The Darkness

I can’t see sometimes.

I’m walking along, it’s a normal day, maybe the sun is shining and lilacs are opening and birds are singing and all of that cliché shit that’s supposed to make all of your troubles melt away, the kind of day when you’re supposed to hear Mariah Carey or someone singing something inspiring in your head like a movie soundtrack, and all of a sudden everything stops. I’m somewhere else entirely, and it’s dark and the only sound I hear is my own breathing. I’d scream but I am too afraid that I would not make any sound, so I just listen until even the breathing stops and then there’s nothing except me and the dark and I don’t know where one ends and the other begins, and I’m falling, spiraling through the darkness, knowing I’ll never reach any kind of an end and praying that, this time, I won’t see him.

It’s been that way since I left the hospital. I don’t tell them, though; they’d just try to send me back in, and it doesn’t help. Not really. They told me that the doctors and medications would help, would resolve things, would keep the darkness from taking over. They were right, in a way: for the whole time I was there, stuck in that antiseptic white tiled room, listening to the girl in the next room moan, I never lost the light. Even at night, as I lay there, not sleeping despite the drugs they had me on, it did not fade; it was always there. I lay there listening, her moaning constant, sometimes rising in little crescendos and fading momentarily away before rushing back in, forté, aggressively, rooting me in my place, listening. Those nights I missed my violin. They wouldn’t let me have it, made me leave it at home. It would bother the other patients, they said. But it always calmed me, always kept me focused on something other than that face that loomed always hidden just behind my thoughts, leering, glaring, laughing. If I let it in even for a second then I knew the whole thing would flood in, choking me, drowning me. And the music kept it away, kept me safe, but they wouldn’t let me have it there, so I lay awake in the pristine little room staring at the light filtering in through the open door, trying hard not to imagine what was making her moan.

When the dawn came, I was still lying there, listening, waiting. And the therapist would come in and we’d take a walk maybe and she’d say something profound like I have to let it go, find a way to hate him without hating myself, try to get out and enjoy my life again, or she’d make me look at my bandaged wrists and ask me what on earth I thought I would gain and I’d say I don’t know, but I knew. I knew what I would have gained. Freedom. Freedom from not sleeping at night because I know I will see him if I closed my eyes. Freedom from memories that scream at me whenever the darkness comes. Freedom from those horrifying moments when the world fades away and that dark pit opens and he waits there at the end, laughing, taunting, saying those things he said, his huge hand swinging, knocking me down, hitting my face, tearing my clothing, touching, touching, and then those grotesque wet lips pressing against mine, daring me to do something, to bite him maybe but I couldn’t--I couldn’t--and then the worst thing, and he pushed and pushed and all I could feel was his hot breath and the sting of my tears, and then it was over and he was gone and I was lying there, lying the way they found me what seemed like days later, lying in my blood and my tears, trying to find my way back to the light.

Freedom doesn’t come. It didn’t come when the knife etched into my wrists and the blood oozed out but not enough. It didn’t come when the medication dulled my mind but still would not let me sleep. It didn’t come when they said I was out of danger and they sent me home. It never will come. He got six years. I got a life sentence. I sit at home, behind locked doors, playing my violin, playing Bach or Mozart or anything I can think of that is not plaintive and sad, and for a little while it helps. But I can’t play forever. Sometimes you have to stop. And when I stop I fear the moment when the light fades away and the sounds disappear and I fall through the nightmare to the place where my breathing stops and all I see is him. I see him in every man I meet, every man I am with. He lurks there, waiting. And he always will.