It’s been ten years. I’ve learned to compartmentalize. I focus on trivial things on my birthdays instead— How many people will show up? And yet. I still obsess. I turn that night over and over in my mind, needing to examine it from every single angle, every single perspective. Tell it in a thousand different ways, and then again. I’m still trying to control the narrative. I’m still trying to understand.
I was the kind of girl who wrote about everything, liked to catalogue crucial moments in a manner more poetic than the actual event. I kept hardbound journals hidden under my bed, maintained an OpenDiary from eighth grade until the year after I graduated highschool, when the site finally shut down and I downloaded thousands of entries into a .txt file that lives on the desktop of papa`s computer. I told myself, if it sounded artful, then the suffering was worth it. Even then, I don’t think I really believed that, but I wanted to.
