Her Name Was Rose

by Claire Allan

I reminded myself what my counsellor had said to me over and over – to deal with the facts and not catastrophise every situation.

We share too much, you know. All of us. Even those of us who swear we don’t. We let it out in our behaviour. What we like. What we don’t. The pages we follow. The clothes we wear in our pictures. Our inspirational quotes. Our lack of inspirational quotes. The music we share. The things we write when we’re tired. Or emotional. Or drunk. The life we let people see. The life we let ourselves believe. It’s strange how we can convince ourselves our Facebook life is our actual life – because we want it so desperately to be. I did anyway. I found my Facebook life, where things were good and glossed over, very difficult to let go of when it all ended because I knew people – who I had perhaps done my best to make jealous – would enjoy some sort of Schadenfreude when it all went tits up.

I only have a Facebook purely for my books.

All the things I had fought in vain for over the last few years. The years that had followed that most public fall from grace. I had been broken. In pieces. Pieces that no matter how patiently, how delicately, I tried to fit them back together, could never be the same as they were before they were broken in the first place.

Sharp edges jutted out. Others, dulled by thick globs of glue – ugly, deformed, misshapen. All the pieces were still there. But they weren’t the same. I was not the same. How could I have been? The whole had become both more and less than the sum of all its parts.

I started to spend each and every minute of darkness in a ball of anxiety, sure that it would never get light again. You can’t take these things for granted. When you get complacent things go wrong. I had thought about suicide. Especially at night when the very act of existing hurt. When even banging my head against the wall didn’t silence them. When I missed him so badly that all I could think of was how little effort it would take to make it all stop. To break myself so badly that no one – not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – could put me back together again.

For a long time I told myself I bruised too easy. It wasn’t that he was too rough, it was that my blood vessels – the living cells and tissue that made me who I was – were too weak.

You won’t ever be the same, and parts will always hurt, but this doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life.’ As I said the words something in me clicked. I had been letting so much of what had happened in my past define me – to factor in every decision every day. What happened with Ben was awful. It was humiliating. It was degrading. It had left me in pieces, relying on alcohol and pills and being branded a flake by everyone I knew. But it didn’t have to define the rest of my life – I didn’t have to let it lead me to make the same mistakes again.