Dr. Amara said to try writing at the end of our second session, and she said it so casually, like she was suggesting I drink more water.
"Not for me," she said, closing her notebook and looking at me over her glasses. "For you. Five minutes a day. Whatever's in your head. You don't have to show anyone, you don't have to make it pretty, you don't even have to keep it. Just get it out of your head and onto paper."
I nodded like I would do it, like I was the kind of person who journals, and I knew even as I was nodding that I wouldn't, because the last time I tried to write things down it ended badly.
That night, I'm sitting on my bed after practice, my legs still humming from the ice, my shirt damp with sweat cooling against my back, and the room is quiet in a way it almost never is. Roman is at the library studying for his midterm, his textbooks spread across a table on the second floor where he says it's too quiet to fall asleep. Maya is at dinner with Priya, they texted me a photo of terrible-looking dining hall pizza twenty minutes ago. The room is just mine for a little while, just the hum of the heater and the streetlight coming through the blinds.
My bag is still in the corner where I dropped it after the health center two days ago, half unzipped, spilling out a sock and a roll of tape, and I still haven't fully unpacked it because unpacking it feels like admitting I'm staying. I pull it toward me across the carpet, the wheels catching, and I unzip it the rest of the way.
Inside, under my spare thermal shirt and my taped-up skate guards and an old protein bar I forgot about, is the notebook.
It's not new, it's old, the cover is soft black fake leather that's peeling at the corners like sunburnt skin, and there's a small gold lock on the side that doesn't work anymore because I broke it when I was fourteen trying to get it open too fast because Kirill was coming down the hall and I didn't want him to see.
I brought it from Saint Petersburg because Mama packed it at the bottom of my suitcase when I wasn't looking. "You might want it," she said quietly while I was arguing with Papa in the other room. I told her I wouldn't, that I was done with that kid stuff, and I lied to her face because I didn't want her to know how much I still needed it.
I haven't opened it in three years. Not since the night before I left.
I hold it in my hands and it's lighter than I remember, or maybe I'm stronger now, my hands are bigger, my wrists thicker from lifting and from holding myself up.
I open to the first page and my breath catches because it's my handwriting from when I was twelve, big and messy and leaning hard to the right, Russian letters taking up the whole line.
*January 3. Coach said my camel spin is better. Papa bought me new laces. White ones.*
I turn the page, my thumb leaving a faint sweat mark on the paper.
*February 19. I hate school. Kirill called me a fag in the hallway and everyone laughed.*
Another page, the paper thinner here.
*March 11. I think I like—*
The sentence stops mid-word and the rest is scratched out with black pen so hard and so many times it tore through the paper in three places, and I remember sitting on my bedroom floor at thirteen with my heart hammering, scratching it out because if Papa found it he would kill me, and I can feel my thirteen-year-old panic in my chest right now like it's happening again.
My throat closes up tight and hot.
I flip forward fast, not reading, just letting pages flutter under my thumb, and it's years of my life in this little book, some pages full front and back with tiny cramped writing, some half empty with just a date at the top, some with whole paragraphs crossed out so heavily the pen bled through, and I can see myself getting smaller as I go, making my letters tinier and tinier like if I wrote smaller no one would see me, no one would find me.
The last entry is dated two weeks before I left Russia, the ink is blue and shaky, and it's only three words in the middle of the otherwise blank page.
*I can't anymore.*
I close the book fast, too fast, the sound loud in the quiet room, and my hands are shaking so bad the cover rattles against the desk when I set it down.
The band on my left wrist feels too tight all of a sudden, like it's cutting off circulation. It's black athletic tape, the same kind I use on my ankle every morning, wrapped in three neat layers, and I wear it every single day and I tell people it's for support, for an old sprain that never healed right, and nobody asks because athletes are always taped up somewhere. Nobody asks and that's why I wear it.
I pull the sleeve of my hoodie down over it anyway, tug it until it covers my knuckles.
I put the journal on my desk and I open it to a blank page at the very back, the paper clean and white and terrifying, and Dr. Amara's voice is in my head, calm and even, *five minutes, just write what's in your head*.
I pick up a pen from the chipped mug I keep pens in, a cheap blue Bic that skips if you press too light.
I stare at the blank page for a long time, long enough that my eyes start to water from not blinking, and the white is too bright, it feels like a trap, like a wide open field with nowhere to hide. It feels like if I write one true thing, just one, everything else will fall out after it in a rush and I won't be able to stop it and I won't be able to put it back in.
I write the date because that's easy, that's safe, that's just facts. *July 7, 2026. Toronto.*
The ink looks too dark on the page.
I try to write the next line and my hand freezes halfway down.
*Today I—*
I stop. The pen hovers a millimeter above the paper and my heart starts beating too fast, that familiar rabbit-fast thump against my ribs, the same feeling as right before the pills, the tight chest, the noise rising in my ears like static.
