The Words We Keep
: Chapter 58

Baby steps.

That’s what Suzanne tells me each week when I see her. One step, one day at a time. Some days are good. Some are bad. And some are just days, moving me forward, little by little.

But each day, I feel more like me.

Suzanne was right, though: the work of healing is not easy. She makes me face my biggest fears, doesn’t let me erase my mistakes, walks me through what it feels like to fail. Sometimes my anxiety feels higher than ever as we work, but she gives me stress balls to keep my hands off my skin, and skills to bring myself back when I start to slip away. I’m pushing back against the glass, cracking it slightly so I don’t run out of air.

The monsters aren’t gone.

They visit often, actually.

When the rumors swirl at school about me on the cliff. When the track team goes to state without me and Kali’s winning project gets displayed in the lobby. When Damon struts the halls, as cocky as ever, unpunished for his crimes. When the darkness feels heavy and the road back seems far too long.

That’s when they come, whispering, yelling, repeating words I don’t want to hear.

But Suzanne is helping me choose when to listen.

Which words to keep.

I write those words down. Poems and stories and all the ideas that pop into my head. The new notebook that Dad bought me is almost full only a month after the night on the cliff.

I read my poems to Micah, to my family, to Suzanne. Even though the summer program scholarship is long gone, I keep writing.

“You should share your poetry again,” Alice says one night after I’ve read her and Micah a haiku. Micah’s on the floor, filling out an application for a killer summer art program at UCLA. He’s not sure about college yet, but it’s back on the table. Baby steps.

“You could read them on my YouTube Channel. A guest segment!” Alice says, her eyes gleaming the way they do when she gets an idea. She’s more like regular Alice every day, full of life and ideas, only the swings aren’t as high or as low.

I shake my head. “Not sure I’m ready to share my most personal inner thoughts with a bunch of internet randoms.” I take a bite of the pizza Staci ordered. It’s actual, real pizza with carb-loaded crusts and cheese from a living, breathing cow. Like your dad says, you only YOLO once, she said.

Alice takes a bite and talks with her mouth full.

“So what if they weren’t randoms? Like, what if you do it at Tony’s? I could get you a slot,” she says. She’s been doing a shift a few nights a week to save up for school in the fall. She and Dad have decided she’s ready to take some baby steps, too. “You could invite people. And everyone can bring something to share.”

I chew while I think about how the words have saved me since I got home. How the chalk poetry outside the school got people talking about all their secret wishes and worries. Even though the words are gone at Ridgeline, #mywords #mystory is still going strong online with people posting new poems all the time.

“Would you do it, too?” I ask.

“Sure, why not,” Alice says. “I’ve been working on an amazing new stand-up set for my channel.”

“I’m in, too,” Micah says.

The electricity I felt as a guerrilla poet of Ridgeline High surges through me again.

“So, we’re doing this?”

“Sounds like it,” Alice says. “Now we just need people to come.”

A Night in the 100-Acre-Wood

Join us at Tony’s café.

Bring your art, your poetry, your songs, your whatever.

As long as it’s real.

#mywords #mystory

I am

I am

pills

in the cupboard

scars

on my body

monsters

in my mind.

But I am

more

than my

diagnosis.

I am

setbacks and

switchbacks and

wrong turns.

I

am

terrified.

But

I am

here.

I am

I am

I am

I am

not fixed

because

I am

not broken.

I am

a work in progress—

a lily

in embryo.

And when my petals finally unfurl,

I’ll blossom,

wild

beautiful

and free.