Emotions were never something I was very good at. I tried to avoid them even more while in treatment. But I knew I had to face them. The problem was, I also had to function day in and day out, and after kissing Nate and screaming at him the night before, I knew I had to do something different. I had to figure out a way to get a hold of myself and my emotions. I felt so out of control. It really wasn’t Nate’s fault and I knew that; it was me and my emotions. I was going to work harder to have more control.
I had stayed up all night long trying to organize and control my environment. I took a shower, shaved my legs, made breakfast for Nate, which ended up being for Jordan and Chase as well. It helped my anxiety to stay so busy, but again, I knew I shouldn’t have stayed up all night long.
It was weird how I could tell something was wrong when I looked back at the moment, but I couldn’t tell in the moment at all. It wasn’t easy trying to adjust to normal life and I was going to have to learn some hard lessons along the way.
Nate was right, though: I wasn’t taking good care of myself and I knew it. After six months at the treatment facility, I was on my own and sucking at caring for myself. It was a simple thing that even a teenager could manage to do, yet I had been making a mess of it since I got out of treatment.
While at the treatment facility, I didn’t have to be in control of everything. They told me when to be in a group session, I had appointments and tasks, and there was always something for me to do. Although I clearly worked very hard while I was there, I didn’t have to make nearly as many decisions on a daily basis as I had already been making since being at Nate’s house.
“It’s going to be a girl?” I asked Jordan as she let me touch her stomach.
“Yes, and we have to show her what strong women look like.”
Jordan kept saying I was a strong woman. It baffled me that she thought that about me. I hadn’t been strong. I had jumped on a plane to see the first man who showed real interest in me. He turned out to be a horrible person and the torture I went through there wasn’t anything I wanted to relive. But I didn’t feel strong at all. I felt weaker than I had ever felt in my entire life.
Strong women weren’t able to be so easily swayed into a man’s arms. Jordan was a stronger woman than I had ever been. She made better decisions and had a clear head on her shoulders. If I could be more like her, then I would feel like a strong woman.
“I’m trying, Jordan. I really am. But I feel like my brain has been through a blender.”
“Why did you get so emotional when you heard that Nate was talking about going to Syria for his job?” Jordan asked out of the blue.
“I don’t know,” I lied to her.
The truth was I remembered my time in Syria even better than I remembered what had happened at Stephano’s house. I had been young when we were in Syria, but the smells and memories were still very strong. I remembered the fear on my mother’s face and the frantic way my father scooped us up and we all ran for safety one night. There were bombs and fires, all sorts of horrible things. It wasn’t a safe place, and I didn’t want Nate to go there.
“Do you want to stay here? Or would you rather come back to the house with us?” Jordan offered.
She was such a sweet friend. Even in her pregnancy and her time with her new husband she was willing to offer what she had to me. But I couldn’t take it. I wasn’t going to take away her special time with her new family.
The truth was it was better for me at Nate’s house. We were out in the middle of nowhere and I could actually relax. If I could stop throwing myself at the poor man, we could probably learn to get along well and not have any more outbursts toward each other.
“Absolutely not. I’m doing great here. I’ll listen to you all. I’ll sleep and eat and do all those boring things.”
We hugged and I felt the warmth in Jordan’s touch. She had a level of compassion for me that I wasn’t even sure I had for myself at that point. I was lucky to have her as a friend and lucky to have Nate and Chase around as well. Even though I was apparently sucking at the whole recovery thing, I wasn’t constantly shaking or hiding in the corner, so that felt like a little bit of a victory.
We finished our hugging and I said my goodbyes. Nate said his goodbyes to them as well and we both stood on the porch as they drove away. Suddenly, the absence of other people made the two of us feel uncomfortable around each other. We hadn’t exactly talked things out at all and there was the elephant in the room when the two of us were left alone.
I knew exactly why: it was that damn kiss. It had been a stupid mistake and I wished I could take it back. Nate was simply trying to help me out and I made it into some weird, romantic thing. No matter what I was feeling for him, it wasn’t the time or the place to go after a guy. I had to get better.
The truth was I wasn’t in a good place to even be worrying about chasing after a man. I had to work on myself and that was where I should have been concentrating all of my energy. No more focusing on Nate or anything outside of myself; I made a promise to really make more of an effort to get my own body and mind healthy before I started looking for any love and affection.
“Do you think you could teach me how to fight?” I asked.
The question seemed to surprise Nate and he looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I’m sure he had expected me to make some sort of comment about our kiss. Or even apologize for staying up all night and passing out. But he knew that I was sorry about all those things; I could tell in the way we looked at each other. I wasn’t going to dwell on it, and instead we were going to move forward.
“Sure. What kind of fighting do you want to learn?”
“All of it,” I joked. “I want to be able to kill a man with my bare hands.”
“Like self-defense skills?”
“No. I want to know how to hurt someone. I don’t want to wait for them to attack me. I want to know how to kill them if I see them in the street.”
I held my hands up into the air and pretended to strangle someone. I didn’t want to learn self-defense; I wanted to learn how to actually kill someone. The anger inside me was so great and the fear so overwhelming; the idea of learning the skills necessary to kill someone if they ever tried to hurt me, that felt powerful. I was ready to explain my reasoning to Nate as soon as he asked me, but he never did. He already seemed to understand exactly why I wanted to learn to fight.
“I’ve got two conditions to teaching you how to kill someone.”
“Okay.”