I shut the door behind me and wander aimlessly into the kitchen. It’s five thirty and I suppose I could pour a glass of wine, but it’s only Tuesday and I feel a little guilty if I drink during the week, especially if I’m by myself. I consider a coffee but my sleep is broken enough as it is. I settle for a glass of water but pour it out after a couple of sips. I go through to the living room and switch on all the little lamps on each of the three windowsills, casting the big room in a lovely golden glow. I sit on the sofa and pick up an interiors magazine from the pile I haven’t gotten to yet. Elle Interiors, from April. I’m about to start reading when I realize that I am absentmindedly staring at one of Elisabeth’s paintings hung in the next room behind the dining table, visible from where I’m sitting. I look around, and there are another two smaller pieces in this room. And in the spare room, the last room Elisabeth ever saw, there’s another. I get up. They have to go. How can I move forward if I’m constantly reminded of the past?

I swiftly unhook the two smaller ones from the wall in this room and leave them face-down on the floor. Then I go through to the next room and run a finger lightly across the largest canvas, which is almost the entire length of the dining table. To think that Elisabeth guided the brush along exactly this same spot just a few months ago is impossible to believe – in a way it’s as though she hasn’t been alive for many years. It feels as though I lost her that night so many years ago, the darkest of nights, the same night parts of myself were lost, too. With time, those lost and wounded parts began to take on disturbing shadows in the depths of my mind. Though patches of my memory were erased, I could still feel, and the shadows of that night would come back with the force of earthquakes, and with as little warning, shaking me to the core. What had once been one – one girl, one life, one mind – splintered into various broken narratives and personas and coping mechanisms, and it took years to begin to reintegrate those pieces back into a kind of whole. It was intense therapy, followed by my own psychology studies and finally, a doctorate in trauma psychotherapy that brought me to a relative peace with the past. Like Jung said, I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.