(Content Warning: sexual assault & drug use)

Over the course of the past three years, you’ve been working on completing your memoir. After reaching three-hundred pages, you’re still repeating the same story. How your body was broken by a specific group of people. Kept breaking you into shards, until you were barely a person. You were a blood smear. The story goes on and on. It permeates every aspect of your life and controls the way you talk to other people. Your trauma has a dangerous hold on your body. You’ve written more than twenty essays on the same topic. From the perspective of you on your knees in the gazebo. But also, what if your jaw was telling the story? What about the lower half of your body. What tales do your legs have to tell. Your hands and arms always get center stage. You don’t talk about the knots in your hair, or the chewing gum, or the cigarette ash. The almost-concussions.

****

There are several pieces of jewelry missing from your collection. Three bracelets, with your sisters, and your mother’s, and your name and social security numbers engraved inside the band. One bracelet had a red gemstone. Likely it was your mother’s. Your stone is opal. Also missing is a gold necklace, thin, but you recognized the clasp had an inscription printed dictating how many karats it was. You sold other people’s jewelry. This you don’t talk about. You snuck around their houses, aware of which floorboards creaked, staring at yourself in their mirrors, wondering what your life would be like if you grew up secure, less exhausted, properly fed. These stories grow, like mold, on your body. They transform you into a jagged little knife. A house looks different with all the lights turned off. Especially if it doesn’t belong to you.

****

You met L when you were both seniors in high school. By that point, the decay had begun. Sure, there were other traumas before the seventeenth and eighteenth years of your life. Fractured memories of your father. Verbal and physical abuse from your mother. Blackouts. Hospital trips. Wires attached to your head and chest. The time you lost all your friends when you were fourteen, after kissing the wrong boys and girls. How they waited for you outside the bathroom just to hurt you.

This is a story inside of a story inside of a story and then some. Embedded in your core is the hatred of others. Some of these memories, you being bullied and teased and hit, deserve their own essays. Might you be able to move forwards, despite being stuck in this one core memory?

Begin by inspecting your head. Your brain is a haunted house. There is nothing pink about this situation, but if you must know, there are sufficient grooves and mazes built for mice, men, women, centipedes, and dogs. Senior year is a small red stone, pulsating and unnaturally warm. You wonder if the gemstone formed partially from your blood loss. In EMDR therapy, there are memories of blood splatters on the floor. They are cartoonish in shape, abnormally bright. Splashes by your father’s front door, beneath your bed in a perfect circle, at the base of a yellow tub, atop your grandmother’s bed. The memory gem is filled with miniature men. You watch them banging on the glass, pissing in the woods, smoking joints in the back of a cherry red truck. There are miniature televisions. A tomato-red Walkman. You shake the stone; their world is unchanged.

****

Years after your ex-boyfriend gets clean, you see his father in town, in an expensive supermarket where you purchased glazed cookies with your waitressing tips. You ask how he’s doing. How has his son been? Much better than five years ago, he answers. You realize he was referring to the year you first met. As if you are responsible for his son’s choices. Sum it up: when he went on a cruise with his family, his friends raped you in one of their gazebos in their backyard; after your ex returned, he claimed you cheated on him, not listening when you sobbed you didn’t want to do those things—then why do them? —but you didn’t have language. He said to forgive, you would have to service him—and his friends—for the rest of the year. Time was a hole. You were exposed. It didn’t matter what you said or did. You’d already been hurting yourself, it continued. Worsened. Your journals contain stains.

Wonder what the animals were thinking. Perhaps they fled, traumatized from witnessing the violence. The robins and redbirds? Away. The deer you almost hit with your bike (stolen) and the fox who ran across your path at four in the morning? Three towns over. Your body a distant memory. The bicycle is a long story. Your own bike was stolen months later, and so was your sister’s. You could say that was the angriest you’ve seen your mother, but that would be a lie.

There are missing pieces of your personality, which must happen with every trauma survivor. You used to wear Lolita sunglasses and pink tank tops. Your shoes were printed with ocean life. Your jeans were light blue, filled with holes through which you could your boxers poked through. What happened to your glittering star earrings? Your necklace filled with moons and suns. The glow-in-the-dark stars coating your bedroom walls. Lacy pink thongs and bras. The worst crime was perhaps when you took books. [We can’t get into that right now.] At some point, you started wearing all black. Your current therapist suggests it’s because you don’t want your body to be sexualized. You don’t have any fight left to explain to her it’s not about what you’re wearing. It never was.

