CHAPTER EIGHT

One month being home.

One month of therapist appointments and attempting to pretend to the outside world that I’m okay. I’ve been attending the appointments twice a week. My mom organized it for me. There was no hesitance from me when my mother asked me to go. Her glassy eyes and pleading face was all it took for me to tell her yes.

My mom took me the first time, but after that session, I felt as if someone had cut me open and taken out my carefully buried memories. I was raw and all I wanted to do was break down on my own. I needed space. I needed to be alone, to sit in a corner somewhere and take the assaults of the memories, take the slicing pain and put them back in their dark corners where they belonged. Dr. Zeek dug deep. I hated her. She was pulling apart my well-constructed world after only two hours. I felt weak all over again.

The look on my mother’s face when I came out of the office was torture. Silent tears fell from her eyes as she drove me home. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell her to leave me alone. Stop trying to help me because she was only hurting me. Bringing up these memories, seeing her pain, all of it was just too painful. I just wanted to pretend. I just wanted to be numb again.

I decided after that time, I would take myself from now on. If I had to go, I would go alone. To do that I needed my car and I needed to learn to drive again. My car was at my parents’ house in their garage. My dad had been servicing it and running it every couple of months to make sure it would be ready for when I returned home.

A small ache hit my chest when I imagined him working on it all these years. Not knowing if I was dead or alive.

Learning to drive again was frustrating and exhilarating all at the same time. My dad took me out for my first test drive. Driving the car was fine, but learning the new road rules was frustrating.

The frustration didn’t last long though. It was also liberating getting into a car and taking myself somewhere. I wasn’t taken, dragged or driven. I was driving myself. I had control over where I wanted to go. It was freeing and for just a little while, all I thought about was the road in front of me. Not the past and not the pain.

My appointments with Dr. Zeek continued to be excruciating. Many times on my drive home, I imagined what it would be like to drive head on into a tree, off a bridge. Then it would all just end. The memories, the pain. Then my parents and Kanye could mourn me and move on. What they should have done five years ago. Forgotten about me. But I don’t. I can’t. Now and again, in the back of my mind in a small corner, a light flickers and I imagine a world where I smile. A life where my family looks at me proudly and I know it’s because of everything I have overcome. I want that life so badly, but the light dims more every day. The other dark corners mock my ray of hope. They creep up on it like monsters in the night, cackling, knowing it’s only a matter of time before they extinguish the light.

I do want Dr. Zeek to help me. I just don’t think it’s possible. I live in a world where harsh realities have scarred my soul. Where real hands have bruised my skin, where spoken words have seared my mind. What can Dr. Zeek do to undo all of that? My own mind turned against me and continues to torment me.

“Anything on your mind, Emily,” Dr. Zeek asks. I look up from my fidgeting hands to Dr. Zeek and see her soft eyes watching me. I’m nervous. Bile rises up my throat because I know how I will feel during this appointment.

“A bit,” I reply. There’s a lot, but I’m unsure of what she means.

“How are you settling in to your house? You’ve been there for three weeks now. Does it feel strange to live there alone?”

“I’ve lived on my own for the past five years, so no.”

“But you had the women from the collection with you. So you weren’t living alone,” she states.

“We may have been in the same house but we were still all alone. We were all fighting our own demons.”

I sit up straight in the chair and tap the floor with the toe end of my sandals. Whenever she gets close to talking about the collection women, I grow nervous. Those are memories I want locked up. I’ve thrown away the key and have no desire to go back to those memories. That is the one thing out of all of this mess I understand. Women were taken, abused and raped, and then they disappeared. I know what ‘disappeared’ means. They were killed. They didn’t stop fighting; they didn’t obey. So they were taken care of. I understand I couldn’t have helped them. That was out of my control. My heart breaks for them and their families. But it is one thing, thank God, I know doesn’t sit heavy on my soul.

“Do you miss Kanye, Emily?” she asks and my breath stills. I promised myself I would tell the truth during these appointments.

“Yes,” I whisper, “with all my heart. I miss him every day and every night.”

“Have you told Kanye this?”

“No, and I won’t. He wants us to be together, but he doesn’t know what he’s asking for. I won’t let him close enough to see how worthless and used I am. I couldn’t handle the rejection.”

Dr. Zeek sits forward and narrows her eyes at me. “Do you know it usually takes me months or years to pull the self-loathing out of my clients? You just handed it to me. Why?”

I shrug. “What’s to hide? I’m a whore. I’ve been with over thirty men. I’ve done unspeakable, disgusting acts. It’s only a matter of time before everyone sees it.”

“No, Emily. You were raped over thirty times. You were forced to do those things. You are not a whore.”

“Does it matter if I was forced or not? They were still done to me.”

Her words give me hope, yet they burn me because I know it’s false. Anger bubbles inside me.

“I see a hundred different hands all over me. I can still taste their semen in my mouth. I feel their fingers tightening around my throat when I fall asleep and when I wake. They burned the memory of feeling sore between my legs into my mind. They are everywhere. In my dreams, in my thoughts and in my memories. I don’t even know if the man standing across the street from me is one of them because I can’t remember all their fucking faces!” I end with a scream and stand breathing heavily.

“I understand your words, although I can never understand your feelings as I’ve never lived what you have lived, Emily. What you are feeling is valid and warranted, but if you don’t try to move past what you think you have become, those thoughts and those memories are going to have you frozen in time. There is a way to lessen the effect they have on you. You need to open yourself up to the possibility that you are more than what they said you are.”

“How?” I whisper to the window.

“You need to take back your power. Stop giving it to the demons in your mind. You keep saying what you don’t deserve. Start thinking about what you do deserve. Stop punishing yourself for the things that were out of your control. You never wanted them. Don’t let them take any more than they already have, Emily.”

Each time I leave her office, I race home and sit in the same corner in the spare room. Here, I grasp a tight hold of my glass rose necklace and cower in the corner while my mind wages war with itself. The old words with the new. Doubts the swords and hope the shields. A little while ago, I began scratching my arms with my nails. When it became too much, I needed to distract myself and think about something else. The only thing strong enough to do that was physical pain, so I scratched my arms with my nails. I don’t bleed often, but the last time I did, and I scared myself, though it worked. I distracted myself and I was able to move past the tormented moment.

Kanye called me every day for the first week, sometimes twice a day. I picked up every time. He would ask about my day and if I needed anything. The same questions all the time. Sometimes there was just silence for long moments. My heart would pound heavily and my palms would sweat. The strength to hold back telling him how much I loved him was taking its toll on me. I would rush to say goodbye before my voice became strangled.

After that week, he started coming over, either in the mornings or in the afternoons. He would bring me some breakfast or tells me he was just checking the mailbox. I’d cling to these moments. I’d look forward to them as much as I dread them, but I realized this was what Kanye’s life had become. I have pulled this wonderful man down with me to the depths of misery where he also counts on these small occasions. These moments are becoming our lives, our reasons for living. That’s not what I want for Kanye. I need him to move on.

***

Forty days of being home and today was the worst. I cut my skin open with a razor. The memories were too much. I had to release the pain and the evil filling my veins.

I’m fucked up, but I know enough that what I’m doing isn’t healthy and I’m not getting better; I’m getting worse. The nightmares through the night slammed into me like a cement wall. I needed something to overtake my thoughts, and at the time, I felt as if my own blood was the enemy and I needed to expel its toxic vileness from my body.

My heart shattered as I watched the blood spill down my thigh and I realized I am this weak, pathetic excuse of a woman.

I feel worthless. I’m learning I’m not, but I feel that way. I want it to stop, but I just can’t.