Sunday, July 1, 2018

Control




She would never lose control again.

6:30am – Throwing her hoodie into a corner of the college workout room, Stacey put in her ear buds, hit play on her iPod, and stepped onto a treadmill. She pushed herself hard until her tank was soaked with sweat. After the treadmill she did squats and calf raises. Then stretching. Then back to the treadmill.


7:30am – Her phone alarm vibrated, and she immediately slowed to a stop in her run. After a quick rinse in the girls’ locker room showers, she pulled on a shirt that was too big for her too-thin body, slid her legs into jeans that needed a tight belt to stay up, tied her hair up in a neat bun, grabbed her backpack out of her locker, and ran the whole way to calculus just for the feel of the steady rhythm it gave her.


8:50am – “So, Tim and Clare and I are getting together with some people tomorrow night to get ice cream at Spoons and see the new Escape movie. It just came out yesterday! I am so excited!” Jake dropped his calculus textbook into his backpack.


“That will be fun.” Stacey didn’t look up from the lecture notes she was finishing writing.


“Yeah, I’m sure it will be! You should come!”


“I have homework.” Stacey flipped her folder closed and slid it into her backpack.


“Stace, you never do anything fun anymore! It’ll be good for you! It’s Friday night, for goodness’ sake! And you love Spoons ice cream! Triple chocolate chunk? Come on! You’ll have plenty of time to do homework tomorrow.”


“I have a paper due in technical writing, and-”
“Due on Monday? And you haven’t started?”


“No, it’s due in a while, but I really want to get it out of the way, and besides, I’m not going miss my evening workout.” Stacey swung her backpack onto her shoulder and stood up.


Jake looked down at his desk. “I know what day it is tomorrow.”


Stacey stood very still.


“Look, I’m sorry. I know it’s rough. I just thought that it might be good for you to get out and have some fun. Like you used to.” He looked up at her. “You can’t keep acting like this. It’s not good for you. You have to let it go. It’ll help. I promise. Come? Please?”


Stacey shook her head, and closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she looked distanced from the conversation, like she had put up a wall inside herself. “Can’t.” Stacey headed for the classroom door.


“You’re freaking my out, Stace!” Jake stood up. “Don’t you know that it’s hard for me too? He was my roommate – one of my best friends. But we have to deal with it. You have to start fixing yourself sometime. You can’t just run away.”


“I’ll see you later.” Stacey pushed the door open and went through. The moment it closed behind her, she began to run.



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10:30pm – She should have been asleep half an hour ago. But sleep was the one thing she could never control – sleep and nightmares. She had Googled it, researched it, asked doctors about it. She didn’t eat big meals or exercise for three hours before bedtime. She always drank a mug of chamomile tea and had one banana before bed. She made it pitch-black in her room and turned on her fan for white noise and didn’t wear her socks to bed and focused on her breathing and did anything else she could think of to make herself fall asleep, but she never could. Not right away. And when she did fall asleep, it was always restless.


Maybe she would be lucky tonight and fall asleep before 11:00, but usually it was midnight or even 2:00am before she was finally out. She didn’t understand. She woke up at 6:00 sharp every morning to the steady beeping of her cell phone alarm. She never took naps. Her schedule was set up to allow her exactly eight hours of sleep, so her body should have received it gratefully and fallen asleep the moment she put her head to the pillow. She was tired; she knew she was. Yet no matter much she tried to force herself to sleep, she couldn’t.


It had been exactly a year. She shouldn’t wake up drenched in sweat and screaming anymore. A year is a long time. Long enough to heal.


-------------


7:30am – She had just pulled out her ear buds and wound the cord around her fingers, breathing heavily at the end of her workout with weights, when she heard it. One of the girls in the exercise room had a more old-fashioned CD player hooked to her pocket, the headphones around her neck. The volume had been up too loud when she pushed play, and the first song on the CD came out clear: Today is a Brand New Day by Slipstream. It had been their song. Stacey moved to grab her backpack and was out the door before the girl had a chance to slide the volume down.


