A Flicker in the Dark

by Stacy Willingham

Home. That, too, is a loaded phrase. A home isn’t just a house, a collection of bricks and boards held together by concrete and nails. It’s more emotional than that. A home is safety, security. The place you go back to when the curfew clock strikes nine. But what if your home isn’t safe? Isn’t secure?

Most of the time, these meetings lead to nothing more than a smile, a thank-you. But sometimes, they lead to something. Or maybe even everything.

I sigh and snake my arms around him, too, letting my guilt and my anger melt away.

Maybe this is karma, I wonder. I got a shitty family, so now I get a perfect husband.

I became a psychologist because I understand trauma; I understand it in a way that no amount of schooling could ever teach. I understand the way the brain can fundamentally fuck with every other aspect of your body; the way your emotions can distort things—emotions you didn’t even know you had. The way those emotions can make it impossible to see clearly, think clearly, do anything clearly. The way they can make you hurt from your head down to your fingertips, a dull, throbbing, constant pain that never goes away.

It was that moment when the weight of it all came crashing down, burying me alive in the debris. That person was him.

Simultaneously too old and too young—a figure and mind beyond her years. But there were parts of her, somewhere, hidden beneath the depths of her slathered-on makeup and the cloud of cigarette smoke that seemed to envelope her each day after the ring of the high school bell that reminded you that she was just a girl. Just a lost, lonely girl.

This effect he has on me, I can’t explain it. It’s as if he knows what I’m doing at this very moment; the way I’m slipping underwater, too tired to even look for a branch to cling to, and he’s the hand that juts out from the trees, grabbing my shirt and yanking me back to land, back to safety, just in time.

I had gotten completely lost in that moment, letting the memories spill from me like the rancid innards of a gutted fish. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to get them out, how they were poisoning me from the inside.

It’s amazing what a single text message from Daniel can do to me—how thinking about him can alter my entire mood, my outlook on life.