Page 2 of This I Know
I don’t hear someone say my name – I feel it.Hard.The words reverberate through my body like the painful little shockwaves they are. They come to rest at my head, amplifying everything horrible that I’m feeling. My head pounds, pulsing with rays of pain just like when I first woke up.
I squeeze my eyes shut. This time, I’m not going to bother opening them.
“Avery.”
It’s my mother. That I know – I recognize her voice.
My eyes stay shut. I want to see her, but it’ll hurt too much to do anything other than continue to lie here. Plus, I’m exhausted, totally and utterly exhausted, more than I’ve ever been in my life. I feel like I just ran ten marathons and now all I want to do is to continue sleeping. She can wait. Besides, didn’t we just talk about me approaching adulthood, and her leaving me to manage my own waking times? I only hope she remembers to close the door behind her when she leaves.
A few minutes pass. I still sense her in the room. I turn my head over on the pillow, away from where I think she is. It hurts to do so, and I cringe a little, but maybe she’ll get the hint.
I don’t hear her close the door. I hear nothing.
Instead, I feel her touch my hand.
The sensation of touch isn’t nearly as painful as sound, but her fingers feel cold against my skin.
“Avery,” she says once more.
I swing my head around and open my eyes. That was a bad idea. Pain shoots through my neck, over the back and up to my jaw. Everything hurts, so I close them again quickly. It was awfully bright, too.
“Open your eyes, dear. Can you? Can you open your eyes?”
I try to sayno,but my voice is halted by an uncomfortable dryness in my throat. I gag.
“Just try. Please.”
So I try.
And this time, it works. I force my eyes open, just a little, and my mother is there, sitting next to my bed and holding onto my hand with her cool fingers. I look behind her and realize I have no idea where I am.
Where am I?
I’ve never seen this room before. Everything’s plain and undecorated; nothing at all like my colorful bedroom. I hear a steadywhoosh whoosh, which matches the pace of several shadowy figures moving behind a big panel of frosty glass.
I don’t like this. It’s all horribly unfamiliar and I’m starting to feel nauseous.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear. It’s me.”
Then, I look back to my mother and whisper through the tubing and discomfort, “Sorry about the dress.”
And that’s it. That’s all I remember. I know it seems like a lot – most people, when I tell them, think it’s a pretty good recollection. But it’s not good enough for me. See, there’s this thing no one tells you about surviving an assault. You’ve survived physically, but you’re left with this hidden feeling of violation that you can never quite identify or recover from until you know what it is. Anditis the black time. The blank space. The time you were out. The that passed when something was happening to your body, your possessions, to your soul.
In recovery, you talk about this mysterious predator who came to take away everything you once thought was yours. But what they don’t tell you is that from that day on, you’ll be dying to know what else he may have stolen from you, the memories that hide in the shadowy parts of your mind, formed when your body was so overwhelmed that the only thing you could do in defense was shut off completely.
I’ve been trying to play Glass Half Full Girl since the attack, like everyone’s told me to do. It happens all the time: they fill me with their superficial words of encouragement, all while petting my head from my hospital bed. I smile sweetly and thank them a million times, then lay back and cherish my alone time when they leave.
They’re right, of course. I know that. I want to think a redeeming good can come out of the bad, somehow, but there’s no denying there was a curse to the whole thing, too.How can they not see it?I think, as though there’s some compartment of the brain that they can block off but I can’t. And secretly, when no one is around, I spend most of my time in that compartment. The thoughts I can’t get rid of hide there, the thoughts that cause me to rub my temples in clockwise circles in the earliness of the morning in attempts to wind it all out of me. And those thoughts – they don’t stop.
Maybe I could have done something. But what? Why did I go down that one road? Why didn’t I take the other route?
What if it hadn’t gone down this way? What if my hero had appeared? What if he’d somehow helped me, kicked that guy’s ass, and then, awkwardly, but with all the luck in the world, had taken my hand and pulled me to my feet. And because of him I went home, healthy and whole and unharmed.
I sigh.
My hero is a tall man, imposing and handsome. He protects me fiercely, and when I reach to meet his hand, I see a love glowing in his eyes that speaks to my soul, telling me that I’m safe at last.
