The Secret Keeper

Its a task that feels unbearable, and yet when there is no choice but to do it, adaptation is not optional. To be the secret keeper, the one who holds life and death, light and darkness, not just for myself, but for those i cannot survive without...there is no option but silence. Silence became so important, so imperative that words disappeared, as if they didn’t exist at all. The memories remain so vivid, the smell of sweat, his breath tickling my nose, the taste of blood is so tangible and yet no words exist...as though it is a movie being played in another language with things that don’t quite translate, perhaps a superhuman survival skills that prevented me from speaking even if i became weak. It is a solitary confinement, torturing me unto insanity...if only i could be insane...maybe then i wouldn’t have the lucidity and functionality to care what others think, what others believe. If only I could be so crazy that I could lose all rational thinking and have the voices inside my head to talk to me, maybe they could understand, break the language barrier and provide the comfort that was taken with the eating disorder. The starvation pressed the mute button in my brain and I could close my eyes and an eerie silence would wrap me in a cold blanket. Shivering from the ice surrounding me i gladly traded the deafening screams in a foreign language for the intolerable chill that numbed me to my very core.

Now the volume has returned and I can see the pictures, smell the smells, hear the running water, feel the torture and you say to me, you are safe. But nothing about what I am experiencing is safe. Nothing I feel is safe. I look into a mirror and I see her small body and her tear stained face, the absolute terror in her eyes that is masked in emptiness, as if to give nothing away...as if she knew he had already taken her very soul...desperate for safe arms to provide respite from the hell she had walked through...but instead there is silence.

Why admit to needs that can’t be met. To long for something is to risk destruction. To have the  desperation of a 4 year old longing to be held and comforted, longing for the harsh reality of what is withheld because of the understanding of age induced innocence...to want that when you are a grown woman is impossible.

To say it isn’t fair is to subscribe to the belief system that equality can be achieved and in other words, it  would be meaningless. I don’t align with a victim mentality or expect the world to repay me for its undue harshness. I do, however, find it difficult to comprehend why I am expected to want to remain alive, continue to hold breath in my lungs when to live simply means continually re-experiencing everything I have lost. Some of those losses are common to every person that inhabits this fallen world. Anniversaries that bring to light the absence of my hero, my father who departed from my life and this world as we know it, when I was twelve. Painful breakups, friendship betrayals, death and jealousy. Those are things I can remember with sadness on occasion and still remain optimistic about a future containing potential  joy. But it’s the bathroom floor that shakes me. It’s the knife against my throat and the blood on my hands that spins a room so quickly that it rewinds time and there I am and there he is.  It is the dark closet where i sought refuge only to learn that to disobey is far worse than to submit, become one with evil and the pain isn't as palpable. It is there, in that submission, that I became sin, became silence, became darkness. While hope on occasion shines through a tiny crack of a cement prison cell where I am locked away from society like a wild animal, it is simply not enough. It is a crumb of food for a starving body. What good would it do for me to expect a feast, to long for ongoing sustenance when I know I cannot survive off of what I can be given. Wouldn’t my brain rather expect nothing, have nothing, than to barely hold on to life, be tortured with a failing body only to survive another day? Add in having no voice, no ability to communicate in any other way than to slowly fade from existence, becoming one with emaciation ...  chancing someone might see the disfigured animal I have become and read between the lines. Perhaps then I won’t break the rules, no one will have to die, and someone can see, physically see  the anguish and wrap me in a blanket and resuscitate life...love me unto ongoing hope. But when you restore the physical weight on to me, I have no voice. I become the fattened cow awaiting the slaughter. It is here that I truly disappear into the eternal hell of perpetual flashbacks, of a lifetime of molestation and rape, and no one will ever hear me or see me...because my real voice kills and destroys those I love. Instead my body will forever be a shoe to be put on, worn, and then discarded. I understand how to exchange what I am worth for love. That exchange has cost me everything.

To be a secret keeper is to sell your soul. So if you are, in fact,  a fellow secret keeper I would beg you to never leave the proverbial abduction spot with the kidnapper. Scream, yell, make a scene and chance being killed right then and there. That is heroic because, so they say, rarely do you survive being taken to a second location. Rarely do his promises come to fruition. Your only chance to be found alive is to be anything but silent.