Laced » Lip Gallagher [3]

8: little fears

"It's to the point where I love and I hate you..."

-

Little fears.

In rehab, my therapist told me that all my fears were little.

At first, I was annoyed. My mom seriously put five grand toward my treatment, only for these idiots to tell me that my fears were little? I knew my mom would instantly regret saving my dumbass the second I told her that an uptight woman in a blazer told me that my fears of becoming a junkie were insignificant. My therapist told me that after every session we had for weeks before I finally understood.

I talked to her about my addict. The angry woman in my head who nestled in my mind and made her breakdown mine. It was the first time I told anyone who wasn't Ty. I told her about her screams, her cries, and her love for me that was so deep and toxic. She wasn't fazed when I told her that I thought I was schizophrenic after my breakdown with Ty and his girlfriend. It was a secret fear that I hid from even myself.

The next day I told her about the time I got jumped by some girls when I was in tenth grade.

It was one of Bobby's ex-girlfriends and a group of her friends. She convinced everyone that I got Bobby hooked on prescription pills and that's why he got kicked off the football team. He got kicked off because he was failing every class and she was an idiot for thinking otherwise. That didn't stop her from kicking my ass in an alleyway after school. I was fifteen. 

After the five girls disappeared, they left me there with a busted lip, a swollen eye, and a minor concussion. Not wanting to burden Fiona or the rest of the Gallagher bunch, I went home thinking that my mom and Aunt Sarah would be off somewhere doing God-knows-what and I could doctor myself up. I walked twenty blocks in the freezing snow only to find the locks changed, again. The living room light was on, I remember seeing it through the sheer curtains that covered the living room windows. During this time, Aunt Sarah was living in a duplex with her junkie boyfriend while my mom crashed on the couch. I stood on the doorstep, knocking on the worn-wood, crying my eyes out with dried up blood and a sore face. What was my mom doing? She was alone. Screaming at the top of her lungs as she danced around the living room. Through the thin curtains, I remember seeing her shadowy figure prancing around the room throwing glass at the walls and ripping up all the pillows. It was one of the fews times I remember seeing her on h.

The first time I remember seeing her like that was a year after we moved out of my dad's. She locked me in the bathroom while she sang to me outside about the voices in her head that loved her more than she loved herself. She didn't do it often – maybe 5 or 6 times my whole life – but when she did, I always remembered how she spoke to the voices in her head. It was so soft and sweet, like she used to talk to me.

When I finished telling her about my psychotic mother, my therapist laughed. It wasn't in a ridiculing sort of way, it was more of a sympathetic laugh. She told me that I was a smart girl and that she was surprised that I didn't put it together myself.