“You have nice bone structure too,” Carmen blurted, playing with her fingers, the stupid grin from her face not fading away.
If Gloria was also surprised by this remark, she hid it well. But she did raise a brow in amusement. “You seem to be in quite a good mood today.”
“I had an epiphany recently,” Carmen said. “Or at least, I realised something.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” she murmured, looking down at her clasped hands and toying with her fingers on her lap. “That I was wrong before.”
“When?”
“When I let myself believe I didn’t love him.”
Gloria leant back against the cushion, folding one leg over the other and regarding Carmen with a composed face. “Really?”
Carmen narrowed her eyes. “You don’t seem all that surprised that I’m saying this,” she pointed out suspiciously.
“I’m your therapist, Carmen,” Gloria stated, the pleasantness in her tone always consistent. “You’ve been coming to me for months now. You’ve even graduated high school. That’s how long you’ve been coming here. I was just waiting for the day you realised it on your own and told me about it.”
“Oh,” Carmen mumbled, averting her eyes and letting them wander around the soft tones of the room. Her gaze landed back on the window, where sunlight was streaming through the glass and into the room, flooding the entire place within those four walls with so much light. The irony wasn’t lost on Carmen, as this was also the same place that held all her darkest thoughts.
Yet here she was, watching the sun illuminate every single inch of it.
“I kind of miss the rain.” She found herself saying with a soft sigh. The downpour had stopped for a while now, taken over by the clear skies and the blinding sun.
“I’m more interested in what you have to say regarding your epiphany.” Gloria smiled.
Carmen’s eyes met the woman’s for a brief second, and she looked away again.
“They say you are what you read,” Carmen started, pulling her eyebrows together as she pieced the words together in her head first. “That it is the society you grow in that has a huge role in your perspective of things, influencing your thoughts and your actions.”
“It’s true,” Gloria said carefully. “To a certain extent.”
“Do you know what they tell you when you’re growing up?” Carmen’s smile was partly sad, partly bitter. “Do you know what they teach you about love? What they repeat over and over again like a mantra until it’s the only thing that pops in your mind whenever someone tells you they love you? Do you know what that very first seed is? The one that they plant inside your head that your insecurities water for the rest of your life?”
Gloria shook her head. “What do you think it is, Carmen?” Her voice was oddly soft. “I’d like to know.”
“The fact that you cannot love someone else until you love yourself.”
A pause.
“You think it’s not right?” Gloria asked.
Carmen’s eyes flashed, every bit of thunder and lightning coming to life in them. “I know it’s not right.” Her voice shook, as if every single shackle that had bound her was snapping into two. As if those wings she’d never been born with were finally battling their way from underneath her skin and bones, refusing to stay chained any longer. “It’s bullshit. And I want to rip those words apart with my own hands and set them on fire until they’re nothing but ashes. Until they’re no longer out there to control somebody else’s heart the way it did mine.”
Carmen inhaled shakily, unable to contain all the fury, all the cries of someone wronged, and the inability to do anything but feel all the emotions run through her like wildfire, igniting all the rusty corners inside her with angry sparks.
“I loved my dad long before I even understood the concept of loving myself, and this was when he was still estranged and distant from me. I loved Hunter, the very person who made me miserable, long before I knew what it was to love myself. Hell, I loved my mother. My mother who broke me more than anybody else in this entire world—the same mother who was supposed to love me unconditionally but left me to suffer the consequences of her actions. I loved her too. Even her.” Carmen leant forward, looking Gloria in the eyes as if she was speaking to the world itself. “And I loved Asa,” she said in a voice that was forged from iron. “At a time and place in my life when I hoped to go to sleep and never wake up, when I didn’t want to kill myself but wished to die anyway. I loved Asa then, just as much as I do now. Loving myself was the last thing on my mind, but God, I loved him to the brink of insanity.”
“They say you can’t love anyone ’till you love yourself.” The words spilt out of Carmen’s mouth like poison ivy, dripping with the bitter aftertaste of bad blood. “They told me I couldn’t love anyone ’till I loved myself. What does that even mean? That I am not capable of an emotion so pure just because I have a rough past? That I don’t have it in me to offer love to somebody else because I have a few bruised knuckles and a bloodied fist? That I cannot make room for people in my heart just because it was a fractured one? That I am not fit to love another soul because I had trouble finding the light in my own?”
Carmen’s fists clenched, wave after wave of righteous anger washing over her with each breathless second that ticked
