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“But haven’t you ever looked back on your life and wondered what if?”
“No, because all the other options of my life would have ended with me hating my life.”
“But you’re in hiding.”
“Yes, but for a long time, I was free to live my own life. I escaped my father and his expectations. He wanted me to marry this guy who would have made my life miserable. If things had worked out differently, I probably would have?—”
She stopped abruptly and I knew why. She didn’t need to tell me. I’d been there for too long.
“I would never have gone to that club,” I said, turning back to face the ceiling. “Then none of this would have happened. I would probably be married and have kids. I’d have a job I loved.”
“Not necessarily,” she grunted.
“Why do you say that?”
“Just because you could go back and change the way things played out doesn’t mean you would have had a better life. There are no guarantees. Maybe you would have married someone and been miserable. Or what if you struggled for years to have kids, only to find out it would never happen?”
“I doubt any of that would measure up to what I lived through on the island,” I muttered.
“Maybe not, but the point is, happiness isn’t a guarantee. And you don’t know how your life will turn out.”
I laughed at that. “Who would possibly want me? I ended up in the looney bin.”
“You really have to stop that,” she sighed.
“What? Joking with myself? If I don’t laugh about it?—”
“I know. You’ll cry. But by joking about it, don’t you feel you’re taking away the gravity of what you went through?”
More suffering. That’s what everything was. Abuse on the island. Mentally tortured when I escaped. It would never leave me.
“Hey, I see what you’re thinking. But you don’t realize how strong you are.”
That made me laugh also. “If I was strong, I would have escaped like you did.”
“Escaping an island is a little different than running away to a different state. Besides, I told you what I would have ended up doing.”
I rolled to face her again, ashamed to admit to her what had been bothering me since I landed in the hospital. I hadn’t said the words out loud, or even allowed my thoughts to really form, but it twisted me up inside.
“I wasn’t brave enough to do it.”
“Do what?”
“End it,” I admitted, dropping my eyes. “I—I thought about it. There were so many times that I wanted to find a way to make it all disappear, but I never worked up the courage.”
“And you think that makes you weak?”
I nodded. “It does. I could have saved myself years of abuse. I wouldn’t be terrified to sleep at night. Look at what he’s done to me.”
She smiled at me, which completely confused me. “Look at what he didn’t take from you. Taking your life would have been the easy way out. Living through that hell was what made you strong. It’s inside you. You just have to find it.”
“And do what with it?” I sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “The problem is, I don’t feel like I’ll ever be normal again.”
“Who wants to be normal, anyway?”
“Me,” I whispered. “I would give anything to be normal.”
* * *