“Yeah.”

“Safer, right? To go back to the past.”

“Definitely,” I say, in 100% agreement.

“That’s the thing.” She lays down her knitting needles. The room is silent now except for the low hum of the air conditioner churning out cool air. “The past is alluring. It puts on rose-colored glasses and seduces us. But if you return, you’ll only need more of the drug. You’ll need a bigger dose. You’ll need more to take the pain away. Remember, the pain is the arrow coming out, not the arrow going in.”

Her words trip me back in time. To Trey giving an alcoholic a tattoo saying that. Would this ache go away once the arrow is out? Or will I always hurt? Will I always feel wounded? “But how do you know? How do you know the pain isn’t just the pain? How do you know the pain doesn’t last?”

“Here’s how,” she says, her voice clear and precise as she keeps her eyes fixed on me. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you.”

“Do you see a lying, cheating, whore?”

I recoil. “No! God no. I see you. You’re the woman who runs SLAA. You’re the pink-haired lady who knits.”

“So I’m not a bad person to you?”

I shake my head. “No. No. No.”

“Good. Because I was you. I am you. I will always be you. A sick person trying to be well. Not a bad one trying to be good. That’s how I know the pain subsides. Because I’m here. Because I made it through. I made it beyond. I survived. And you can too. Whatever is weighing you down now will pass.”

I start tapping my foot against the frayed brown rug and I know I won’t last much longer taking my medicine. There’s only so much you can down in one sitting. But then, maybe the medicine is working, maybe it’s churning up all the vile things inside me that need to come out, because the next thing I know I am spilling it all, only this time someone is here to listen. “It’s too much. It’s all too much,” I say, the words rushing out, landing on top of each other in a pile-up. “My mom talks about her sex life all the time and always has, the woman blackmailing me will never let up, the guy I think I like for real is the most confusing person I know, and the man who took care of me and made me who I was is the only person I can trust. It’s all safer and better and easier with him. My life is spiraling out of control, and I just want to return to the one thing that made sense. That felt good. That felt like I was living my life on my terms, not anyone else’s.”

I hold my hands out wide, and stare at her. Solve this, pink-haired lady.

“I know,” she says. “I know it feels like you can’t hold on. But you are more than those things that hold you back. You don’t have to listen to your mom talk about men. You can walk away when she does. You can tell her you don’t want to hear about her boyfriends. You can start with that,” Joanne offers and it sounds so simple and possible when she suggests it.

But I don’t know that I’d have to guts to walk away. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I say.

“And as for this guy,” she says, and now she slows down, speaks carefully, as if this is a delicate subject. “Is this boy Trey? Are you and Trey still spending a lot of time together?”

“Why are you asking?” I press my spine against the back of the metal chair, digging away from her trying to know the real me, the me I am with Trey.

“Because I know you’re friends.”

“Right. And you disapprove because I haven’t been in recovery for a year yet,” I say, raising my walls once more. I can’t let them down for long.

She shakes her head, smiles sympathetically. “Layla – if that’s even your name and I doubt it is, but I respect your privacy – I’m not going to say the heart wants what the heart wants, because if we followed that line of false wisdom that we’d all be partaking of our vices. But I will say this. Sometimes you meet someone in recovery and it feels like the real thing, but it’s not. And sometimes you meet someone in recovery and it is the real thing, and I’d be a fool if I told you to stay away. Because SLAA is not like AA or NA. You’re not going to withdraw completely from sex and love. All I want is for you to be able to have a healthy relationship at some point, if that’s what you want. And if the real thing comes along, I want you to have the strength and fortitude to deal with all the messiness and yuck-iness and problems, but also the wonder and potential and possibility of the real thing. And I think you can only have that if you can step away from the hold the past has on you.”

She makes it sound easy, but the path looks so shadowy to me. “I’m not capable though. I’m not fixed. I’m not healed. I can’t even tell what a healthy relationship is.”

“You are capable, sweetie,” she says, reaching for my hand, resting hers on mine. It’s not a motherly gesture, but maybe it’s a sisterly one, and I don’t mind it. It feels warm, comforting. It also feels appropriate. “You just let go of the past.”

Let go.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe, just maybe, if I try letting go of the past, at least one way it chains me, I can move forward.

“Is it really that easy?”

“Yes, it is. It is easy to let go. But to do so you have to take ownership of your behavior. Your choices,” she adds, and now her voice is firmer now.

“But I do take ownership of them,” I protest, but then I find myself wondering. Do I blame my mom for everything?

“I think you’re getting there. And I’m not saying you need to beat yourself up. But I think the key to healing is to acknowledge that while you might have had reasons that led you down the path of love and sex addiction, you also need to accept that you made those choices. You made them, you own them, you are accountable for them.”

“But what does it mean to be accountable for them?” I say, pressing her. I want to understand her advice, I want to be like her, I want to be happy on the other side.

“It can mean being honest about them. Talking to the people who might have been hurt, or shut out by your choices.”

With a sharp pang, I think of Kristen. Of my total lack of honesty with her. Of how I haven’t let her in. When you’re an addict, there’s a divide between you and your normal friends and that divide is their not knowing. The divide is alive, pulsing with its own secret heartbeat only you can hear every time you hang out with them, talk to them. It’s as if a ghost is in the room, chattering constantly, and you’re the only one who can see it or hear it.

Am I ready to banish that ghost?

“Does that make sense?” Joanne adds. “That’s my wish for you.”

I nod. “It does make sense,” I say, nerves jumping as I picture myself holding a chisel, banging it on the brick wall between Kristen and me. But what happens when the wall crumbles? Does the friendship fall to rubble too?

Joanne tucks her needles and sweater-to-be away, reaches into her white leather oversized shoulder bag and pulls out a book. There’s a stick drawing of a girl on the front carrying an oversize, misshapen heart. The caption says “Carry the heart.”

Is she carrying her own heart? Or someone else’s?

Joanne hands me the notebook. The white pages inside are empty. “It’s for you. If you ever want to write down any thoughts. Or not. Maybe it’s just a pretty picture on the front and you write grocery lists in it,” she says with a shrug. “It’s whatever you want it to be. All I hope is that you can someday know that love doesn’t have to be a brutal, bitter, power game. Love can be the ugly beautiful.”

The ugly beautiful.

I’ve never heard the saying before, but it resonates deep in my bones.

It’s an oxymoron. But like many oxymorons, it makes sense.

Like this malformed heart drawing. Like my lack of mascara, like my telling off of Neil, like the kitten hanging in there, like the arrow that’s coming or going.

I don’t know if the arrow is coming or going. I don’t even know where I belong. But the arrow is real, it exists, and it’s in my misshapen heart.