A couple sits out the window below us, holding hands on the bench and I want to be them and kill them at the same time.
“And sometimes you get tripped so much and so hard you just feel like staying down, you know? Like, maybe you deserve to stay down, maybe it’s meant to be. Maybe it’s just easier to stay down, and you don’t have the energy to haul your ass off the ground again at all.”
“It sounds terrible,” Jemma says softly.
“It is! It’s the worst,” I laugh. “It’s everything you don’t want to happen to you. You think you’re strong and that you’ll always love living and want to live, but sometimes you get so tired…”
“You’re tired a lot, then.”
I shrug. “Sometimes. But I’m Isis Blake. I’m the opposite of tired. Derit. Being tired just isn’t something I do.”
“We all do it once in a while, Isis,” Jemma assures me. “No one is an exception.”
“But I’m special!” I whine. “You don’t understand! Crazy shit is my forte and I do stuff, the best stuff, and I never stop moving ever except when I am peeing and even then sometimes not, sidenote: the janitor hates me.”
Jemma tries to hide the laugh-snort behind her hand, eyes twinkling, and suddenly I start laughing too. But it’s a different laugh from the angry short ones I’ve been making lately – it’s loud and happy, and it only gets louder and happier, and it’s light, the lightest thing I’ve done in a long time.
“That wasn’t even my best joke,” I sigh when we both calm down. “And I broke rule numero uno.”
Jemma wipes away a tear. “Which is?”
“Never laugh at your own joke, because that means it’s probably not a very good one and also you look like an easily amused, self-absorbed ass**le. Also; it’s grossness.”
“I see what you mean now,” She says. “Someone like you, so vibrant and funny, is rarely tired. It must be so strange for you when you are.”
“It’s like….like losing a leg but trying to run a race anyway,” I say. Jemma nods, then inhales.
“I know this isn’t going to sound very sensitive, and please don’t take this to mean I’m diagnosing you with anything, because I’m not qualified to do that, but does anyone in your family have a history of depression?”
I melt all over the chair dramatically and grumble. “My mom. But I don’t have it!” I protest, sitting straight up. “I swear to you I definitely don’t because I’ve worked really hard to not have it and I’m happy all the time so I don’t have it. Ever. And I never will.”
Jemma nods, and writes on the clipboard, but my words are so hollow and wrong-sounding I burn to fill them up with the truth. I squirrel my hands together and clutch them together tight.
“I had it. Maybe. I think. When I was fourteen.”
“What made you think that?”
“I didn’t like myself. I still don’t a little. But I really didn’t like myself because I was huge and I thought being huge was wrong but it’s not, but when you’re in love and a guy tells you you’re ugly and fat you start to believe it, you know? Also it wasn’t love. Maybe it was. But probably not, because it made me feel horrible, and love’s supposed to make you feel good.”
“Some people say it’s supposed to make you feel good and horrible at the same time.”
“Well, those people are dumb and wrong,” I jut my chin out. “That’s just….that’s just the old-man-poetry-romanticism of it. People like to sound deep so they say pain is a part of love but it’s not. Love is –”
"There is nothing about it that is ugly," Jack says. "May I?"
I hesitate, and nod. He reaches around and brings my forearm up, gently running his fingers over the cigarette burns on my wrist. He traces around each circle with his thumb gently, so gently.
"It looks like a galaxy," He smiles. "Full of stars and supernovas and conductive cryogeysers and a lot of wonderful science things I could go on to list that would probably bore the hell out of you."
I laugh against his chest, and burrow deeper into it.
“ – Love is being accepted and adored for who you are, scars and all.”
My eyes get wet and my lap gets wet and I curl in on myself, hugging my arms.
Now I know the difference.
Now I know what love is, and what it isn’t.
Jemma puts the clipboard down and her arms up, enclosing me in them as the darkness comes rushing out of my mouth and into her sweater.
“I w-was….I was r-raped. When I was fourteen. By the guy I thought I loved.”
It pours out of me, it falls on the floor and pools on the tile and slithers down my cheeks. Four years of carefully silent suffering floods her office, and her lap, and I’m a stranger and she must hate me for it but all she does is hug me closer, and I hate myself I hate who I used to be and I hate who I’m trying to be and the people I loved betrayed me, and I betrayed myself, I hid it away instead of telling, telling somebody, anybody, I stayed quiet instead of asking for help from somebody, anybody, and all the hurt is being pulled out of me sideways, the thorns scraping my mouth and eyes and this must be what it’s like to die, except the pain doesn’t end, not for hours and hours, and Jemma just holds me, and cries with me, and whispers ‘I know’, over and over again, because she does know, because she went through it too, and I’m not alone, not anymore.
***
In the entire history of planet Earth, no one has been more of an idiot than I have. Except God, or the Big Bang, or whatever you wanna call it because it made this place, and us. And that was, obviously, a very bad move.
Anyway, god and I are tied for Universe’s Biggest Morons because I did something equally stupid, which was to hurt myself. For years. By keeping a nasty secret inside me.
I thought I was stronger than the traumatic event, which is entirely true except for the part where I forgot to admit it was a traumatic event to begin with, because, as Jemma tells me after I pass out on one of the cots in her office and wake up to birdsong and a Styrofoam cup coffee she hands me, no matter what happened, or for how long, it still happened. Just because it wasn’t prolonged or penetrative doesn’t mean it wasn’t rape.
He still held me down and masturbated on me.
It was still rape.
Jemma invites me to come in next week to talk some more when she changes my bandage again, and I agree. She’s not a therapist, and she’s not getting paid to do it, but she’s taking a chunk out of her free time to listen to me talk, and I’m grateful. Also, sore and worn out and mentally exhausted from reliving the entire event in one night, but mostly grateful and ready for nine pizzas.
But I walk different, now, like all the space in my body was replaced with helium overnight. My shoulders feel lighter, my head feels lighter. I flip my hair dramatically as a couple walks passed and realize I don’t actually harbor the urge to kill them anymore.
Nameless, though, is a different story.
I duck into the front office and grab a cup of water, the office ladies’ chattering following me out the door.
“Summers? That’s impossible. He’s such a nice looking man.” One lady sighs.