Another excerpt I love from Broken. This is from Chapter 19.
I shook and, dropping my head to my hand, I cried. “Well, not when you put it like that,” I said and I cried. I cried for a long while.
“How did you find all this out? Did you have a therapist?” William asked.
“I did it myself,” I said.
“Yourself?”
“Yes,” I sniffed. “The self-evaluation. The encyclopedia sets. I learned very early on that the subconscious buries only what you can’t deal with. It’s a coping mechanism. So the problem is there, buried beneath memories and layers of forgotten pain. But to cope, we forget. It’s to preserve our sanity and our mind. Later, I noticed problems…I noticed I was different and needed to unearth the root of the problem.
“A therapist will talk to you in hopes to get the patient speaking fluently enough that, in the heat of passion, under pressure, controlled pressure, the patience’s subconscious will permit clues or outright admissions to the surface. But only in pieces at a time and only ever what the patient is capable of handling at that time. Once it emerges, the patient can address it.”
“But you had no therapist,” William said.
“My good friend,” I said with a grin. “I am a writer. I knew what I needed to do. I shut down my conscious and wrote free form. It took me three years to unearth all of this through discussions with Ian and my writing.”
I watched him twitch as if trying to process the idea that I talk to Ian regularly.
“What about the coping, the depression, the healing…” William listed off the risks.
“I am aware of my alternate worlds,” I said. “I am aware that I may have bits of my personality organized into neat little packages called Ian, Angel, and Erik. And the psycho addiction I have to my cats. I am aware Ian is standing right there watching me, smirking as he drinks my beer. And I know he’s not real—”
Yes, I am.
“—although he thinks he is.”
I looked at Ian and he put my bottle of Guinness to his lips with his grin.
Or maybe it is I who am real, Ian said. I who am the writer and you, my bonny lass…are a figment of my imagination.
I hadn’t thought of that. I paused for a moment and looked at the world and the room around me.
“If I am a figment of your imagination,” I said, “then good god, man! Do better by me than this!”
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes, William,” I said. He looked at me all weird like.
“P-perhaps we should continue,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Let’s.”
