Back to You(34)

All her breath left her in a rush, and she shook her head slightly in disbelief.
His eyes were scanning the mats below, and when he finally made eye contact with her, she grinned up at him and waved.
And when he winked at her, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that from that moment on, she would do anything for him.
She turned then, walking to the other side of the mat as she got ready to make her run, her adrenalin racing because she knew he was watching.
And she couldn’t help but smile at the irony of the fact that the baddest boy in school could somehow always make her feel like the world was good.

October 2011
Lauren couldn’t concentrate to save her life.
She sat in the back of her Psychological Defense Mechanisms class, her pen poised on her notebook as if she was getting ready to write, but her mind was a million miles away.
Actually, her mind was just a few miles away, back at Adam’s office.
Earlier that afternoon, he had suggested a more aggressive stretching routine to counteract the core exercises she was now doing. Lauren had laid on her back as Adam took her leg and lifted it straight up, slowly but surely pushing it closer to her chest, all the while explaining to her how certain hamstring stretches actually release the lower back rather than the legs. As she grew more comfortable, he leaned over and pressed the front of his shoulder to the back of her leg, using some of his body weight to increase the intensity of the stretch.
And that was the moment Lauren’s mind kept going back to: looking up at him as he leaned over her.
With her leg propped up on his shoulder.
“…Can be found in chapter six of your textbooks. These two are most commonly confused, and can often exist simultaneously in a person’s psyche,” Lauren heard her professor say as he gestured toward the screen behind him, and she blinked quickly, snapping out of it as she sat up a bit straighter in an attempt to regain her focus.
Two words were projected on the large screen in the front of the lecture hall: repression and suppression.
“Both are Freudian concepts concerned with removing unwanted or unpleasant memories from one’s conscious, but the difference between the two is that suppression involves the cognizant desire to forget, whereas repression happens subconsciously.”
Lauren made a shorthand notation of that on her page as the professor continued, “Now, either one of these methods in moderation can be considered healthy. It’s only when they occur in extremes that they hinder a person’s emotional development and impede their ability to heal from traumatic events.”
She chewed on the corner of her lip, writing that down as her mind shifted away from Adam’s office and back to the place it usual { display: block; text-indent: 0%;hery, bringly did as she sat in these classes.
Right back to him. Always to him.
“Now, believe it or not, most of the time, it’s easier to work with someone who is suppressing painful thoughts rather than repressing them. Since repression is a subconscious method of protection, oftentimes the subject will not even be aware that the element being repressed even exists, which lends itself to denial. However, with suppression, the subject is well aware of the issue; he just chooses to avoid dealing with it.”
Lauren sighed softly.
It was just so classically Michael.
She’d never admitted it out loud to anyone—in fact, she’d never even officially admitted it to herself—but it was Michael who made her want to go into child psychology. She couldn’t help but feel like if he had been given the tools to deal with his emotional suffering when he was young, if he’d just had access to the necessary coping strategies, so much could have been different.
But instead, he fell back on what worked, on what was safest and easiest for him: he refused to deal with any of it. And it made an already miserable situation a hundred times worse. She hadn’t even been aware of how severely it all affected him until the very end.
Lauren pressed her lips together, looking down as she rolled her pen between her fingers.
Because she realized then that she was guilty of the same exact thing.
As much as she denied still caring about everything that happened between them, as much as she insisted to Jenn that it was years ago and that it was all in the past, the truth was, she’d never gotten over it.
Lauren would have never admitted that if he hadn’t come back into her life; she realized that. She would have gone about her business, choosing to pretend she was unaffected by her past, and if she’d never seen him again, she probably would have been able to believe her own lie. But his reappearance had given her past a voice again.
And as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist anymore.