"It's like I'm running away from me,
it's like I've taken the puzzle in me
and left it scrambled for all to see."
__________________________________
When Arden Danvers' parents split when she was eight years old, she moved away with her dad from her...
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"Coming like a hurricane, I take it in real slow. The world is spinning like a weathervane. Fragile and composed, I am breaking down again."
Hurricane - Fleurie
_______________________________ trigger warning: talks of drug abuse, mental abuse, and suicide
VII. \\ FACING THE PAST //
"Back at my old school, I had a boyfriend. Michael. We dated for a little over a year." Arden told them, "I knew he had problems when we started dating, but...they were small and I...I thought that everything would get better, you know?"
By this time, Rowan, Hailey, and Elisia had sat down on the floor across of her, listening as she began the tragic story of her past. Hugging her knees into her chest, Arden tried to maintain her composure as she continued. This was the first time she'd talked about it with people outside of her family and her therapist back in Colorado.
"The first couple months of our relationship started off great. We were happy, and I was falling hard for him...but it didn't last that way."
In Arden's head, his voice began echoing the little things in the beginning as her mind began remembering the past.
'You shouldn't wear that, it'll attract the wrong kind of attention.'
'You wanted to go out with your friends? But I thought we could just spend time together, just you and me.'
'If you really loved me, you wouldn't go out tonight.'
'You're being ridiculous, Arden. Why are you acting like such a bitch right now?'
'If you leave, I will hurt myself.'
Blinking her eyes, Arden fought his voice off in her head...feeling a lump forming in her throat as she found her voice again.
"Slowly, Michael became more and more emotionally draining and then eventually got really emotionally abusive. He had a way of playing mind games with me and he knew how to get to me in order to get the attention he wanted. Whether it was manipulating me into spending all my time and energy on no one else but him, or threatening to kill himself if he ever suspected I was having thoughts about leaving him."
Rowan frowned, her eyebrows knitting up as she looked at her sympathetically, "I'm so sorry, Arden. I had no idea."
But she couldn't have known. No one did. In fact, not even Arden's parents knew fully about any of this. Rowan, Hailey, and Elisia were now the only ones who knew the whole story of what she went through last year.
