Hello Adventure

Chapter 10

In my gut, I knew from the moment I saw the text messages that I would give in and open them. It was just a matter of when.

I lasted an impressive few hours. The first thing I did was start on a campaign-extension strategy for the Doux partnership: I had a bunch of creative ideas on how to extend the shelf-life of the campaign, so I wrote them out in full detail (in a rather impressive 28-slide deck) and then sent them off to Stasia. After, I checked my emails—work and personal. I took a long shower (cold). I read Brooke's latest blog post "How To Travel Like A Local (Hint: Sleep with One)." I ate a perfectly blistered and chewy pizza Margherita down at the pizza bar by the pool. And then, when I ran out of things to do, I even went on a jog along the lake (okay fine, it was a fast walk).

Lake Como really was unbearably beautiful, but as I passed palatial villas, spires of cypress trees, and open-air café filled with happy chatter, it was like all the colors and saturation had been turned down because the whole time my mind was on the dark messages, waiting there in my phone like the goddamn boogieman.

That's when my resolve broke. I just had to know why he was texting me; I just had to know why he just stopped like that in the first place. So when I got back to my room after the colorless walk, without thinking about what it really meant, what I was really doing, I opened them:

The first message was innocuous: "What's this I hear about you being in Europe?"

I cursed myself for sharing my whereabouts online. Maybe Seb would have never even messaged if he didn't know I was abroad.

Really, it was the next messages that got me.

I dumbly stared out at the view from my hotel room. I had a lake-view and there was a petite balcony set with two chairs. This very morning I had sat there and drunk a life-changing glass of fresh-squeezed blood orange juice.

I know it sounds kind of crazy to call a glass of juice "life-changing," but that was the next thing that travel gave me: the realization that I could still learn stuff about myself.

You see, I thought I knew my tastes by now, what I liked, what I disliked. And before this morning's juice met my lips, I always had a meh relationship with orange juice. But suddenly after this one sip, I realized I loved it! I had never even tasted freshly squeezed Italian blood orange juice before this morning. And I would never be able to taste orange juice again without thinking of this oddly enthralling memory. How strange it was to change your mind about something so basic and rudimentary?

But now, I stared at the balcony and only felt heaviness. I was already slouching under the weight of what I had just done. By opening the messages, I had brought Sebastian into the room with me and sat him right there, his presence telling me that hadn't learned anything, that I was still the same stupid girl.

Just delete the rest of the messages, I told myself. Don't bring the dirty, ugly, needy part of you into this beautiful new chapter of your life.

But I couldn't.

And why? So I could feel that little hit of excitement in my core? Maybe it wasn't just his drugs that I had been addicted to; maybe I was chemically addicted to Sebastian Lacombe too. Maybe I needed professional help to kick him as well. It's always easy to stop until suddenly it's not. Hadn't that been what my addiction counselor told me again and again, when I went to her day after day, to rid myself of his drug's frantic chokehold over me? This is going to be the hardest thing you ever do, she had told me. And she made me say it. She made me call myself an addict. That dark, scary word. Admitting it was physically painful, sickening to me at the time. Even now when I think of myself as an addict it still hurts a bit inside, but it's okay to hurt a bit. I learned that too.