Snapshots of Broken, 1991-92

What is torn can often be mended, but not always. I was lucky.
Dusk came to the dock. In his parent’s lake house, one lamp on a night stand lit up a corner over cream colored carpet. My toes sank slightly on my way back to his bed. The TV in another corner, facing his pull out sofa, never shut up.
EMF, “Unbelievable” rocked with him. It wasn’t supposed to hurt.
He rolled over and wouldn’t speak to me.
We drove home the next morning. I could have seen the scenery if he hadn’t been made of stone.
Two hours of rolling tires, silence breaks.
I am reminded of two freshman who dated for a week five years before. I am reminded I humiliated him.
“Am I paid back in silence,” I wonder? Mercifully, I missed what he really said.
When I went to College two months later, I was perfect.
I was one year older than most of the freshmen and three years more independent from having dropped out of high school at sixteen. Few understood how I could room alone. Wouldn’t I get lonely, they wondered? No. Two weeks into fall term, frustrated faces came to my top bunk for breathing room.
My single dorm room was always clean, walls ornate with memory filled trinkets and a beautiful head shot. When friends came over, I liked when they looked at that black and white proof I was pretty another day. I liked when they lingered there before my frozen image, especially when a compliment followed.
In the shadows, in an office near the Dean, I visited a health counselor. My period was three months late. She took me to a local clinic for a pregnancy test. Fortunately, I was not occupied by new life. I didn’t visit the counselor again. I didn’t tell another living soul.
I made close friends fast.
I met Jonathon, the boy who grew up with a single foster mom south of Chicago. Jonathon and I were zooming airplanes on the football field under a starry sky, arms stretched out, vrooming, spitting, crashing and laughing over and over again. Nineteen year olds think of themselves as children too quickly parked in adult forms, expected to give up childish play for a focus on bright futures that seem dull. Jonathon and I decided to be seven that night, claiming the relevance of years past, years slipping fast from our loosening grip.
Spare time in the early evening was often spent with Sandra, a graceful soul from a family of seventeen children. We talked of many things through our months together, but I only remember one conversation. She spoke of regret and concern for consequences after sleeping with a certain boy. I nodded but did not verbally empathize. Answering questions was unthinkable.
When we couldn’t sleep, Darren, my theater friend, and I sat on the backs steps of “some dead mans name” hall. I was always one step lower than Darren, my back nestled between his legs, both of us gazing out at light sprinkled darkness. We shared “one day” talk in slight southern accents, painting our future life together, discussing unborn children as if they were asleep in the house that didn’t exist and the too long lawn that needed mowing. Since we were both into theater, we slid seamlessly between spinning out our imaginary play and talking about life at school. I was playing along in a magical game of comforting word play. He proposed one night late in the semester. Our game was over and I couldn’t explain why. I would have had to tell him what I wouldn’t tell myself. We didn’t talk for the remainder of the term.
I ate three meals a day. I lined my ridged cafeteria tray with half sized cloudy plastic tumblers full of whole milk. I needed extra liquid to get solids down. I had to trick my body into accepting food with each swallow even though I desired nourishment, into overiding my no-name (hide it in shame) OCD eating disorder.
Every night I ordered a small, easy cheese, triple sauce (to help it get down), pepperoni pizza from Dominos for delivery to our residence hall.
I gained thirty pounds in four months. For this bony size one who doggedly struggled to eat, 30 pounds was a talisman (or maybe a shield). For the first time ever I could lift my arms over my head and not see rib bones.
I came to my English teacher for one on one help with out of class creative writing, the pieces I wrote because they talked to me every morning. I helped with tech for Hot L Baltimore. I shook my body in synchronized motion in poodle skirts with other dancers on stage for a fifties musical. I excelled in Oral Interp, English 101 and Tech.
For the first time in years, I enjoyed school. For the first time in my life, I accepted my creative talents as valuable, even advanced.
Then I dropped out.
I made an attempt at being an adult. It was harder than I could have possibly imagined. I was supposed to pay Karen and Mark $300 the first of every month for calling home their basement apartment next to the family laundry room. I didn’t have any money for them.
How do people work behind a counter and protective glass cutting white bread rolls full of mayo and vegetables all day? I lasted six shifts in a daze. My fellow Jimmy John’s employees were relieved by my disappearance. I was a crappy employee.
I’d had to leave the sandwich shop or explode. Falling into fragments is not acceptable. I slipped away instead.
Shirt sleeves and sweaty socks hung over the edge of a broken basket. It lived in my living room because I didn’t. No couch, no bed, no sense of reality. There was never light down there. I forgot about switches. I wandered from bedroom to kitchen in the dark. Kittens were hungry. I poured canned corn in their small square dishes and didn’t realize they’d never eat it. No food for me, no money to buy cat food for Gibber and Chile. That pack of Marlboros I bought after nine months of being a non smoker was held in place between my sweaty stomach and the elastic of my shorts.
My mantra the was, “What the hell is wrong with me?!”
I had no idea I was going insane.
I don’t know how to bring this account to a conclusion in the same style it was written. What happened to wake me up was purely magical. It’s also why I believe in prayer. I was not praying at the time, but my landlord Karen was. As long as I’ve known her she walks in a state of prayer. I didn’t know this at the time. I knew her as one of the most loving women in the entire world. I was right.
When I knew absolutely for sure I would not have any money for rent, I went to her house upstairs. Fortunately no one else was home. We sat on her orange couch next to a west facing window in late afternoon. The room was bright and clean. I was stammering along about quitting Jimmy John’s and feeling like I couldn’t handle work right now. Then she caught sight of a corner of red cardboard in cellophane sticking out from my shorts. I explained how the strange scene of buying them had played out. I went to the security glass window with a twenty to pay for the gas I’d just pumped and asked for a pack of Marlboros. I was simply listening to myself speak words I didn’t think before hand, but I didn’t argue either. I’d quit nine months earlier but there I was, pulling onto Chicago Ave lighting up a cigarette, pulling in a smooth inhale.
The entire time I talked she held eye contact with me even though I spent much of the conversation looking at the wooden trim on the back of the couch. When I fell silent, out of seemingly nowhere, she said, “You were raped.”
In that slow motion moment, I realized what I’d missed a year before. His silent treatment wasn’t my punishment for humiliating a freshman boy six years ago by breaking up with him after a week to go out with his friend.
Now I knew why it hurt.
Willingness to talk about my experience marked the end of debilitating insanity and the beginning of healing a no longer secret wound. In the ensuing weeks, friends and family rallied around me, offering strong emotional and physical support and help if I wanted them to “take care” of the offender. Recovery was slow but steady, checkered with minor and major breakdowns that tested my parent’s spirits.
I don’t have any special purpose in sharing this account. A few days ago I prayed for guidance about what to write next and within seconds, a friend interrupted my work at the computer to tell me about the book she was reading. I didn’t looked at the title. She said it was about a woman who was raped and didn’t tell anyone and how her life was falling apart. My friend said it reminded her of me twenty years ago. I showed no interest so she didn’t speak about it further.
A few minutes later, as I was writing a list of possible blog topics, #7 formed, “Tell about what happened to you, in snap shots.”
So I did.