The Void

This is the part I don’t have.

I want to be straight about that, because everywhere else on this road I’m choosing what to keep from you. Not here. Here there’s a wall, and my mind built it, not me, and on the far side of it are weeks, and I can’t get to them, and I’ve decided to stop trying.

What I’ve got are pieces. They aren’t a story. They don’t connect. They just float.

A water stain on a ceiling, shaped a little like a dog.

A crack in the plaster I followed with my eyes a thousand times to keep from following anything else.

The exact grey of a certain light that meant one more day the same as the last.

Cold at the small of my back.

The sound a chair leg makes.

That’s all. That’s what came back, later, all at once, and even all at once it was only that, a ceiling and a crack and a grey and a cold and a sound. The rest my mind took and walled off and won’t give back, and for a long time I was ashamed of the wall, I thought it meant I was broken in some way other people weren’t.

I know better now.

The wall isn’t the break. The wall is the thing that kept the break from killing me. My mind looked at what was happening and understood, faster and smarter than I could, that there are things you don’t survive by remembering, and it took those weeks away from me on purpose, to save the rest. It was the only one in that room looking out for me, and it was me, the deepest part of me, the part underneath the trained girl and underneath the cold line both, doing the one thing it could do, which was make sure whoever walked out of there wouldn’t have to carry every ounce of what walked in.

So I let it keep them. The weeks. I don’t go looking. When the flood came, years on, and the wall cracked and the shards poured through, I learned exactly how right my mind had been to build it, because even the edges of it almost took me down.

I won’t describe the void. There’s nothing to describe. That’s the point. A girl was here, alive, seventeen, with a heartbeat and gooseflesh and a body that still wanted oranges, and then there’s a wall, and on the other side of the wall the worst of it happened to her in the dark where I can’t follow, and she came back out, and she was me, and I owe her the one thing I can still give.

I won’t make her say it.