Other Broken Things by C. Desir

Author:C. Desir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

Chapter

Seventeen

“Did you make your list?” Kathy asks as soon as I slide into the plush velvet Starbucks chair across from her.

I kick my feet up onto the table and take a long sip of coffee. “Yeah. It’s done.”

Kathy shakes her head. “No. It’s not. But let’s hear what you’ve got so far.”

I take another sip. “No ‘good morning, Natalie.’ No ‘you made it on time,’ just right to the list, huh?”

“Good morning, Natalie. Did you go to all your meetings this week?”

“I talked to you yesterday. You know I went to all my meetings.”

She pulls off a bite of scone and pops it in her mouth. “That’s right. We talked four times this week. And every single time, you didn’t say anything about the Fourth Step or your list. So. We’re here to work and I want to know what you’ve got so far.”

I take a deep breath, suddenly nervous. I jotted down a few things, but I kept getting tripped up on the past regrets thing. And on the sex thing. You start looking at your life in terms of the guys you’ve had drunken hookups with and things get real depressing real fast.

I pull out a piece of yellow lined paper I got from my dad’s office and stare at it for a few seconds. “I resent my parents. They want me to be a certain way. I’m inconvenient for them and that sort of pisses me off.”

Kathy nods. “Yeah. That’s probably a big one. Did you think about whether or not that’s something you have control over?”

“What do you mean?”

She leans forward and her boobs droop low, pressing against her button-down shirt. I hope my body never gets old like this. “I mean, think about the Serenity Prayer. Half the reason people drink is because they’re worked up over things they have no control over. So every time you start getting worked up, you got to put up a mental block that stops you and reminds you to focus back on what you can control.”

“I can’t control anything.”

I’m not sure I mean to say this, but as soon as it slips out, it feels an awful lot like truth. Like every time I want something so bad, I never get it. And there’s always so much disappointment. And that’s probably the reason I let go of stuff when it starts to get hard, because I’m so fucking sick of disappointment.

“You can control things,” Kathy says. “You can control your choices. You can control how you choose to react to others.”

“In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t feel like very much.”

“Exactly,” she says, sipping from her coffee. “And the minute you realize how little control you have over things, it all gets easier. We’ve talked about this before. There’s nothing you can do about other people and their shit. You have to mind your own business, do your work, trust God, and help others.”

The God thing continues to be a bit of a holdup for me. Even growing up in a pretty progressive church, I feel conflicted about faith.

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