Chapter Text
“Healing is a process,” Xiomara always reminded the group, “No one has ever healed in a day, from just some words.”
Tahira trusted that advice, because it kept her from feeling she was behind everyone else. Jordyn was smiling more every day, Kairi was more social… Morgan… Tahira didn’t want to think about it. Tahira certainly didn’t dislike him, as she knows she doesn’t want him dead, but… thinking of her filled her guts with a kind of warmth and… compassion that Tahira was so, so desperately afraid of. Day after day, she told herself she just related to what she said. But she knew damn well that Morgan’s experience with that was so different from hers.
It wasn’t just Morgan, either. While Morgan was the only one to make Tahira feel warmth and butterflies and all that other mushy shit, she felt that pity she thought was ripped away from her coming back just for each of the other girls in the inpatient program. When Jordyn first opened up, she didn’t care. Now, every time it talks about the bullying they faced, Tahira doesn’t feel angry about anyone other than the people who hurt them. That’s not how it’s supposed to go, that’s not how she’s supposed to feel at all! She’s supposed to be uncaring, angry, wrong in the head, always-so-moody Tahira!
There was a frog on site one day, and it filled her with actual joy to see two of the resident “stoics” looking at it in such fascination that they did. Tahira didn’t want to feel weird cringey feelings about the girls in the hospital, she just wanted to get fixed and leave! Why was healing so hard? Why couldn’t she just feel happy and let herself feel happy?
Everyone else was smiling. Everyone else was already friends with each other. So why was Tahira still so afraid of daring to even accept how happy they made her? The only person she could even consider “equal” to her is Kairi, and thinking of being equal to everyone else made Tahira almost relapse into the bitterness that once consumed her.
It’s like she said, the day she attempted. There’s something in her that just can’t be saved, something that rejects any love that can be given. It’s like what Xiomara always says, that there is no guarantee that she will be indefinitely happy. Maybe she should just give up. She’s not friends with anyone else, the only person who can even care is Kairi. Getting worse and preventing herself from ever healing again is so much easier than getting better, isn’t it?
But degenerating would only make the girls feel bad for her. And, while she thought she only hated that idea because she hates being pitied, she realized something else.
She didn’t want the others to feel bad at all.
And that’s more horrifying than the thoughts that brought her here in the first place.