Burning Moon (Wattpad Version)

Alternative Ending- Chapter 19

Heartbreak.

Real, searing, pulling, ripping, burning heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that affects every part of your body. It makes your head hurt, your legs sluggish and your arms feel too weak to even pick up the giant spoon of icecream and chocolate sauce – so that you almost just end up burying your face in it.

I’ve never actually had a triple bypass or open-heart surgery or anything like that – but that’s exactly how I felt. I felt as though someone had opened my chest and pulled out my heart leaving in it’s place a gaping hole that no matter what I did, could not be filled. And the worst part was that I had no idea what could fill it other than Damien.

That was my life for those first months anyway. The days blurred into night and the nights blurred into the endless, hot summer days that surrounded us and brought me no joy. Luckily my dad was also my boss, so he gave me some much-needed time off.

For the first few weeks I was a complete disaster, a basket case to top all other basket cases.

I did nothing but mope around my apartment like a depressed sloth that had been anesthetized. I barely moved off of my couch where I lay eating and watching the Reality Channel and old reruns of Dynasty, so much that I came to rely on my daily dose of dramatic Joan Collins with big eighties hair. I think the only time I actually laughed during those first few weeks was when I watched the episode in which Joan Collins’ character Alexis attacks and pushes Krystal Carrington into the fountain and the two engage in an aquatic fight of all proportions. If this was the highlight of my life, I was worried for myself. Very worried.

I also lay in my bed reading romance novels – not the best idea in retrospect; my tissue bill had never been higher. I wept into my pillow and saw Damien’s face every single time I closed my eyes. During those black days I also didn’t shave my legs – and I am embarrassed to admit this – but didn’t shave my under arms either. Eventually Val and Sue staged an intervention of sorts and burst into my apartment late one evening, wearing their full-body biohazard suits, gas masks and spraying anti-bacterial liquid at me, dragging me into the bath where they forced me to scrub, shave and to wash my hair.  I wept the whole time- it was all so dramatic.

I must have driven them mad with the late nightly tales of woe – Damien this, Damien that, Damien the next thing. But they listened. They nodded, they held my hand and they wiped my tears. God, I have the best friends in the entire universe.

As usual my family was also supportive; my sister-in-law offered to sue Damien (this was her solution to most things in life, and I know it comes from a good place, but it’s rarely the answer), James offered to hook me up with some ‘awesome dudes’ he knew from the gym. Stormy also offered to set me up. She was convinced that a sexy one-night-fling would get Damien out of my system – ‘The best way to get over someone, is to get under someone new.'  And now that Stormy knew I had lost my virginity- finally- she was of the opinion I should rack up some notches on my bedpost. Even my mother seemed concerned, well as concerned as a self-obsessed narcissist can be. She insisted I go to Esmeralda, or her new hypno-regression therapist, who she had recently started seeing and who had taken her through her spiritual birthing, or some such crap. But strangely enough, it was Adam who finally slapped me to my senses and dragged me kicking and screaming out of my black hole of dirty, hairy depression.

“You have to snap out of it Lilly!” He actually shouted at me one evening. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him raise his voice. “You have to get up, pick yourself up and carry on. I’m going to give you the number of a psychologist colleague of mine and I insist you go and see him!”

And so I did. I picked myself up one day and dragged myself out into the big, bright world that existed beyond the four walls of my apartment.

I’d never been to a psychologist before, Sue had gone to one after catching Matt in bed with that other woman and it had helped her tremendously. So at 4:30 PM on a Monday afternoon, almost one month exactly after returning home from Thailand, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of one Kevin Stanley, MD. I didn’t really know what to expect.