There are other missing pieces. Quirks stashed in boxes inside your blue mind. There is an entire room filled with knickknacks your crush pocketed. You took them from her room, knowing one day she would be gone and you never wanted to forget once you were both the same. Once, you were in love. Other rooms contain laughter. An inability to apologize because you were the epitome of anger, hot to the touch, a little fire creature, your mother’s daughter. Back to the men. Mustn’t leave them alone for too long or they’ll start to fester. Are you listening? Follow these instructions very carefully:

Stumble towards your bookshelf at three in the morning, after having watched I May Destroy You. Tear the books off the shelf, labeled 2008 – 2009. Devour passages you wrote, about not wanting to. But it happened anyway. Flip through the blood stains. Don’t linger on the bandages which fall floor like petals. Rest on the passages written in all caps. Learn how so many people called you a whore. Relearn so you can reclaim them. Tell the stories to your therapist, who diagnoses you with PTSD. These situations are abusive. You realize that, right? she asks during session. Cry, because it’s the first time you barely gave any information to an adult and their immediate response was not hatred but unrestrained belief in you. In the validity of your memory. We don’t need a grand jury, she adds. No one needs to validate these memories for you.

Dream you are a lamb. God loves you the most because you return, even after he breaks your jaw and sheers your skin. Contorts your limbs. You don’t make a sound. You make all the sounds. God lives in a glowing, neon-hued deli. He doesn’t need to hide your body because everyone waiting in line is hungry and haven’t eaten in days. Ensure you are perfectly shaped discs. They will wash the stains out of your fur. Has L been here all along? Is she a lure? You’ve got terrible taste in butchers. He doesn’t wash his hands after he’s done or rinse his mouth. Take a shower, for god’s sake. Buy some petroleum jelly and fix your face. It’s time to start again.

****

You begged your mother for a sleepover with L, convinced she was your new best friend. A man named Duffy drove her jeep. In the backseat of was another man who kissed you once when you were sixteen, without permission. Next to him is a woman whose name you never learn. Everyone except for you and L are in their late twenties and early thirties. L’s boyfriend is 35. The two of you are seventeen and soon you will be eighteen and this will still be going on.

Duffy’s apartment is in a town named Ayer. You laugh to yourself, thinking about its phonetic pronunciation. He has blackout curtains and tables covered in psychedelic drawings. There is a bunkbed and a leak in the ceiling from the upstairs bathroom. A new man arrives. He is tall, in his thirties, and about to break up with an angry woman lurking behind him. Scars from knife wounds on the backs of both hands. You don’t know it at the time, but he will be your boyfriend for the rest of the school year, until your mother finds out.

The evening involves you sitting on the laps of different men who want to fuck you. They do drugs you don’t recognize. You learn a crack pipe can be made from an empty water bottle. That you can get free needles from the hospital. In the next few weeks, these men and women will become your getaway drivers. They will help you escape from one abusive household into the next. They’ll take you on drug runs. You never smoke or drink, convinced your childhood epilepsy will be triggered. You are the only sober one in the friend group and for some reason everyone finds this funny. R becomes your boyfriend. He sells drugs in the middle of the night and listens to Kid Cudi. His mother hopes you will help him stop using. She thinks you’re a positive influence. He tries to wean himself off heroin. Starts using Suboxone. Becomes addicted.

Days are spent in the parking lots of bowling alleys, working at a drive-thru fast-food restaurant, eating cheap slices of pizza. R teaches you how to sell jewelry and you use the money for pancakes. No one knows you’re being followed. Into his dark green car you go, back pressed to the backseat while he goes down on you, trying to imagine what it would feel like to enjoy being with a man for once. The car is both too big and too small at the same time. He has diamonds in both his ears, tells you stories about catching his ex-girlfriend cheating, how he split his hands over their bodies.

At school, your ex and his group continue to terrorize you. When not calling you a slut or a whore, they’re pushing your body onto the ground. Your ex-girlfriend screams at you, then later picks you up in her mother’s car so you can hook up down quiet suburb streets whose houses contain people you go to school with. They have lanterns on their porches and warm blue light in the kitchens. There are dogs curled in soft beds. Everyone has enough milk in the fridge. Meat for a thousand sandwiches. Fancy bath soap in the shape of seashells and roses and aquamarine dolphins. The bathmats are fluffy, so soft it makes you want to cry. Their closets are neat, clothes folded. They own more than one pair of shoes. They have cellphones and iPods and Macintosh desktops. The girls you used to be friends with in middle school have thick comforters printed with poppies and Paul Frank. The headboards of their beds are covered in polaroids and love letters. Everyone’s carpet is clean, and their hardwood floors are polished. When you wake up from sleepovers, their mothers and fathers are making pancakes and singing. Your mother barely has enough money to feed you and your sister. You will work with this grief.

