In Between the Two

I really should have written this out a long time ago. I know that. Writing things out – it’s good for me, and I like to think I’m good for it too. There are times when I cannot speak, as if a shadow is gripping my vocal chords and trying to hang me with them. I can still write in those times, still clamp my fist around a pencil, still type methodically into a keyboard. Writing is good for me.

It happened in July, four years ago, up at my grandparents’ house. They live some forty minutes from Grand Rapids in a big cabin dropped on the edge of a clover-shaped lake. I lost something there; someone took it from me. He did not take my virtue. He did not take my innocence. He could have taken either of those things and I would be better off.

I was thirteen! I was thirteen. Girls that age are supposed to be dreaming about boys and lip gloss and the high school prom. They are supposed to be wearing Hollister Co., not the dark shadow of disillusionment. No, he did not take away my virtue, my innocence. He took away my confidence in the world.

Since then, it has been hard for me to feel safe. I dream things ten times worse than what happened. So twisted and horrific are my nightmares that I don’t remember what actually went on in that basement room (underneath the fan, on the chafing carpet, below the spinning loon decoration.) The dreams are not only sexual horrors anymore. They’ve developed into violent deaths and gory diseases. They are reoccurring. They are cruelly realistic.

It used to take me hours to fall asleep. I would be scared of what I would dream that night, or sometimes I would just think too much. Then I might wake up in the middle of the night, never drenched in sweat, never screaming, but paralyzed, frozen like that day in July where I didn’t do or say anything.

I know I am partially responsible. I perpetuate my hell. I cling to it. I do not allow myself to be distracted by joy. Whether it is because I don’t deserve joy, or like it, I feel displaced in it. I lost my confidence in the world! And when something good happens, when happiness thrusts itself upon me and I cannot help but smile, I am confused. And I back away.

So I sit on my roof in the middle of the night while everybody else is sleeping or stringing themselves out on electronic morphine. I rock back and forth in the odd chance that I’ll lose my balance, tumble down into the driveway and break something important. I cry into a ratty towel because tissues are feeble and bad for the environment. I do not sob anymore; how dare I break the nighttime peace of my leafy suburban street. I sit in crushing silence. I plea to the constellations that I cannot name because those stars, more than 25 trillion miles away, feel a lot closer than God.

The statute of limitations on rape is nine years, and I’m almost halfway through. But I don’t need – or want – vengeance or restitution or someone else’s definition of justice. I’m not even sure if I was raped in the legal sense, but it completely does not matter because the damage is done and it’s all the same. Physically, I am young and healthy. Emotionally, I am a rape victim.

Maybe I’m confused with my tenses. I can look back and tell you how I was, and I can look forward and tell you where I am aiming, but I don’t know where I am right now. You can keep on asking me, “how are you?” and I will always tell you “fine”. I’m not lying, really. I just don’t know what I am. I can look backwards and I can look forwards but there isn’t a word for looking in between the two.