after three long years under gray Scottish skies. Actually, that's not strictly true. The university is under gray Scottish skies, and so for the most part I've been under strip lighting. Either way, this is the first time I've felt any semblance of hope, or freedom, or possibility, in ages. I once read that we're all solar-powered. I get that now. It's like when the sun is out and the water glistens, everything that came before melts away. So much doesn't matter here, unmoored, bobbing about, the sound of my own heart surprisingly good company. Even last Christmas and everything that happened feels far away, and after my breakdown I didn't think anything could be any worse than that. Only I could hit rock bottom and then discover it has a basement. Classic.

Recovery can mean different things for different people. That's what my therapist says. Having a breakdown at twenty-four is part of who I am, and two years on, it's part of what's made me the resilient, hopeful phoenix- rising-from-the-ashes that gets to float in the sea and let her mind drift, happy to be alive. I was a wreck back then. A year into my PhD and I had a depression and anxiety that got worse and worse until I was signed off sick from my course and had to spend a month in a residential care facility. Even after I left, I had to have daily visits from the crisis team—but that's when I met my therapist, and she's changed my life. Well, I have changed my life actually, but she gave me the tools to do it. I've done a lot of work to get better. I had to stop fighting myself. I've journaled, medicated, walked, stretched, got back into running. I've made best friends with Hope, which isn't a joke: Literally, the woman I saw waiting outside my therapist's office three times a week is called Hope. It's not a metaphor. In fact I called her Despair for a while, as we got to know each other. It made her laugh. But after Jamie slipped that note under my door at Christmas, it tested my new tools to the limit. I was so humiliated. I went home for the holidays feeling so in balance, and suddenly there he was—my brother's best friend joining us for the festivities—and the vibe between us had shifted. I was open to it.

"Am I imagining this?" he'd asked, after three days of...something.

"No," I'd said. "Knock on my door later," I eventually told him, after a family movie night where his foot ended up pressed against mine under the blanket and the nearness of him almost made me explode.

He never showed. His letter said he'd bottled it. I'd put myself out there and & Well, it's a good job I'd had all that therapy, because I needed every trick in the book to pull myself back together. Yeah, it was only a few days of whatever-it-was developing between us, but all my "positive thinking" and "soothing visualizations" had me thinking I'd actually get to have a bit of fun for once. Because, spoiler alert: Nobody wants to date the woman who had a nervous breakdown. I had thought Jamie "got it," what with his own trauma. I thought he understood me. So that's what hit hardest. I know now that I should never have trusted him, because first impressions are nearly always right: He really is a vapid womanizer, and I will never fall for his charms again because I have worked too damned hard for my self-respect.