****

R has glasses and baggy jeans. He gifts you a stolen iPod filled with alternative music. He is addicted to heroin and crack and sometimes he takes small white pills whose names you never learn. His fingers remind you of sausages. His mouth, like C’s, is messy. Being touched by these men makes you feel worse but in a different way. They are the third set of men. The first, when you were sixteen, were in their forties and fifties. Can’t talk about this. But if you must know, it was blue rope, electrical wire, the base of a tree, the backseat of a car, you were like cattle, they wore baseball hats and checked you into hotels with golden walls. You wore stolen lingerie and dreamt of a life beyond this shit. The next set of men had the gazebo. This third set have holes between their toes.

You lose your mind in the green car. Mother kicked you out and you took your diaries in a backpack and ran away with R. When she called you to come back, you took the battery out of your phone (as if that could have prevented her from finding the two of you). Out the window you tossed thongs, trash, cold fries. [Almost two decades later, there will be a tornado prediction so severe it mirrors the devastation of 2011. You will pack all your journals into bags and drive them to your friend’s limestone basement. There are eighty-eight journals in total. After the storm passes, the tornado having lost speed and severity as it moved through other states, you will return home in the rain. Your partner wonders why you can’t leave the journals in the car for the next day. You don’t understand, you explain, ferrying the books back-and-forth until your shoulders break out in broken blood cells. By the time you are done, it’s almost midnight and your body is drenched in sweat. Take off your clothes. Promise him you’re going to take a shower, then proceed to arrange your journals, in order, naked. Wonder why this memory feels so familiar. Shake away the feeling of threat in your chest. Take a shower and don’t touch the goddamn razor.] He calls you baby and princess. You’re not attracted to him but it’s better than being alone. He threatens your ex, the one who raped you repeatedly. [Grooming is not yet in your vocabulary.] As in, I’ll kill him if you want, baby. Make your voice as sweet as possible. Thank you so much, you ooze. I don’t think that’s necessary.

There are many offices you will become familiar with. First, the counselor’s office, blue in hue. She asks the wrong questions. Are you on drugs? Are you aware your teachers are concerned? Your mother sits next to you, crying. You laugh; I’m not on drugs. Wrong question. Try again. The second office is in your particular “house,” of which there are four in your high school. They contain housemasters and are named after the cardinal directions. You are in North. The guidance counselor asks you what’s going on. You tell about trying to get your boyfriend off heroin. For some reason, this story charms him. He tells your mother you’re going to be okay. She will recall this story years later, drunk at a New Years Eve party (even though she’s not supposed to drink). And in that moment, I knew you were going to be okay, she slurred. This isn’t true. But you like the way it sounds. Third is the headmaster’s office. His last name is Carpenter. Like Jesus, you think as he scrutinizes you, trying to figure out what’s going on. Your mother and a private detective enter next. She “knows what you’ve been up to.” For some reason, you find this funny as well. I’m not on drugs, you giggle. What is funny about this situation? A police officer enters. Without second thought, you give up everyone’s names.

****

Senior year comes to a close. R is still in your life. You’ve just been accepted to art school. There was an event on campus where everyone wore the official t-shirts from their universities. You couldn’t afford one from SMFA, so you stole a bright blue shirt from the art store and some fabric paint, making your own version the night before. R tells you he’s proud of you. You respond by dumping spaghetti on his head.

Eventually, R disappears. You don’t remember how or why. It might have been around the time he returned to prison. Become familiar with the courthouses and jails where you will routinely pick up R and L and C. You learn security confiscates their shoelaces. L thinks this is hysterical. The second she’s in your car she makes a crack pipe. She’s now homeless, sleeping in the back of your Ford Taurus. Your mother hates her because she slashed your tires. She slashed your tires because her boyfriend had sex with you (involving shoelaces). It was the worst pain you’d experienced thus far. You wanted to die. After she found out, L barred you from seeing him ever again. Your mother learned about the tire slashing and took out a restraining order against her. The two of you mended your friendship while C was away. You skipped school, spent all day in Boston, selling clothes and jewelry to miscellaneous stores. You ate cookies for most meals, ramen for dinner. During the winter, you covered L in extra blankets and sweatshirts. Occasionally, you went to class. You dropped her off early at a package store one town over. She flashed strangers who took her home for a day or two. The men from high school were still abusing you. Said you’d never be forgiven for “cheating.” But I didn’t cheat spilled from your lips every other sentence. It didn’t matter. You entered a deep depression in which you started hurting the insides of your hands. Making art became useless.