I can't write *today I went to counseling and cried in front of a stranger*. I can't write *today Roman stayed with me all night and I listened to him breathe*. I can't write *today I thought about home and wanted to die and then felt guilty for wanting it*.
If I write it, it becomes real in a way thinking it isn't. If I write it, someone could find it, someone could read it. If I write it, I'm thirteen again and I'm in the locker room and Kirill is holding my diary open and reading it out loud in a stupid high voice while everyone laughs and I am standing there in my underwear wanting the floor to swallow me whole.
I put the pen down carefully, like it's hot. I close the journal. I push it away to the edge of the desk like it might bite me.
The door beeps, the green light flashes, and Roman walks in with his backpack slung over one shoulder and a paper coffee in his hand, steam curling up into the cold air of the hallway.
He sees me at the desk immediately, sees the journal, sees my face, and he doesn't say anything at first, just puts his bag down soft on the floor instead of dropping it like he usually does, and sets the coffee on his desk.
"Hey," he says, quiet, like he's trying not to startle me.
"Hey," I say back, and my voice sounds scraped out.
He sits on his bed and takes his shoes off, one then the other, lining them up neatly which he never does. "You good?"
I nod because it's automatic, it's what I do. Lie. "Yeah."
He looks at the journal on my desk, then at me, his eyes moving slow and careful. "That yours?"
"From home," I say, and my voice cracks a little on the word home.
He nods like that explains everything, and maybe it does, maybe he understands more than I give him credit for. "You write in it?"
"Trying to," I say, and I pick at a loose thread on my hoodie sleeve so I don't have to look at him.
He doesn't push, he doesn't ask to see, he doesn't make a joke, he just opens his laptop and clicks it on, the screen lighting up his face blue. "Cool."
I sit there with the closed journal in front of me like it's a test I'm failing, and I want to open it again, I want to be the kind of person who can write five minutes a day and feel better after, the kind of person Dr. Amara thinks I can be. She made it sound so easy in her office, like brushing your teeth.
It's not easy. It's terrifying. It feels like opening a door I've kept locked for three years and not knowing what's going to come out.
I pick it up again because my hands need something to do, and I hold it in my lap, heavy and familiar, and I run my thumb over the broken gold lock, back and forth, feeling the little dent where I pried it open with a screwdriver.
Roman looks over from his laptop, his eyes flicking down to my hands and back up. "You don't have to, you know."
I look up, confused. "What?"
"Write," he says, shrugging one shoulder. "If you don't want to. Or if you can't today."
"I'm supposed to," I say, and I hear how defensive I sound, how much like a kid. "For therapy. Dr. Amara said."
He shrugs again, easy, like we're talking about what to eat for dinner. "Therapy's supposed to help, not make it worse, right? If it's making you feel like that," he gestures vaguely at my face, at my hands shaking, "maybe skip today."
I stare at him, at this hockey player who barely passed high school English, and he just said the smartest, kindest thing anyone's said to me all week, and he goes back to his laptop like he didn't just completely rearrange something in my chest.
I open the journal again, but not to the blank page at the back, not to the terrifying white. I open it to the middle, to a page that's already full, an entry from when I was fifteen, and I don't read the words, I can't, but I look at the handwriting, how small I made the letters, how I crowded them together in the margins like I was trying to take up as little space as possible, like if I wrote smaller no one would see me, no one would find me, no one would hurt me for what was inside my head.
I take the pen, and my hand is steadier now, and I don't write a sentence, I don't write any words at all because words are too much today. I draw a line, one straight horizontal line across the very bottom of the blank page at the back, pressing just hard enough that the pen doesn't skip.
Then another line under it, parallel, careful.
Then another. And another. And one more.
Five lines. Like music bars with no notes yet. Like a staff waiting for a song. Like a beginning that isn't scary.
I close the journal slow, and I don't put it back in my bag where I can hide it and forget it. I open my desk drawer, the shallow top one where I keep my tape and my extra laces, and I put it inside, on top, where I can see it every morning when I get my tape.
Roman closes his laptop with a soft click. "You want to get food? Maya just texted the group chat, she said the dining hall has poutine tonight, the real kind with the squeaky cheese."
I stand up and my legs feel less shaky than they did five minutes ago, more solid under me. "Yeah. Okay. Let's go."
He grabs his keys off the hook by the door and holds the door open for me, waiting, and as we walk out into the hallway I look back over my shoulder at my desk.
The drawer is closed. The journal is inside, safe. Waiting.
I didn't write anything today, not really, not words. But I opened it. I touched it. I made five lines on a page that used to terrify me.
Dr. Amara would probably say that's something. Roman would definitely say that's something.
I think maybe it is.