I don’t get nightmares anymore. Well they aren’t as frequent as they were from before when I had the first relapse a month ago.I mean it feels nice. I don’t feel as if every time I breathe it is being numbered, every time I move I’m being watched, every time I try to escape I’m dragged back, every time I revolt I feel the sting piercing it’s way through my limbs and veins. It feels nice to not endure that torture everyday. I’m finally thinking that I’m going to be okay.
But even though I’ve fled from his tight grasp on my neck and the feeling of disgust and shame, that he forced upon me, is one I still need yet to escape.
Days seem to go by so fast. Back in the basement, hours felt like days, days felt like weeks, and weeks felt like — well I stopped counting after 5 months; it didn’t seem to be worth it anymore. So long — but so less time for me to recover from the pain of the whips and the burns that were imprinted across my body as they hold a permanent mark. So many opportunities for me to just run — but his voice had plagued my mind, leaving me to be to scared to even limp near the window to feel the rays of the sun warm my body. I had such little hope left inside of me to break free from the screams, taunts, and “discipline” that was only so tolerable at the age of 12. The grass wasn’t greener on any of the sides around me — just the cold hard cement floor that forbid my body from any comfort.
When I was first brought to the basement, he told I had lost the right to my body and that I was mere property. He told me that my parents didn’t want me; that’s why my mom thought it was more important to go attend her call rather than wait for me to come off the spinning strawberry ride. He said a lot of things. Things that I still am trying to forget, but they always come find me when I’m finally thinking of going back outside – they just won’t let me. Even though he’s not here to physically drag me back from my hair into the basement, the memories and recollections of the abuse have chained me back from breaking free from this phsyicatric ward.
When I told the officer what happened – she replied by saying that it’s normal for underage victims who have been kidnapped to undergo sexual and physical abuse. Normal. She said that without any hesitation, without any feeling, without any compassion. I wanted to scream to her and yell that there was nothing normal for a girl to have bite marks and scratches across her chest, and the fact that she was forced to spread her legs not knowing of what was come to next; but later was scarred and traumatized of what she had to endure for the painful hours that it had lasted the first time. I wanted to scream, but over the years I have been taught that silence resulted in immunity from torment. He told me that: “silence was key.”
Those words echoed in my mind and the empty soul that had been ripped apart from inside of me. Those words, they are what constraint me from breaking free. Those words are imprinted on my identity. They will never leave me. In fact they have followed me here – to my grave.
The doctor’s had told the officers that there was too much “damage done,” and that I would need intensive care for me to recover from both the physical abuse and the emotional trauma that I had to endure over the years. I was considered a miracle. For the first time I had felt as if I was considered something other than a muse and puppet, instead I was a miracle. A miracle who could not live through her nightmares any more longer. A miracle who shouldn’t be able to still feel as if her body is not her body. A miracle who just would’t endure it no more.
I was a miracle.