During class, you had to share a non-unique object made from scratch. You misunderstood the instructions and instead brought a “unique” object—a partially visual essay about what happened in high school. After reading it aloud, because your art teacher didn’t seem to care you misunderstood, a student came over to talk about your project. She had been both kind and awful to you. I loved your reading, she said. Now I understand why you are the way you are. You don’t remember how you responded, only that you dropped out of school a few days later.

****

When you were a child, and not yet old enough to bathe yourself, your mother would bathe you in a clawfoot tub. She poured warm cups of water over your head, careful not to get soap in your eyes. Sometimes in EMDR dreams, you are back in that tub. You were young. Someone else was in the tub. Not your mother. Your mind splits into an even smaller version of yourself. A doll. You climb out of the tub, rappel down one of the clawed feet, drip water all over the floor. You can barely see your child-self’s body from this angle. And you cannot see his face, but you recognize his chest.

****

C stayed around for another year. Your then-boyfriend, a redhead with good taste in music [emotionally abusive] would smoke cigarettes with C outside his apartment, above the Blue Coyote. You brought your sister along. She thought everything was thrilling. When alone, you had threesomes with C and your crush, a woman. At the time, you thought she was the love of your life. She couldn’t be with you; she was in love with another violent man. On two separate instances, these men broke her nose. The first time, it had snowed.

You were at your partner’s house. His parents were wealthy. Again, your hatred of money. But enough of that. Someone was fighting—either the two of you, or him and his father. Their house was three floors with a furnished basement and a long driveway. Someone owned a mustang. They were the type of family to put out Christmas decorations on their lawn every year. Their fridge always had food. They had a pantry, also full of food. [Years later, in your first nice apartment, you will finally have a pantry and two walk-in closets. Upon entering the back closet, you will cry at everything you’ve sacrificed to be here.] You will never forget how eerily quiet your phone was. Why hadn’t anyone texted for you to come back over? What were they doing? Your boyfriend raised his eyebrows. His father was done picking fights. It was time to survey the damage.

You found your crush in the snow, bleeding. L was there, also in the snow, also bleeding. C was in jail, as was a fourth and fifth man who had showed up. Apparently, the couples had tried to switch partners. C had a temper. You will never forget the sound of her moaning. It hurts, it hurts, she said over and over again. You were horrified. No one ever told you what happened, but you knew.

The second time, you weren’t around. There was alcohol involved. She woke up covered in blood. They’d dropped her body on the concrete and broke her nose. She knew what happened to her. Why did it take you so long to admit you’d suffered abused in the same way?

****

Eventually, L and C disappeared. Once every few years, they returned. C would call you from jail, having memorized your number. You saw him once when you were about to move near Chicago. He had you sit in his lap, and you made up an excuse a few minutes later, grateful he let you leave. You saw L once, years after she got clean, and held her baby. Her then-partner owned a fish tank with thousand-dollar angelfish. R tried to message you on social media to apologize for “treating a princess so poorly.” You blocked him. You were not aware, until years later of course, that any of this behavior was dangerous. You learn R started a gang of teenagers and children who stole televisions for him. C stabbed a woman in the chest. L is clean but you’ve removed her from social media, ditto to her crush. The only way to get clean and stay clean is by breaking off contact with everyone from that period in your life. Your body carries the memories. It is better this way. Leave and stay gone.

A friend of yours says your writing is never optimistic. You wonder, but don’t ask him, how might one be optimistic about grief? How to imbue optimism in a story of violence, blood, haunted houses. Perhaps there is a way, and you haven’t found it yet.

He tells you he wants to be more than just a passing line in your stories.

      What would you rather me write? you ask.

      Have me doing something cool, he responds.

Your idea of doing something cool feels different than everyone else’s. In your story, you and your friend are laying in a field. You’ve told him everything there is to know about your life. None of it bothers him. I’ve heard worse, he might say. It’s sunny out, but not too bright. You’re both wearing aviators. You finally have tattoos on your fingers. He points at different butterflies in the trees and names them after your friends. A gentle breeze carries a stray leaf over your head. You reach for it, and he doesn’t make fun of you. There’s no such thing as the past, only stories, he says (or some version of this line). Your friendship is secure, and your eating disorder is gone. Your scars are covered by flowers, leaves, butterflies. You’ve forgiven your mother. You don’t have to tell your friend you love and care about him; he already knows.