Never Alone

Chapter 37

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I slept through the night. The door was open and everyone was scattered throughout the motor home, and I had closed my eyes around midnight without opening them again until almost eight the next morning. The nightmares that had been plaguing my sleep didn't come, and the fear that I couldn't trust anyone around me was gone with them. Maybe they'd come back, but maybe they wouldn't.

I pulled my notebook out of my bag and quietly began to write my story on its empty pages. I wasn't sure if I'd ever let anyone read it, but Dr. Crimm was right about how writing it out made me feel better somehow. This was going to be a difficult day, saying goodbye to everyone, and I wished I could stop time and spend more of it with them before going back to my old life.

The memory card with the video of the crime against me sat inside my bag. I would give myself the day to think about what I wanted to do with it. I had two choices: I could go back to my old life and just know in my heart what had happened to me, or I could give the video to the authorities and prepare for another wave of attention and salt in my wound. Every time I felt convinced it was better to just slip back into my old life and get through the final months of school, I remembered my brother at my bedside, begging me to fight.

"Are you hungry for breakfast?" Dr. Crimm asked quietly.

"Yes," I answered. I closed the notebook and tucked it back into my bag.

Shima was awake too, and she slipped out of bed and joined us outside in our folding chairs for a box of grocery-store donuts. The cold morning air felt sharp and clean with the scent of the tall trees beyond the campsite. A thick fog hung over their tips, making them look menacing and beautifully inviting all at once.

Shima stared into the dark spaces between the thick trunks. I knew that behind her eyes was a tangle of thoughts, and perhaps, as she believed, a genetically predisposed call to spend her last moments in a place like the forest before us.

"You know what I've always found most interesting about the ribbons and plastic tape in the Aokigahara Forest?" Dr. Crimm asked, perhaps having been thinking, like me, of Shima's struggle.

"What?" Shima asked, turning to look at Dr. Crimm. Her quiet, innocent voice reminded me of a young child seeking answers.

"They are a perfect example of perspective," Dr. Crimm answered, setting down the donut she'd been eating. "Those ribbons have a beginning and an end. They start somewhere and they end somewhere," she continued thoughtfully. "But where that 'somewhere' is depends on your perspective. If you are lost and alone, not seeking help but wanting to get away from the people and places that could save you, then the ribbons begin on the public trail and end in a desolate location in the forest. They lead you to the end of your life.

"If you are lost and alone and seeking help—searching for the people and places that can save you, then the ribbons begin in that desolate location and end at the public trail. They lead you back to life." She turned her head slowly and looked out at the forest again. "It's all in your perspective. It's in the work you choose to do to either get better or get gone." She turned back to Shima, her last words falling between them like a period at the end of a dramatic speech.

The day I met Dr. Crimm, I'd thought I would either outsmart her or outwait her, but she was so much more than I ever thought she could be. Dr. Crimm was an old soul who knew what she had control of and what she had to let go. Shima's choice, all of our choices, were out of her control. She could tie ribbon to trees all day long and it would still be up to us to decide where those ribbons began and where they ended.

The difference between Dr. Crimm and the other adults trying and failing to help was simple: When faced with a lost teen on a deserted trail, she didn't just point in a direction and say with authority it was the right way to go. Dr. Crimm had wandered those trails herself at one time, so she knew that all the directions in the world wouldn't help someone who had lost their inner compass. Instead, she offered to walk beside you until you found your own way out.