What did she hope to achieve by following me around and writing about my life? I try to run through all the possible scenarios, but my brain is dull and uncooperative. It also feels impossible to spend the long night here alone, and choose not to know what she was trying to tell me. I inch across the room to the sofa and settle myself into it before opening Leah’s MacBook and opening the document. She would have been pleased to know she has my full attention now – that’s what she wanted.

49

Supernova

You’ll be familiar with exposure therapy. It may come as a surprise to you that, so am I. According to Psychiatric Times, exposure therapy is defined as, ‘any treatment that encourages the systematic confrontation of feared stimuli, which can be external, such as feared objects, activities and situations, or internal, such as feared thoughts or physical sensations’. Consider this entire account exposure therapy, Kristina.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve mentioned Carúpano. I bet it horrified you. I’m not doing this to torture you, I only want your life to be perfect. Selfishly, I suppose I need you to be perfect, and the only way you can be perfect is if you’re whole.

What we’re going to do here is to rewrite the stories you tell yourself. You see, like any good journalist, I’ve done some research and some fact-checking, and it would seem things aren’t quite how they looked at first glance. Your dissociative amnesia came as a surprise to me. A trauma therapist marred by trauma; you couldn’t make it up. A doctor of psychology dedicating her life to the extensive exploration of the inner life, and yet your own remains steeped in shadows.

I’ve been thinking about how to best do this, and came up with the idea of a ‘guided walk through the mind’ approach. Bear with me, I’ve actually done a lot of research into this. It’ll be a bit like that meditation bit in yoga; I know you like a bit of vinyasa flow, you told me yourself in your diary. See, I pay attention.

Let’s start off with the mental image of a large, beautiful house. It’s modern and sleek, in a good part of town. The house is your life. Your marriage is one room, your friendships another, your career a third. Your past is downstairs, and behind one of several doors is Carúpano. But you’ve nailed that door shut and plastered over it, making it indistinguishable from the smooth white walls. We’re going to open it.

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