Stacey tried not to let herself think as she turned on the water in the girl’s locker room shower full blast and stepped under the spray, but the memories were too hard and fast to avoid. She breathed in and shoved against the images crowding her conscious, trying to make them leave. Putting her fists over her eyes, she hunched over, not entirely aware of what she was doing, and tried to make that steel wall in her mind, the one she had laboriously built one year ago, rise up high enough to block out the sounds, the smells, the look he had given her.


“I just gotta say, ice cream is the best!” Brian licked the triple chocolate chunk ice cream cone they were splitting between them as they drove home.


She lsughed. “Remember how you used to always say vanilla was your favorite, and I kept telling you that you needed to try Spoons chocolate ice cream because it was the best in the world, and you didn’t believe me?” She turned to poke his shoulder.


The windows were rolled down, and her long hair was free to blow around her, like it was dancing. She looked down at the radio where their song had just come on to crank the volume up and did a few seated dance moves, steering with one hand. Brian always let her drive if she wanted to.


“Hey, that was like forever ago! Way before we were dating!” But he was smiling too. And nodding his head to the beat.


“Oh, I know, because our very first official date was getting chocolate ice cream at Spoons and anyone who takes one lick of this ice cream is converted for the rest of their lives!”


He laughed and held out the ice cream to her. Leaning over for a taste, she took her eyes off the road for just a moment. The ice cream was sweet and cold and made her feel like the girl singing on the radio – thrilled to be alive.


Then Brian’s smile disappeared, his eyes went wide, and he lunged for her steering wheel.


With an awful gasp, she pulled herself away from that night. She was grateful for the deluge from the showerhead because crying was something she did not allow herself to do, and maybe it was only shower water on her face. It was then that she realized she was still wearing her workout clothes, standing in the downpour of the shower, totally drenched through.



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6:30pm – Her run that night was hard and fast. Too fast when she started, and she knew it, but no matter how fiercely she had practiced the piano, or how many calculus problems she had solved, or how diligently she had edited her technical writing paper today, images kept interrupting her in her head, suddenly standing out with rude white and blood-red lights colliding. And sometimes his eyes, opening wide, again and again and again. She couldn’t let the images in. She was in control. She told herself this over and over. She was in control. So now she ran. Forcing her body to move, keep moving, even when it screamed at her to stop after ten miles, because she was in control. Of herself. Of her life. Of her every movement. She wouldn’t lose control. She couldn’t lose control. Not again.


Her feet thumped on the grass. The piano concerto in her iPod was only background noise now; she wasn’t listening. Her arms traced back and forth. She struggled to keep swinging her elbows in front of her body with each stride, forcing her steps to lengthen. Her blood was hot as it pulsed in her forehead. She could feel the pressure of dehydration pushing on her brain, making it ache. She told herself to ignore it. Her form was slipping. Her stomach was tightening, making her nauseous. She straightened her spine again and focused her eyes ahead. She couldn’t lose control. Her mile tracker on her arm beeped that it had been fifteen miles. She had run this far before. Not this fast, but she had done it. She didn’t want to stop. Maybe tonight would be the night she ran a marathon. Full-out. Because she could.


Sixteen miles. She focused in on what she was demanding of herself, concentrating on the way her lungs burned, the way her ankles tensed at each step. Then an ambulance went by with screaming sirens and panicked lights. And for a second it wasn’t the sirens screaming, but Brian. She could hear metal crunching. Glass shattering.


Her foot caught on a crack in the sidewalk. She caught herself before she fell and kept running.


Seventeen miles. This was new to her body. She could feel her muscles responding more slowly. Her throat was too dry. She hadn’t thought she would run this far when she started and her water bottle had been empty for a few miles. Her head pounded. She had to keep going.


Eighteen miles. Her vision began to blur at the edges. Squinting and blinking, for a moment, she could see him hanging there, held in place in the sideways car by the seatbelt, broken against the torn bent-up metal, bleeding. She shook her head. Pushed herself harder.


Nineteen miles. Her feet tripped again. And again. And then again. Pulling on the little energy left in her body, she tried to drown out the crying in her head with the screaming of her own body’s pain. Don’t stop. Keep going. She wouldn’t endure it. Not the memory. Not the accident. Not again. She had already lived through it once. What if she couldn’t live through it again? She wouldn’t let herself relive it. She couldn’t.


