"I don't feel anything." Lizzie said sitting in the chair across from her therapist. Her eyes looked dead. She had finally acknowledged that Sebastian wasn't coming back.
Her therapist was a licensed professional at school. She was a nice lady, but Lizzie felt she lacked understanding of what it meant to be on the bipolar spectrum.
"Why do you feel nothing?" Her therapist asked.
Her mind only thought of him. How he made her think she was crazy at one point. The night they shared in fall when everyone at school thought it was Christmas. How he called her friends turnips. When she made the daylight ring for him.
"I just don't feel anything." Lizzie said slowly. She stared blindly into space. Sebastian was dead and he didn't make it out of the prison world and she carried guilt with her. Lizzie didn't mean she felt nothing. She felt so much that she felt emotionally detached from him having passed away.
The prison world itself was hard enough to handle with her sister going dark. She had hoped that the memories would wash away when he jumped into malivore to reunite with her. She had hoped there was some way to keep the memories, but murder the ones that haunted her like the time Sebastian tried to make her a vampire. She remembered running away in the night with him begging and pleading to him that he would never do anything to hurt her.
He had in fact done something to hurt her. He left. He chose to stay in the prison world until it collapsed. She remembered how she held the ascendant in her hands with Josie's arm around her. She remembered how much she cried for him. How much she knew she was going to miss him.
Somewhere it felt as if her heart was permanently broken. It hurt to smile. It hurt to breath because somewhere there was a metaphorical void in her chest. The voice inside her head kept reminding her if she had been enough, he wouldn't have chosen to stay in the prison world.
"Lizzie, tell me what you are thinking about and perhaps, we can piece together a plan to help you?" The therapist asked. "Sebastian's dead." She looked away from the dead space she was looking at and into the therapists eyes.
"I'm sorry-" the therapist couldn't finish her thoughts. Lizzie had interrupted her.
"Sebastian made me feel like I was crazy. He also made me feel less alone. He said, perhaps we are both crazy. He wasn't a great guy, but he was someone that didn't judge me when I told him about my bipolarity." She said looking into the floor boards.
"Alyssa Chang told him that he didn't deserve me. I don't think I deserved him." Lizzie added.
The therapist wrote a couple notes down realizing that Lizzie was entering a grief related depression over the loss of Sebastian. She found it odd that Lizzie couldn't look into her eyes.
"Let's reframe that," she looked at Lizzie.
Lizzie's brain was busy yelling at her.
'If you were enough, he wouldn't have left.'
It kept repeating over and over.
A tear slid down Lizzie's left cheek. She didn't bother to wipe it either. Sebastian didn't want to stay.
"Why do you feel that you didn't deserve him?" She asked Lizzie.
Lizzie went quiet again. Her brain was keeping her occupied with it's own thoughts. There was a specific moment that Lizzie kept sitting inside her mind. A moment she replayed over and over again. She never got tired of it.
The moment that she met Sebastian for the 2nd time at night, the day she had been trying to locate him. He said something to her that meant a lot to her. He told her that she shouldn't have to wait around for anyone. He presented himself in such a mysterious manner that it intrigued her. She'd been chasing that man she met since she met him.
Sometimes, she wondered if Cassandra came back, would he have still picked her.
"Elizabeth Saltzman," she heard her name called gently.
"Why do you feel that you didn't deserve him?" The therapist asked one more time in hopes of actually getting an answer.
Lizzie's thoughts were too loud to be focused on anything. She just looked back into the therapists eyes and smiled the best she could. Even she could tell the smile was fake.
"He would have stayed, if I did." Lizzie said before pressing her lips together for a moment.
Sebastian wasn't coming back and it killed Lizzie to know that he decided that for himself after everything they'd been through. They'd always have the old mill. She could always sit there and reminisce about how much she cared for him. She wanted him back more than anything in the world.
She wanted a lifetime of memories with him in the purest of ways and it was all her fault. She thought for the first time, she'd actually allowed herself to fall in love. She fell and she got hurt.
The therapist looked surprised at her answer.
It was honest and also devastating.
