All The Things We Should Have Done
Exactly one week after she came home from the hospital, Sara made a list. Grissom was asleep on the couch, muttering things in his sleep. He did that a lot now. He sometimes woke her up calling her in his sleep, but that was okay because she woke him up screaming. They were both pretty fucked up. Sara bit on her eraser and tried to concentrate. The only thing she had written so far was Things To Do Before I Die. She had thought of a million things when she was trapped, hadn't she? She had thought of a million more when her lungs were burning for air and finding only water. She tapped her pencil on the table. Go skydiving? Too risky. Try escargot? She wasn't sure why that one had popped up at all. Have sex in the ocean? She didn't actually want to go anywhere near water. In the end, she only wrote down live.
They made her see a counselor before going back to work. She was tall and had a very long face. Her name was Penelope, but she liked to be called Penny. She gave Sara a journal and told her to write her feelings down, as if this was a new and novel idea.
"It's okay to cry," Penny assured Sara, smiling confidentially at her. "Just start talking. Anything you want. It's okay to cry."
But there was nothing to cry about. She had been under a car, and now she wasn't. She had been in danger, and now she wasn't. Really, she just wanted to go back to work. Penny was not impressed. On the fifth day of counseling, Penny pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows.
"This is quite an ordeal you've gone through, Sara." Her fingernails were painted an odd, pale salmon color. "I'm slightly worried about the way you're dealing with it."
Sara shifted in her seat. "I'm fine. Really. I'm just…I'm just not really an emotional person." And as soon as the sentence had left her mouth, Sara wanted to laugh at the gross inaccuracy of it. Not an emotional person…when had she started telling such outlandish lies? She had always been an emotional person. Before. And then she realized that she hadn't really cried, hadn't truly been emotional at all since first waking up to whitewashed walls and a sterile smell. She looked back at Penny, who seemed to be rolling this new piece of information around in her mouth as if it had a bitter and unpleasant taste.
"Sorry," Sara said, shrugging a little and feeling something like realization erupt inside of her. "I'm just not." And it was true, it was true.