A Contemplative Odyssey

Michaela Jones

This piece contains suicide, sexual abuse, and self harm.

I stayed home from middle school that day. It was a beautiful, sunny midafternoon. I had on my dad’s big T-shirt with my puke bucket, which was really an old ice cream gallon tub, next to me. My parents were at work and my brother was mowing the lawn, leaving the house empty and quiet. My sister, only twenty-two months older than me, came into my room to hug me. She told me she loved me and disappeared back into the stillness of the house. Something was wrong.

I wanted her to stay. I wanted her to talk to me. I wanted the strain on our relationship to suddenly vanish.

I crept down the stairs into the darkness. No lights on, nothing. Just my seven-year-old miniature dachshund shaking her butt to welcome a new presence. I sat down in my favorite secondhand recliner that had a view to my driveway. Nothing could prepare me for my neighbor’s car ripping into my gravel driveway, the man bursting out of the car to yell something to my brother on the lawnmower. I couldn’t make out the words. Something was wrong. My brother, tired and sweaty, uncharacteristically ran over and jumped into his car. Everything was so quick. Then, I heard it. I heard the sirens coming down my road. You never hear sirens in my small town, especially my insignificant, forgotten road. Why were there sirens? Why was an ambulance blazing down my road past my house? Why did my brother jump into a car with an acquaintance? Where were they going?

My parents never tried to instill the “dollhouse” mentality with me. The outward presentation to others that your life is perfect hiding the sinister things happening behind closed doors. I made the choice to appear like everything in my life was fine. Everything is fine. I’m fine. It is a mask that I wear whenever trauma happens. I want to appear happy and easy to approach. Otherwise, the darkness, the shadows, will consume me. I can place things into tight, flawlessly wrapped boxes and stow them away in my head to be unpacked later. But what happens if you never unpack them?

Suddenly, I am projected into my mind. I turn around to see a towering wall of these perfect boxes covered in cobwebs and dust. The wall is enormous, my body microscopic in comparison. All the boxes acting like bricks in a compartmentalized fortification. They were once strong and secure, now decrepit. Threatening to fall at any moment. What happens if you don’t unpack them? I gulp.

My sister was in that ambulance, accompanied by my brother. My heart pounded out of my chest when my brother called to inform me. My only siblings were racing to the hospital where my mom was about to end her twelve-hour shift.

It happened in an instant. All the commotion. My sister’s body being swept away to the hospital. The emptiness of the house. I was the only one in there. I dared not utter a sound. The silence and dread made me swallow my thoughts. For hours, I sat on that old recliner in the shadows secretly hoping it would consume me. I had to banish this pain away. I felt its whispers and I wanted to call back, take me with you. Instead, they let my heart ache and squeeze the blood out as quickly as it entered. I was angry with myself. Why didn’t I stop her? I knew something was wrong. Why did I let her leave? I begged God to let my sister live. I pleaded, please, please, please. I sat in the same chair with my dog for hours. The sun went down, and it felt sickeningly sweet that the lack of its warmth and light justified the way I felt. Falling into the shadows. Numb.

The boxes in my mind form what I guess to be a maze. It’s dark. The only light seems bleak and artificial in nature. It’s almost calming, yet the atmosphere makes it feel isolating. Alone. There is not one specific point that exhibits this light source from within the maze. Just enough light to see where I am going along the walls of boxes—all the times I have inwardly shut away my feelings to not deal with them. I have procured quite a collection. Enough that I cannot see over the walls of this labyrinth to the end point. I don’t even know how big this entire thing is, other than that I have started at the beginning.

On Mother’s Day, a couple weeks later, I sat across the table from my sister in the psych-ward; she looked so pale. Her normal olive-toned skin was now gray. The color matched her soul behind her eyes. Wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and shorts, if one looked at her on the street, they would expect her to be walking home from school. A regular everyday teenager. Her body was so small, weakened by wishing to be dead. I could feel her emotions, a hurt that could bring someone to their knees. Her reality was the daily war in my head.

She had taken a bottle’s worth of my dad’s anti-anxiety medicine.

“Why did you walk down the road?”

“Because the sky was so pretty. I wanted it to be the last thing I saw.”

Anger. Why would she want to leave us? Why would she want to leave me? She could see thousands of beautiful skies if she lived.

But would it really be living or just surviving?

I think about this often. She felt so relieved that her pain was going to end that she was able to live again, if only for a few minutes to walk down the road, to take in the cornfields, rolling hills, and fluffy clouds. Smelling the air…relief. A charming, final goodbye.

The endless corridors in my mind are daunting. I move ahead, brushing my hand over the boxes. I coldly laugh to myself; I don’t even remember some of these memories, yet they are here, holding up this enclosure. I hear something. An echo of words jumbled by the walls. I must follow it. Much like my memories, I am propelled forward by my emotions. I do not want to be alone anymore. I must find who is speaking. I arrive to a dead end. There’s nothing here?! The whispers are coming from one side and then the other making me spin around, almost like trying to swat a fly. In an instant, a memory is displayed in front of me. Reaching out, I can feel what I felt in the memory. I was scared—vulnerable—trapped.

My sister’s childhood best friend’s family owned a farm that housed horses. With a decked out room of horses and even a stallion comforter, I wanted to ride one so badly. An opportunity presented itself one day during the summer break between third and fourth grade. My siblings regularly went over to the farm since my brother worked baling hay. My sister’s best friend’s dad, D, offered to let me ride Duke, a retired racing horse. D was tall and skinny, almost no muscle mass whatsoever. His short spiky hair only called attention to the hollowness of his face.

