I sit on the couch, which I’m pretty sure is a darker pink than it was last week, but I don’t say anything.

“I actually wanted to talk about that,” Jennifer says. “EMDR can be intense. It’s probably better if we just talk the first few sessions before attempting that again. So I thought maybe we could start today by you telling me a bit more about your family? Your parents and your brothers?”

I gaze down at my twiddling thumbs, ready to draw back into myself. This nice white lady wants to know about my family and I don’t know what to tell her.

“They’re good people,” I say. “At the core.”

I look out the window, fighting the door that is trying to erect itself between us. Open, I say gently to myself, knowing I can’t keep everything locked away forever.

“My mother, in the summer, she cooks for the whole neighborhood. Everybody calls her Ms. Aprah. And she’s so loud, my whole family is. When she talks, she shouts. She’s big now. She used to be my size, but she eats away a lot of her problems, I think. It’s better than the drugs. I missed her most when she was gone, when she was on drugs. Nobody ever tells you about how the drugs take the soul of a person until you see it yourself, but she’s clean now. That’s good.

“And my dad, they call him the Mayor of Lorain. He’s from the South, Alabama. He grew up in a real poor community where everyone looks out for each other. He still has that mentality. Has to go around pulling people’s garbage cans to the curb, playing lottery numbers for folks, and has to wave at everybody. ‘All right, how you doin’ today?’ That’s why they call him the Mayor, ’cause he knows everybody. He’s not my real father. I mean, he is, but he’s not my biological father. He raised me, though. He was in the hospital when I was born. I wonder sometimes where my real father is and why he left me and if he would be proud I’m in a place like this now.”

A wave of guilt thinking about my grades crushes me. Maybe I won’t be here much longer, I think disappointedly to myself. Then there would be nothing he could be proud of. I’d be the daughter that dropped out of college.

I plummet into despair.

When I don’t say anything for several minutes, Jennifer asks me about my brothers. “Are you close to them?”

“I used to be,” I respond. “When we were younger. I thought it would always be like that. Us against the world. The three of us. We were so small, you know. The world was tearing us apart, but at least we had each other.”