trauma does not exist part 6

I remember the moment I chose to forget.

I was 15. I was in my bedroom blow drying my hair. i had just finished burning one section into submission. no longer torn and frizzy, it looked glossy whole and straight. we girls do all types of things to look presentable.

I placed the hair dryer on the bed, getting ready to battle the next fistful of weeds springing from my head. the hair dryer was on an old blanket draped across the bed, light blue and light pink. the implicit taunt in those colors, the same ones we wrap innocents in when they first appear, still fresh, untouched.

and so it began. or rather, it began again. a flood of sick sensation. I close my eyes and brace myself. stomach tightens, face contorts, jaw clenches, eyes squeeze shut. I’m trying to curl back up into myself, to find somewhere silent and forgiving.

then come the memories, oozing in. in those days, I still remembered clearly. why wouldn’t i. I remembered everything through the eyes of a child, dumb with wonder. curiosities would flit stupidly across a mind unmarred by understanding. back then, the events I remembered, they were all crisp lines and full of color. but a story – the story --  eluded me.

but things were changing and that’s why this time the memories landed like a punch to the gut. everyday what I was remembering was gathering strength. it was gaining mass. morphing from gauzy lightness and air into something terrifyingly solid and certain. it was Becoming. a story was piecing itself together.

in that moment, recognition dawned. ruthless revelation.  Knowledge willed itself into existence and tossed me aside like a used rag.

why here, why now. perhaps because things had changed in the years he’d been away. i’m a not quite woman now. I understand what boys do to girls. what girls let boys do to them. I am no naïf, I think with the self recrimination and self disgust that will become my dearest friends. I Know now. I will never not Know again.  

**

 I arrive back to myself in that room, standing straight, my gaze still fixed on the hairdryer, arm midair clutching the wooden handle of a round brush.

I think that if you were watching me, you wouldn’t really have noticed anything. maybe you’d have seen nothing more that a moment of sweet reverie in a teenage girl’s daily ritual of vanity.  but a war of extermination was underway. i tore them out, one by one, bloodied bits of me still stuck to the roots. I incinerated anything that was left, leaving nothing but charred remains. I salted the earth behind me. from now on, eyes ever forward. the past, not even a distant memory but a gaping hole where a self should exist.

I blinked. then I went back to making myself presentable.