The Deep Middle

This is the note where I have the least to give you, and I want you to understand it is not because I am protecting you. It is because there is not much there. The deep middle of that road is a stretch my mind kept almost nothing of, and I have decided that was my mind doing its job.

People think trauma is loud. The screaming, the fighting. Sometimes. But the long part, the middle part, is quiet, and the quiet is the damage. You do not break in the deep middle. I had already broken, years before, at a kitchen table, so there was nothing left in me to break the way the new girls broke. What happens to a girl who is already broken is different. She just goes away. Not dies. Goes away. The body stays at the table and does what the body is told and somewhere a long way back behind the eyes the rest of her steps out of the room and waits.

I was good at it. That was dear old Dad’s other gift. I had learned to leave before I learned to read, learned that you can set the part of you that matters down somewhere safe and let them have the part that does not, and by the road I could do it without trying, the way you blink. So the deep middle, the worst weeks, the ones between the things I have told you and the things I am about to, are mostly a flat grey nothing, and the nothing is not a gap in the story. The nothing is the story. That is what it did. It took the days and made them into one day, and then it took the one day and made it into a hum, and I lived inside the hum and the hum had no edges and I do not know how long it lasted because counting had stopped meaning anything and counting was the last thing I had.

Here is the only piece I kept, and I kept it because it scared me. There was a morning, somewhere in there, when I caught myself not wanting out. Not wanting anything. Just the hum, and the next thing, and the next. The part of me that had spent eighteen years scheming and reading and working every room had gone so quiet I could not find her, and for one flat grey morning I did not look for her, and that was the closest I ever came on that road to actually being gone. Not dead. Worse. Emptied with the lights still on. I have met the version of me that wanted to die, in the house, years before. The deep middle introduced me to a version that did not want anything at all, and I will take the one who wanted to die over that one every time, because at least wanting to die is wanting.

I came back from it. I always came back. The hum would break, some man would do some stupid thing and the old cold would click on and there she would be, reading him, already three moves ahead, and I would be glad of her the way you are glad of a light in a window. But the deep middle is where I learned the thing that even now I do not say out loud to the girls I keep, which is that the road does not always take you with violence. Sometimes it just runs the hum long enough that you set yourself down and forget where you put you. I almost did. I want it counted that I almost did, in the grey, with no day on it, somewhere south of the border I would die at. Then the hum broke, like it does, and there I was again, and we kept going north.