There was a time that I wanted everything to just stop. It was fall, just as things were starting to get cold again- one of the first snows on the ground. It was the semester that I didn't go back to school- for the first time I saw friends continue on and simply leave me behind. No one seemed to notice the absence, but stuck in a tiny town in Maine I was screaming-
"I'm here, I matter, I'm important and I'm missing! Doesn't anyone notice?"
But no one did notice, really. Six months before I had three, four, five young men courting me- and now that I was *absent* all had forgotten except for one, my boyfriend. That word still seemed strange on my tongue, never having had one in all my 19 years of life. But now things had changed.
Six months before I was pure and innocent and seemed perhaps desirable; my little girl perspective of the world managed to turn young men's lust into worth. But even there, at school, I had my moments. One by one people turned their backs on me. Mostly girls first, as they tend to do at the first sign of a social pariah. There were nights, long ones, when I felt so utterly alone. I walked out to the middle of the rustic bridge one, two, twenty times or more; wondering if one small jump would end it or simply leave me in a mangled unlovable mess.
Finally, in a fit of despair I gave up my innocence and with it went my fight. The night that I slept with him, I knew that he didn't love me. I knew that it was all in my head, that he probably never would-but some part of me went to bed still believing in fairy tales. When I woke up, Hansel and Gretel were dead and Cinderella's glass slipper had shattered.
After that I believed what people said about me. I was a whore, slut, worthy of shame and ridicule, not worthy of happiness or the air that I was so greedily filling my lungs with. I lied to everyone, said it had never happened, lied to myself until I couldn't even remember the details, much as I wanted to hold on to them.
There was one person who still told me I had worth, though that worth was built on the lies I was telling, completely dependent on my status as a Truly Pure Girl. I should have seen, right from the start, that he was beginning to control me, using his role as the Experienced Man to show me that the only time I had worth was through him, but I was so genuinely ashamed of my own actions that I made a house out of lies and hoped that it didn't fall down.
To be honest, I didn't think it would last. I knew by that point that I was going to have to leave, knew that everything would be changing, so I thought that perhaps with distance he would become disinterested, break my heart, and let me go. Heartbreak would truly have been kinder.
But he thought, through my own deception, that he was the First, and that made me a prized possession. And so when I left he didn't break it off, instead he let me linger somewhere on a shelf in his life. I wasn't truly there but I wasn't truly gone either.
And so, summer came- normal summer, almost happy summer. Work sucked but I was 19 and summer jobs were supposed to suck. I made friends, made flirtations, and had I not been tied to my shelf I probably could have found summer romance. It almost happened, once. We were sitting at the top of Cadillac mountain, and he started talking about love. He looked at me and I looked at him and we almost kissed. It was the most intimate moment I had ever experienced. Nothing happened, but somehow I understood that this was different, this was what it was to be valued.
But I had a boyfriend, and he told me that he wanted me forever, asked me to marry him at least three times a day, and played games of truth or dare for hours on the phone. And that, I thought, was what a *Mature Long Distance Relationship* was supposed to be.
And then fall came.
And people went back to school.
And I stayed in frigid Maine.
The tourist season ended and with it, my job. The end was horrible beyond words but it was over. I had nothing to show from my summer, I had earned more than ten thousand dollars and spent it all on weekend road-trips to Pennsylvania and thai food and an online game that I didn't play.
He stopped talking on the phone. Started asking why we had to talk, what new things we could possibly have to say to one another- but still he could not let me go and now I needed him because he was the *only one* left. Well, not quite the only one.
That man, the innocence stealer, he was asking me why I was throwing my life away. Why I wanted to be with someone so cruel. But, I wondered, what could be more cruel that plucking something fresh and sweet and then throwing it away? And so I ran from him, straight into the arms of the only person I had left, someone who had not yet shown their full capability of cruelty.
And so, one night in early fall, I went for a walk.
There was frost on the grass but I purposefully left my jacket behind, wearing flip flops over the crusty ground of the summer estate long since abandoned for a warmer home somewhere to the south. There was a little bay, private, just beyond the long driveway, maybe a mile and a half from my house. I walked, phone to my ear, talking to someone who had stopped listening months before. Finally, looking at the bay I said something that made him listen.
"How cold do you think the water is?"
"What?"
"How cold do you think it is, now?" I dipped my pinky toe in, and immediately I could feel the shock of hundreds of tiny pins spreading up from the icy water. Silence, and then
"You're scaring me, stop it."
"I could just go for a swim."
"Don't do that, stop it. Go home, ok?"
For a moment, standing there, I could see it happening before my eyes. Pulling off my shoes and wandering into the water, pushing my head under to quicken the numbing effects, and just floating until unconsciousness and the tide carried me away. Gone. I wondered if he would call anyone, or if it would take weeks for them to find me washed up on some forgotten shore. Maybe I wouldn't be found.
I don't know what it was that stopped me. Maybe it was love for my little brother, he had saved me so many times in the past. Maybe it was fear of pain; I don't like uncomfortable situations. Whatever the reason I put the phone back to my ear and slipped my numbing toe back into the sandal.
"Only kidding."
"Good, now go home where you'll be safe."
Only when I got home I was more disappointed in myself than ever. Because I was a cowered, because even in this I had failed.
I wonder if I would have done it, if I had known what the next three years would bring. If I had known that they would come with physical, sexual, and worst of all emotional abuse. If I knew I would be scared to talk, scared to eat, have to ask permission to dress and undress, to go to bed and go to work. If I would have know how much it would have hurt when everything finally, inevitably crumbled.
All I know is that somehow I survived. But not everyone survives.
Gwen, I wonder if you were feeling the same way at the same time, if maybe we had talked or noticed each other things could have been different. Your death brought me a little closer back to life, but I often wonder what would have happened if I had stepped out into the bay- maybe you wouldn't have made that choice just one year later.
And then, finally after years of abuse and torment someone else took a step into the bay. Someone I had never met, that I know of, though I'm sure we passed each other dozens of times on our tiny college campus. I was in yet another horribly abusive relationship, firmly anchored in what psychiatrists would I'm sure call a *pattern,* but somehow what he did woke me up. Once again it was real, I was standing there looking at a reflection of my own past, only this time I wasn't helpless. I could hold hands, could listen and wipe away tears. Without that, I wouldn't have every truly lived, without that, I wouldn't have ever truly loved.
I wish you hadn't I sincerely do; but I also wish that you could know the love and joy that you unknowingly brought back into this world.
I am not that terrified girl anymore, I don't think I will ever feel that amount of despair again, but I will never as long as I live forget how it feels to stand alone looking out over the icy black water.
34th and Lexington
15 years ago
