After the incident, I began seeing Trevor in that tiny beige room with the coffee pot. The doctors agreed to release me from the hospital so long as I went to see him twice a week.
Trevor was a social worker who specialized in addictions and suicide. Before his transition into therapy, he had worked with the police as a suicide negotiator, convincing people not to take their own lives. He was good in a crisis.
Trevor was in his forties. His face was chubby beneath black stubble, and his eyes were soft with rings of hazel and green. His voice soothed me in a way that made me feel like a child. Not the child I had been, but the child I knew was inside of me. A child who was able to trust, to depend on people, and to be vulnerable.
“You’ve been through a lot of trauma, Grace,” Trevor said decidedly, after I had given him the condensed version of my life: my childhood, my parents, my siblings, my work, my drug use, my hospital stays, the ghosts, Jack and the people in between, and our baby boy. Not the rehearsed version or the one I told to feel better. My monologue had been edited. I shared the truth, as close as I could get to it.
“Yeah.” I nodded, smiling through the discomfort. “I guess you could say that.”
“Have you ever heard of kintsukuroi?” Trevor asked, his hands resting on his knees.
“No.”
“It’s this amazing Japanese art form.” Glancing out the window, he watched a group of kids run by, squealing with delight, seemingly in a game of tag. A smile spread across his face, lost for a moment. He pulled his eyes away, continuing slowly, “Right. Kintsukuroi. So they repair vases that have been broken. They piece them back together, bit by bit, and use gold to fill in the cracks.”
I listened as the cries of the children grew gentler and gentler, until they disappeared entirely.
Trevor grinned. “More beautiful for having been broken, they say.”
I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted the salt of tears on my tongue.
“Well, first things first, you need to get sober,” he explained, leaning forward to hand me a piece of paper and a tissue. “I would recommend you start attending meetings.”
Taking both, I glanced at the paper’s heading: Narcotics Anonymous.
I didn’t want to be that butterfly anymore. I no longer wanted to be on display, my beauty merely a convenience for strangers who wished to admire it. “Okay,” I said, wiping my eyes with the tissue.
“Good. And Grace, you’re a writer.” Trevor held my gaze. “That’s an incredible gift. You need to use it.”
I felt the familiar tinge of shame. I hadn’t written in years. “How would I do that?”
“Well, I think a great exercise would be for you to write about your experiences and emotions. Write about everything you’ve been through. Write about your childhood, and your parents. Just write it all down.”
“But I was never any good.”
“How can you say you were never any good? How can you even measure that?” He gestured as he spoke as though his hands were an extension of his mouth. “Tell me this, Grace, why were you writing?”
I had never considered this, so I thought for a moment. “I think when I was little, I had all these stories in my head. All kinds of questions and observations. I didn’t know what else to do with them.” I ran my fingers along my lips; catching myself, I returned my hands to my lap. “Then I stopped, for a long time. I started again to help deal with my mother leaving.”
Trevor nodded, inviting me to continue.
“I think I kept writing because Jack liked it. It was part of how he saw me, or wanted to see me. The idyllic version of me.”
“Do you think you were writing for Jack, or for yourself?”
I hoisted myself up in my chair, my skin tingling. All this time, it had been for someone else. First, my parents, then Jack. The words I let out, the words I kept in. In my performance of being who they wanted, I had sacrificed myself. “It was for other people.”
Trevor’s head bobbed. “It’s sounds to me like it wasn’t working because it wasn’t for you. You need to write for you, like when you were a child. Just write, without judgment, as if no one is going to read it. Do it for you.”