This Is How the Story Changes, This Is How the Body Remembers by Raennah Lorne

One day, when I tell my story, I will remember how my body led me to believe it. I will say I slept with you the second time we met, seeking a force strong enough to break the physical magnetism between me and my loving ex. I will not fear being called a slut or worry I’ll be told I got exactly what I deserved. I will describe your eyes, always bloodshot slits, and the long-sleeve collared shirts you wore with the top buttons undone, revealing your chest, and your favorite one that summer: a rich forest green, the sleeves cuffed to the elbows. I will call it what it was when, during the second time in bed, you asked to try something different and I said No but you tried anyway and I said Please stop, and you said Relax and it won’t hurt. I will tell how I shifted on my knees, preparing to spring, but you growled over my shoulder and I froze and you did not stop. I will call it rape.

I will admit I can’t recall whether it happened before or after I learned you were in anger management. I will remember that a half-formed fear about how our social circle might break under the pressure of my No bubbled to the surface of my brain. I will describe how afterward I went into the bathroom and wiped away blood, and how when I returned, it was obvious, no matter how drunk you were, you knew you had done something wrong. I laid myself down, having already left my twenty-three-year-old body, and you lifted me up, all one hundred and thirty-five pounds, and cradled me against your chest. Then you put me back down and fell asleep, and I turned away from you, eyes open in the dark.

I will remember that in the morning you said I hope you had fun last night, as I sat on the edge of the bed, my arms around my knees, my tongue pressing swollen words like marbles to the roof of my mouth. And then you left.

---

When I tell my friend Sylvie, I preface it by saying, It wasn’t rape. She is uneasy but takes me at my word. I am convincing enough, casting it as a night of bad sex, and later she shakes her finger at you and tells you not to hurt me again. I didn’t know it was her first time, you say, your hands in the air, her finger aimed at your heart. We all laugh it off. You drive me to a park where we have sex in the backseat. We undress ourselves and move mechanically. You try to be gentle but seek, as ever, only to satisfy yourself. My bare skin is pale in the moonlight, and this is what I will remember most. Not your body—mine.

---

I first meet you in the basement apartment of our mutual friend, Steve. You are sitting on the couch, slumped over, too stoned to raise your head, and Sylvie points you out as the one I’ll like because of your curly hair. Our group heads to the karaoke bar and you stumble your way through “Sex and Candy,” Sylvie shaming you for not knowing the words by heart.

The second time we meet is at a Mexican restaurant. It must be after Cinco de Mayo because I recount my recent disastrous date on that day with a man who arrived at my house wearing a huge sombrero and a black felt mustache stuck to his Caucasian upper lip, whose hands were cold and smaller than mine. At the mention of my long fingers, you set down your wine and reach your hand, palm up, across the table saying, Now I’m curious. We press our hands together longer than necessary. Your hands are not smaller than mine.

The raspberry margarita goes to my head and I grin over your attention. This time when we reach the karaoke bar, you are alert, premeditating. You buy me a Woodchuck and as I drink it, you read all the signs: my flushed face, my loose posture, my growing inhibitions. Are you a lightweight? you tease, and then buy me another.

When you go to the restroom, Steve tells me you’re moving to another state. My spirits fall. I ask if you’re a good guy. Yeah, he says, but then tilts his head from side to side, weighing your bad against your good. Yeah, he bobs finally.

I am already so enamored by our shared love of Suzan-Lori Parks and the fact that you’re an actor like my ex that I don’t think to mind when you put your hand on my ass. We dance close together, your hands everywhere, until you ask, Do you still need that walk home? and I say Yes.

On the walk, under the sobering street lamps and headlights, I ask you not to touch my ass. You take your hand away, but slide it back again to cup my jeans under the shadows of the magnolia and gingko trees. You make a joke and as I turn to you and laugh, your mouth falls hard on mine. I kiss you back. At the door of the house I share with three other people, I turn to you and say, I suppose you want to come in.

If you don’t mind, you say. We climb the stairs to my bedroom tucked above the old garage and make out on my mattress on the floor until you say, