With time, my attachment to you grew from the perceived sexual to the frenzied, obsessive friendship feelings of young girls, and then it deepened into a gentle, parental kind of bond, and that’s when things really went wrong. In my mind and heart you were the very incarnation of perfection, though, like I’ve said, I knew you were human just like everyone else. But to the child inside, to little Leah who craved a stable, predictable, unconditional adult, you were perfect. So it hurt like hell to discover that you were its very opposite. That you were as hollow as Swiss cheese, vast parts of what makes a whole person, just gone. The rage I felt at first wasn’t rational, I know that. But I feel it, still, when I revisit the memory of your persona disintegrating before my very eyes. I didn’t stop loving you, in my basic childlike way. I never will. Now, I’m telling you this because I want you to know that there was a reason for my behavior, for all the questions I asked, for everything I did.

It was selfish at first, this need for you to be like a perfect hologram, so that I could feel safe. Naturally I felt angry when the bubble burst, but then as things progressed, I realized that you need me as much as I need you and the real healing, for both of us, will happen when all the cards are on the table. Mine, and yours. I need to fix you to fix me.

37

Kristina

I hold myself entirely still. There’s a throbbing pain in my temple that burns and insists itself into my very brain. I steel myself to let in one thought at a time. It was Leah that took my bag and I try to take in the enormity of that fact. The lengths she went to. The depths of betrayal of the bond between us. At the time, I had no choice but to write the missing bag off as an honest mistake, the one that was left behind on the floor next to my chair was exactly identical to my own. There was no phone in the bag, no credit cards or any other identification. There was a generic set of keys and a cheap wallet with a couple of hundred-kroner bills, and some make-up. I handed the whole thing in to the police, and assumed that the person who’d taken my bag by mistake would do the same thing. But they never did. I bought another Neverfull bag with the insurance money and eventually forgot about the whole strange incident.

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