crème brûlée

i wrote this on my phone sitting on the edge of my hotel bed with all the lights off waiting for my therapist to text me back

I ordered a creme brûlée to the room at 3:30pm because I couldn’t stop worrying that I would run into the 18 year old version of myself on the street. I wore a hat and sunglasses outside to smoke a cigarette in the park and I felt paranoid. When I get paranoid I start to worry that I am mentally ill in a way similar to my mother, and once the fear is registered I begin to look constantly for further signs that this is true. Some would call this paranoid behavior. I try to sit in the center of the park with the sun on my face and release the narrative. I hope she is not following me or worse, I hope that I am not secretly looking for her. I call Jared in the hopes that he can release me. “It’s probably because you’re there all alone,” is what he says. It feels like a bottle episode or a waking nightmare or like the time I brought the big soft felt flesh of my Groovy Girl doll over to my friend’s house, who only played with Polly Pockets. I don’t understand. I have unfinished business with the city it appears, but certainly I had my time to finish it last year. When I watched the ghost of myself on a stage where in some timeline I graduated, I clapped until I felt my hands turn raw for the world’s newest Religious scholar, my best friend, Katherine Twomey, as they walked across the stage and deserved it. There is a version of me who failed the LSAT. There is a version of me who caught the last bus and rubs her pregnant belly in the middle seat. I decide I need to eat and that there is no teenage girl who is looking for me but that answer is not quite satisfying enough for me. I know the girl is not dead. It would have disturbed me if that was the agreement. However accepting that she may be alive within me disconcerts even more. The second I stepped off the plane I felt haunted and followed. This is perplexing because the girl I may be looking for is the one who gets followed, who waits for disaster to strike upon her, who is constantly picking up the matches that fell from the open box. She cannot hurt me because she is the one who experiences hurt. And yet that has made her more terrifying to me than anyone else — a figure so fragile that keeps coming back like a scarecrow or a promise I forgot to keep. I thought I was better, thought I had integrated. I don’t know how to relate. I do not want to be her predator and I know that she will not hurt me because she does not want to and because she hasn’t learned that she can yet. I want to love her but I don’t know how, and I hope that if she’s looking for me then I can duck below some concrete stairs and wait until I am ready to be found.