Page 56 of Like First Love, Again

Tears pricked the back of Mia’s eyes and all she wanted to do was argue. To tell Tori that she had her all wrong.

“I see the girl I’ve always seen,” Tori said, eyes dripping with so much awe Mia didn’t deserve. “Brilliant. Honest. Worth the wait,” she added with a little grin.

Mia didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. Her heart had lodged itself in her throat. As if Mia might have missed the fact that she was hopelessly in love with Tori if it had stayed firmly affixed to her chest.

“You don’t have to be perfect, you know,” Tori promised. “You just have to be you. That’s always been enough for me.”

“I don’t deserve you,” Mia whispered, unable to hold back a new class of tears because she was on a mission to cry them all. “But I will,” she vowed.

When they hung up hours later, Mia opened her browser. She wasn’t sure how to search, so she typedqueer-friendly therapist near me, in the search bar.

Because she wanted to be better.

Because she wanted to stop being afraid of herself.

Because she wanted to become the version of her that Tori already saw.

Twenty-Eight

Sitting in the guest room with her computer in her lap, Mia drafted her resignation. She’d only ever worked at one place since getting her tech license, and the idea of leaving made her unexpectedly sad. She got as far asDear Dr. Asgharbefore she closed the laptop.

Mia glanced at her phone. She had her first therapy session in a few hours thanks to a fortuitous cancellation, and she needed to start getting ready for that. She wasn’t avoiding writing the letter if she had legitimate things to do first. Things like washing her hair and shaving her legs and applying a charcoal mask. What would her new therapist think of her if she showed up with pores the size of manhole covers?

After unproductively killing three and a half hours, Mia sat in a microscopic waiting room. Walls painted in bright murals clashed with safety cone orange chairs and a lime green side table. Marigold Weisz, LPC must have started her career asking kids to paint self-portraits. Sitting there, Mia understood why colors were described asloud. This room was an assault on her eardrums and her eyeballs.

When the interior door painted a comparatively muted gold opened, Mia jumped. A woman vaguely resembling a Simpsons character smiled at her so warmly, Mia couldn’t help but unclench.

“Maria Falcon?” Marigold was already extending her hand as Mia rose.

“Call me Mia,” she replied, banging her foot into the table.

“Mia,” she repeated, clutching Mia’s hand with both of hers while looking so deeply into her eyes that Mia felt like a snake being charmed. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Her energy was so warm, tears welled up in Mia’s eyes. Her new Pavlovian response to kindness.

Where the waiting room was a paint department explosion, Marigold’s office was a sleepy dream. The soft pastel tones and the softest leather armchair that forced Mia to sink in and let go was a nervous system reset. It was easy to open her mouth and unleash a torrent of stress and pain. Without taking a breath, she told Marigold about her losses and her mom and her divorce, all of which happened in the same year.

“That sounds incredibly overwhelming,” Marigold observed, tone gentle. She hadn’t made a single note while Mia spent twenty minutes unloading. She’d just trained every ounce of her attention on Mia like she was listening with her entire body.

“I guess so,” Mia replied rather than admit that she’d been fighting the constant fear of drowning on dry land.

“And how have you been coping?” Marigold leaned forward. Instead of sounding judgmental, she seemed legitimately concerned.

Mia fiddled with the hem of her shirt. “I don’t know that I have been,” she admitted. Attention on the thread woven through the edge of the fabric, she heard herself say, “I might be relying on avoidance a little bit.”

“Who could blame the instinct to run from so much pain?” Marigold said like she understood Mia’s admittedly maladaptive behaviors rather than judging them. “When is the first time you remember pushing something down to try and protect yourself?”

Mia slid down the chair just enough to drop her head against the backrest. Looking up at the ceiling painted a pale lavender, Mia really considered the question. When she looked back at Marigold, the answer was stabbing her like a rock in her shoe.

The truth didn’t just slip out—it tore free, ripping its way to the surface before she could brace for it.

“Maybe around the time I didn’t get into med school on the first round of applications. Everyone thought I would—IknewI would—because it was all I ever wanted. And when I didn’t.” She shook her head. “It was so humiliating.” She shut her eyes, but the tears came anyway. “After that, there was no hiding that I was a fraud. That I wasn’t good enough. That the only thing I’d ever wanted looked at me in the face and saidyeah, no.”

Her voice cracked, but she didn’t stop.

“And then it just kept bleeding. One failure into the next. No matter how hard I tried, how hard I worked, I couldn’t stop disappointing people. And then even my body”—she pressed her hand to her empty womb—“even there.” Anger and despair converged to form a homemade chemical bomb. “I gave myself shots, followed the doctor’s orders to the fucking letter.” She gritted her teeth. “The one thing my body was supposed to do.” She blinked hard, but couldn’t clear her blurry vision. “I failed at that, too. And I guess I just got tired of the unrelenting mudslide of shit.”

Marigold’s bushy eyebrows saidwhoa, but her magenta lips said, “That’s a lot to carry.” She held Mia in her warm gaze like there was no way Mia could scare her off. “Would you tell memore about why you wanted to go to medical school in the first place?”

After her session, Mia sat in her car with the engine running and both hands wrapped around the steering wheel like she might float away if she let go. The two-year-old sedan still smelled like dealership plastic and synthetic leather. It was nothing like her mom’s old Volvo. It was just another thing in her life that felt borrowed. Transient.

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