Twenty miles. She could hardly see. The pain in her head and the sweat in her eyes made everything darker. Her vision was tilting and tipping. Her legs were shaking and trembling. She was barely jogging, but still, she was moving. Don’t give in. She demanded that her eyes stay open, that her legs keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving. Stay in control. In control. Control…


The bright neon lights of the Spoons ice cream place suddenly caught her attention from across the street.


“Don’t you ever want anything besides triple chocolate chunk?” Brian had asked her on about their seventh date to Spoons.


“I’ve tried just about every flavor of ice cream here, and they’re all good. But nothing beats chocolate.” She held up her cone so he could have another taste.


The sidewalk collided with her shoulder. She was down without ever realizing she was falling. Trying to pull herself backup, she struggled against the heaviness holding her down. Her strength gave out, and her scarred cheek landed on her arm.


She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t save him. She couldn’t run. She couldn't stay ın control. She couldn’t even move. He wasn’t alive. She had lost control of the car. Of him. Of her life. Of everything. And she couldn’t ever get ıt back.


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10:00pm – She was still under the same tree where she had fallen about half an hour ago. Her hoodie was zipped up around her, and her hand was limp around her iPod. That song, her favorite song, the one she and he were listening to the night she crashed, had played on repeat over and over again on her iPod as she sat there, because even though she had thought she would never listen to it again, sworn she never would, she hadn’t deleted it. She wasn’t sure why.


A car drove past, turning in at the parking lot for Spoons. From across the street she recognized Jake as he climbed out of the driver’s side, laughing with his friends. Maybe he could feel her looking, or maybe it was just chance, but he glanced her way, and then did a double take. She saw him say something to the other guys and then start heading her way.


She looked down at herself and pulled the ear buds out. She didn’t have the strength to push herself to her feet. Her chin was still dripping with tears. She didn’t bother drying them off.


Jake jogged across the street between cars. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, squatting in front of her, a line in his forehead looking like a frown.


“Just out running.”


He looked around. “Seriously? You ran here? It’s gotta be like-”


“Twenty miles. Yeah.”


“Wow!”


Stacey looked down at her feet. “I wanted to run a marathon. I thought I could.”


“A marathon? Stace, that’s seriously intense! People train for those things for years!”


“It’s been one year…” That feeling that had consumed her while she lay on the grass rose again, pushed against her eyes, making them wetter. She had fought against the feelıng for so long. She was too tired to fight it anymore.


Jake sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, I know it has been. Believe me, I know.”


She leaned her head on his shoulder and let herself shake, let herself sob.


“It was my fault,” she choked out. “I lost control! I didn’t mean for it to happen! But it was all my fault!”


Jake didn’t say anything, just gripped her shoulder tighter. His tshirt was drenched in salty tears.


“I can’t let that happen again!” Her voice was high and broken, so out of control that it scared her, but she didn’t swallow the words. She let them come out, tangled and out of tune. “I have to stay in control! I thought, if I never slip again, then I can fix it somehow!”


“You can’t fix it,” Jake said. “It’s overwith. All you can do now is work on fixing yourself.”


She continued to cry, tears running off her nose. “I know I can’t fix it. I can’t even stay in control of small stupid things, like running.”


“You don’t need to be in control,” said Jake. “This isn’t a calculus test. This is life. Stuff happens. You can’t be in control all the time. Sometimes you’ve got to let things go.”


She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Her dehydration headache had worsened with all the water her body had cried out.


“I know,” she whispered. “I know. But it isn’t easy.”


They just sat there for a moment, looking at the black street and the dark sky.


“It won’t ever go away will it? This feeling?” Stacey asked.


Jake shook his head. “No, but I don’t think that means you can’t ever enjoy life. You need them all, the sorrow, the guilt, the pain, to have the happiness.”


“Happiness…” She took a deep breath and looked up at him. “Like triple chocolate chunk ice cream? I can’t think of anything both sadder and happier than that.”


Jake’s smile was small and sad. “Just like that.”


He helped her to her feet and let her lean on him as they made their way across the street toward the memories.





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