Quiet Fear

Quiet Fear

          It wasn’t just that she was afraid of being hurt again, of giving back her heart, laying it carefully in their hands and saying, “You are all I have left to trust. Please, let this be real.” – it was an intense terror that she would have no one left to run to if she returned home, no home to live in, no angel to lead her through pain. This was what consumed her thoughts at school, what burned her eyes to tears at night. She could see it clearly: coming home one day to find her clothes on the porch for the final time because she had refused to play along in the game of pretending – pretending things were normal, pretending they were a family, pretending nothing was wrong…nothing but her. She didn’t want to play that game, but she was forced to because she was terrified
          It was all her fault. She knew it. Those days her mother was mad, the terrible hours of her stepfather’s rage, her grandmother’s paralysis, her parent’s divorce, her brother’s poor grades, her friends’ pains, her father’s problems, the fights, the crying, the hitting, the hurting, the sickness, the silence, the starvation. She was tired of pain and so she stopped confiding in others, stopped trusting others, but for some reason, her own pain started swelling instead, and she found herself alone, scared, and bleeding.
          The pain had been growing for some time now but she had tried to ignore it. When she was young and her parents started hitting each other, she would sit in her room and put stickers on the frame of her bed, creating green valleys filled with unicorns and leprechauns, pots of gold and rainbows. If they got too loud and she couldn’t shut them out anymore, she would walk to the door to their room – it was always open – and sit outside, listening to see if anyone had been hurt and if she should call her grandmother or a friend. She sat outside so many times and too many hours past midnight, waiting, wishing, listening as they destroyed each other.
          If they started to strangle each other in the kitchen, she would come running from her room. She only once tried to separate them and her daddy shoved her into the kitchen counter. Later when she asked him why, he laughed and said he thought it was her mommy he was pushing. She didn’t try to separate them after that and she would never ask why again. Instead she would sit on that same counter, legs tense and crossed, and make sure they didn’t kill each other. After a minute or two of their frightening dance around the kitchen, they would start calling the other filthy names and yell into the early morning. She tried not to listen, and she cried right in front of them and they didn’t see. When her grandmother would appear in the kitchen to see what was happening, she would give the girl a sad look and gently ask her to go back to sleep. But she would always refuse. It was scarier to sit beside her bed and listen blindly than to sit on the counter, ready to call a friend. She always wondered if her grandmother ever felt as guilty as she did.
          When the girl’s daddy was taken away by the police because her mommy had lied and said he pushed her into the door, she spent the whole night watching television. She studied faces you see, and there were so many on television to take her mind away from things. The next day there was a binder that was compiled by a strange man who had followed her daddy, and the binder was black and evil and evidence, according to her mommy. She flipped through the pages, one by one, and image after image of nakedness ripped by. The girl stayed silent as words like “fag”, “bastard”, “sick”, and “adulterer” came out of her mommy’s curled lips. The girl didn’t understand what was wrong with being different but she didn’t want her mommy to get angry, so she shut her mouth like a good girl should and never said a word.
          When her daddy told her that her mommy was not eating right, the girl sat in his car, letting the wind blow her hair wildly, and she felt a twinge in her heart but never told anyone. She remembered that awful smell that was always in mommy’s bathroom and how she hardly ever ate. And then the girl wondered if her daddy would ever admit to her he was different. She couldn’t ask him though. It just wasn’t right.
          The girl thought she could mange to live with this. She even thought she could survive when her grandmother had a stroke and lay on the floor of her house for three days in her own urine and blood, paralyzed. And the girl had been too lazy to stop by just once that weekend. So instead her mommy had to find the stiff and broken body and ever since it was the girl’s fault that her grandmother couldn’t remember who the girl was, or move the left side of her body, or would spend the rest of her life in a blank and smelly hospital room with a tube in her stomach and decaying muscles and mind. The girl felt like she could never be forgiven. Her mommy told her that her grandmother had been calling her name in the ambulance and the girl wasn’t there to squeeze her hand. The girl had wanted to cry, but instead she held back the tears at night and felt its pain shoot through her. She was in agony.
          But the girl still thought she could live with this - she didn’t realize how heavy her eyes looked now. Her mommy eloped almost a year after her divorce and married a man the girl had only seen a few times. He seemed nice at first. She didn’t know him. He was crude and insulted her, said things like, “I ought to slap the snot out of you.” He made her feel stupid and useless, and she still didn’t know him. Until her mommy hit her. She had hit her a few times before. But this time it hurt a lot more. The girl had gotten into an argument about something her mommy had forgotten and mommy didn’t like being blamed for things. And then the girl brought up her daddy, so her mother was going to bring out the binder again but the girl got away. As she was running down the street, her mommy tried to run her over, but she still got away. She ran to the park, sat inside the yellow, plastic tunnel and cried into the wind that tugged and ripped at her skin. It was too cold. When the girl came back to her room, her mommy grabbed her arm and hit her in the face and stomach, then told her to clean up her room. But the girl disobeyed. She sat in a corner of her room, rocking back and forth and crying herself to sleep to dream of valleys with unicorns and leprechauns, pots of gold and rainbows.