I sat excitedly in the barn watching D put the saddle on Duke. Finally, I was going to make my eight-year-old dreams come true. Once Duke was all geared up, D walked her over to the round pen while I bounced along after. I walked into the pen gazing at the horse tied up on the other side. She was a beautiful horse, solid brown with a white spot on her nose. Her legs were almost taller than me, natural for a racing horse. With her ears pinned back, she seemed somewhat annoyed being out on a hot summer’s day. I could feel her apprehension. Behind me, D shut the gate with a screech. His demeanor changed. Coupled with Duke’s annoyance and the gate shut, I felt trapped. I didn’t want to ride her anymore. I didn’t want to be shut in with D.

He made me ride her anyway. I expected to use a stool to get on top of her, but D insisted on helping me up himself. He picked me with his hands resting on my hips.

In the maze, I am shaking. I utter the words I wish I could have said as a child. Please stop.

D kept his hand on my mid to upper leg, walking alongside Duke as she lazily trudged around the parameter of the pen. He taught me the word dominance as we went. Duke would never try to buck me off because D was dominant over her. The way he was speaking. Evil. D kept talking over and over about dominance. I needed to leave. I wanted to get off Duke as soon as I got on. In my head, I was trying to think of an excuse to get out of that pen, to get away from D. Fortunately, his wife came by and offered us dinner. I could leave.

Stop!

A sob rolls out of me. I can’t deal with this. I haven’t thought of this memory in years. In fact, I could only remember snapshots of D. Him staring at me in the doorway as a I changed clothes, trapping me in the barn alone with him, my sister forcing us to leave a sleepover without telling me why, my parents picking us up at 11pm confused and tired.

In middle school, I came home to my dad sitting in the living room on the recliner. He seemed occupied in his mind, like something was troubling him. The daily 5pm news played from the television. I stood watching the news, waiting for him to speak to me. After what felt like years, he said, “Do you know if D did something to your sister?” I was blindsided. I sputtered, “No. No. She would have told me.” In perfect timing, D’s mugshot appeared on the news. “Perry County Man Arrested for Child Pornography and Molestation.”

What did he do to my sweet sister? What if people started asking if something happened to me? What if they found out my secret?

I was too young to realize my sister’s trauma. Too young to see the turmoil his sexual abuse brought to her body and mind. Too young to realize this horrible man had forced my brother to watch porn at the age of twelve. Too young to realize why I kept feeling like someone was watching me in my sleep. Too young to realize I, too, was a victim. Too young to realize each of us were holding onto the same silence, unable to fully participate in everyone else’s reality, secluded by our own secrets.

His name was Daniel Crater. No more secrets now.

We waited years to tell my dad what Dan did to us. He was already locked away in prison—thirty-five charges, thirty felonies—only a handful of years. These charges didn’t include what happened to us. There wasn’t enough evidence. Dan’s wife said she would testify for us, testify she knew exactly what was going on and decided to ignore it, even when it happened to her own kids.

I want to have sympathy for her. What was he putting her through? No! No.

She abandoned her kids while still living in the same county. She moved on with her life while her son took his at 20. My brother cried out when he heard his childhood friend was no longer walking this earth. She will never get my sympathy.

In the past, labyrinths were used as spiritual discovery. The traveler would go in seeking some form of transformation. In ancient Egypt, the labyrinth was a single walkway, curving in and out. Peaceful. Then, these labyrinths were converted to mazes. Within the walls, twists and turns propel the traveler to be what seems to be forward. How many dead ends are there? What do you do when you reach a dead end? Simple. You keep moving. Try the other way. How do you feel? What did you discover about yourself along the journey?

I can’t keep going in this mind maze. It is too much. I hear the shrieks from my enclosed memories. I hear the sobbing. I see my sister’s arms being covered with so many cuts from wrist to shoulder, my brother playing the guitar to keep his hands busy to not kill himself while the family discusses which mental hospital would best fit, my mom breaking the news she has two autoimmune diseases and will have to take two different chemotherapy drugs, my dad being talked down from suicide, my childhood dog slowly dying before my eyes. The walls. All made from boxes of my worst experiences. It feels like choking. I am not able to escape. I need to escape. Yet, I see myself in real life performing my daily tasks, as if I am watching my body move on a TV screen. I am stuck in my head yet to everyone else I am carrying on with my day. It doesn’t feel real. The mind is detached from the body. Dissociative. It goes in and out like a wave where one minute I am fully present in my body and the next trapped here, in the maze. I continue walking, seeking anything—an end, a break, anything.

I come back into my body to the sight of my girlfriend dancing alone in my bedroom to the sound of Madonna.

“Do you know how to Vogue?”

“I don’t know.”

I wiggle my fingers and try to bop along to the music, not very successfully. Giggling at my attempt, she decides to show me. Her arms extend out and contort to make a rectangle, capturing her face in a smize. Her sculpted eyebrows lift slightly. Her cheekbones high enough to scrape the gods. Her honey eyes that communicated her intent. Her face captivates me, like lighting a fire within my being.

When vogueing, the dancer performs in such a manner that the attention is on what they choose. You control what and how people see you. A glimpse. A still picture of my beautiful girlfriend with her arms highlighting her face. She blocks out any other visual content. It is the other side of a dissociative state. The audience is looking in rather than the dancer looking out. It is incredibly powerful position.

Dealing with trauma is like dancing back and forth between reality and disillusions. It is the ongoing path of healing, not always linear, but more chaotic. So here I am, at the end of my labyrinth, the dancer with no rhythm, deciding to willfully and embarrassingly vogue in this strange place in my mind.

Michaela Jones is a senior Mathematics major from central PA. She enjoys skateboarding, spending time in nature, and listening to disco. She hopes to continue using writing as a creative outlet.