The Room

This is the part I have the least of. Not because nothing happened. Because the part of me that keeps the days had stopped keeping them. You cannot lose what you never wrote down, and somewhere in there I stopped writing anything down. So I will give you what I have, which is pieces, and the spaces between the pieces are not me being delicate with you. The spaces are the truth. That is what it was. Spaces.

A room. I think it was more than one room, but my mind has pressed them into one. A mattress on a floor. A high window the color of dishwater. The same hours over and over until the word day stopped meaning anything and there was only the round of it, the round with no edges.

The sameness was the method by then. They did not have to break me anymore. They only had to keep me, and keeping me was a matter of repetition, the same nothing done to the same girl until she learned to leave before it started. That is the skill you build in a place like that, the only skill, going away while staying. I got good at it. I would be on the mattress under the dishwater window and I would also be on the path to the church with the beads warm in my fist, and the second place was more real than the first because I had decided it had to be. That is not madness. That is a girl rationing the only food she has.

My body began to turn on me in a new way, one I did not have a name for and did not go looking to name, because by then a body that betrayed you was the only kind I knew. I was sick in the mornings. I would wake with my stomach climbing my throat and I would retch on an empty stomach, bringing up nothing, until my eyes streamed. I thought it was the water. I thought it was the fear, which had gotten into my stomach the way it had gotten into everything. I thought it was hunger gone sour, or the road, or him. There was always a reason standing ready to take the blame, and I handed it to all of them, one after another, and never once to the reason it was. Why would I. No one had told me a true thing about my own body in months except what it was worth. The women in that place looked at me sometimes in a way I did not understand then and have understood completely ever since, a look with something held back inside it, and not one of them said the word to me, because there was no reason to, because in that place I was not a girl something was happening to. I was stock, and stock does not get told.

I will give you one thing she said, the girl I was, because she would want to be in here as herself and not only dressed up the way I have to dress her now. After one of the bad stretches she said, to no one, wiping her face, well, I won’t be eating for a week. And she almost laughed, because if you do not almost laugh you do something worse. That was her. Seventeen and wrecked and still making the small joke into the dark. I love her for it. I could not do it now. The cold does not have the joke in it. She did.

My faith in those weeks was not anything I could have shown you. It had gone all the way under. My voice had gone with it, worn from a whisper down to almost nothing, so that I moved through those rooms making no sound at all, which was what they wanted, a quiet girl, a finished girl. They thought the quiet meant they had won. The quiet was only the two things I had left, the faith and the voice, driven so deep that even I could not always find them. But they were down there. In the worst of the middle, in the part I can barely hand you, there was still, under all the silence and all the spaces, one hand closed in the dark that would not open. That was all that was left of me. It was enough. Barely, and enough.