          The girl told a man at school what happened and he made her feel like everything was going to be okay and for a second, she believed him. She felt safe and loved when she talked to him. But a caseworker was called and left silently because her mommy’s lawyer called her up. The girl was alone again. She grew bitter unknowingly. She stuffed it into the darkest recesses of her heart and tried not to feel anything anymore. It hurt too much and she was tired of the painful tears.
          Summer came and the arguments grew worse. She had run away a couple of times because she was afraid but she never was free of the pain. The girl took a razor to her shoulder 50 times a night before lying down. She slept in the closet now, curled against the farthest corner with hanging cotton shirts and sandblasted jeans brushing against her weary body throughout the night and she prayed that no one was waiting on the other side of the door. She couldn’t sleep in beds anymore. She had nightmares every week that never seemed to disappear and her stepfather made her feel stupid and useless. One time she was so scared of him that she had barricaded herself in her room and he had taken a hammer and started pounding hole after hole in her door. She couldn’t bear to see the crack grow larger and larger until he was finally in, so she sat behind her bed in a corner, hugged her knees to her chest, and rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. She grew so tired during those hot and insufferable months and yet somehow she survived the scratching, the fists, the bruises, the pain.
          When school started again, the girl was almost 17. She was tired of fear and so, one day after her stepfather had hit her again, she told the same man at school. He still made her feel like everything was going to be okay and that she was safe and loved. But she was sent to live with her daddy. The girl hated him now – but not because he was different. The caseworker had told her daddy what was going on but he hadn’t done anything. Sometimes he hadn’t stopped by for 3 or 4 weeks on end and he had never really told her why, just that work was “busy.” But the girl moved in with him and with another man who she didn’t know. The other man was nice but was continuously in the process of buying one apartment. He finally moved and the girl read a love note between him and her daddy and the girl was angry that he hadn’t told her the truth.
          The girl used this time to bond with her only uncle, a soldier in Iraq. He told her things like “if you just wait it out a few years, you will be able to spread your wings and truly soar” and he made her feel loved and safe. He told her that family was everything and the girl thought she believed. But she was angry at her daddy for telling her how much of a burden she was to him and to her friends, how she almost cost him his job, and how he was barely able to pay the rent because of her. She told him that she had never wanted to live with him, and so the second time he kicked her out, she moved in with a friend.
          Her uncle stopped talking to her after this – his final words stressing the importance of staying with family, no matter what. She thought she was cut off from her whole family and had no one to love her anymore. Her friend wasn’t close and there were loud arguments every night. One time the police were called. The girl just sat up in her room through all of it, turned on the television, and tried to think of valleys with unicorns and leprechauns, pots of gold and rainbows. She felt so abandoned and was desperately reaching out to people that could love her. She just wanted someone to hold her. The man at school had to leave and she was devastated. He had offered her safety and care, a sense of belonging and trust that no one else could. Everyone who had offered her love and safety had gone and left her shattered and hopeless body. Then her mommy suddenly started talking to her and the girl couldn’t have been happier: she told the girl she loved her again, and that was all the girl had wanted.
          So she soon moved back with her mommy and hoped desperately to feel warmth for once. She thought that things had changed but soon found home to be as cold as ever. Her mommy saw only the fantasy that they were all happy and grew frustrated and cried when things went wrong. Her stepfather ignored her. He would bitterly ask her mommy questions like “does she have school tomorrow?” or “what is she doing this weekend?” when the girl was sitting right across from him and whenever she was around, he glared at her and made sure she knew that she was a no one. She knew. During the day, the girl wondered who would be at her wedding and who would walk her up the aisle, and she wanted to cry. She tried to think of the last person to hug her, to make her feel loved and wanted, and she wanted to cry. The nightmares slowly came back and she longed to stop sleeping in her bed and start hiding in the closet but she was afraid of what would happen. She was afraid that mommy would realize things weren’t perfect, that she would throw the girl out in the middle of the night, content that she was rid of all her problems, and the girl wouldn’t have anywhere to go, no one to hold her as she sobbed uncontrollably and shamefully. So the girl kept quiet as always, tried to push under the pain that kept slipping out, and silently, desperately, horribly suffered the unbearable the only way she knew how.