I Want More

“What brings you in today?” 

The woman in the blue velvet chair gives me a bland smile and tries to get her pen to write, scribbling ferociously at the corner of her pristinely white note pad.

I shudder involuntarily. Her dead smile, that pen scribbling back and forth. I want to get up and walk out without a word.

Relax, I tell myself. You need this.

Instead of escaping, I settle back into the overly pillowed couch in her dimly lit office and try to breathe before answering her.

“I made a New Year’s resolution last year and it ended…badly?” It sounds like a question even to my ears.

She looks up and studies me. I know she’s taking in my slightly messy hair, tired eyes, and the sweats that almost look like real pants.

“And what was that resolution?” she asks slowly.

 I close my eyes and take another deep breath.

“Trust one person.”

Her slow nod seems to take a full minute. I smile at her in the most ironic way I can, hoping she has some sense of humor behind that bland smile.

Finally, she gives me an ironic grin back, “Relationship issues, huh? I’m guessing your New Year’s trust didn’t end up with the right person?”

I chuckle a little. New Year’s trust. She eyes me as I chuckle, sobering me quickly.

 “I’m really not sure where it ended up,” I say honestly.

She nods again, “Tell me how it started.”

My mind wanders back to what prompted my resolution a year ago on that foggy night I was once again spending alone. It had been years since I had even thought about building any sort of relationship.

Close bonds had stopped being part of my life a long time ago. My willingness to feel close to anyone slowly chipped away through my childhood and young adult years.

My happy, average childhood had been rocked by a drunk driver destroying my parent’s car in the middle of a bright, sunny day a week after I turned nine. The brightness of that day always stands out in my memory. Crash scenes from movies are always dark and dreary. I couldn’t understand when they found me at school that day and broke the news. Things like that don’t happen on sunny days.

I had been taken in by my mother’s best friend, not having any family members ready and willing to take on an adolescent girl with clear and present damage. She was my home for two years until she met a new man. They moved to Florida two months after they met. I was just about to turn twelve and while the court may have let me go with her, I knew she didn’t want a teenager in her new relationship. I asked not to go.

I lived with my grandparents for a few months until they could no longer care for themselves, much less me, and from there I moved between a few aunts and a couple foster families.   

I met a boy the day I turned seventeen. When you have no one else, a boy can be absolutely everything. He told me he loved me, and I couldn’t see anything else. We moved in together as soon as I turned eighteen and everything that was mine became his. It was almost exactly a year later when I walked in on him with someone else and my small world shattered.

As I surface from the pool of memories, I feel the woman’s eyes on me. They have turned sharp, letting me know her bland smile and pen scribbling were meant to put me at ease.

I shake my head once and give her the short version of my life.

“I had some stuff happen. My trust in others sort of…evaporated.”

“So, this resolution was a big step. And you’re not sure how it turned out?” she studies me again curiously.

“Well, I mean, I kept my resolution,” I admit.

“And it ended badly?”

“Hmmm…”

My mind wanders again. Another lonely New Year’s Eve had finally gotten to me. Years of being just fine by myself suddenly felt suffocating. I was so deeply alone.

After the resolution was made in my head, it barely took a smile from a handsome man at a bar for me to give in to the need for someone.

It was such a relief to give in, to give it all, to not think about why I had kept myself solitary for so long.

And he was beautiful.

Honestly, that is what drew me to him. I would like to say it was more, but it wasn’t. He was nice, but not kind. He was sweet, but not warm. It didn’t matter. I was all in from the beginning.

It took six months before I started to see things that weren’t quite right. It took another month before I saw texts on his phone that woke me up to where I was. Still, it took three weeks for me to walk away.  

When I finally did, I was broken.

It was worse somehow, than everything before. I had done it to myself this time, chosen it wholeheartedly, but there was more than that. Something that was slowly eating me alive, something that made sick to my stomach with butterflies.

“And now here we are, a year later,” the woman’s voice calls me back. “Did you make a new resolution? Never trust anyone again? That would be completely understandable, and we can work through that.”

I look into her eyes and she frowns.

“I’m here because something is wrong with me.”

"Ok."

“I made another resolution this year.”

“Ok. To never trust…”

“That would be the right thing to do.” I interrupt her. “That’s what a normal person would do. But that’s why I’m here.”

“Ok.”

“It’s the thing inside me. The thing eating me alive, making me sick day after day,” I shiver from the intensity of my words. “I…I want…more.”

“More?”

“My resolution this year was to trust one person.”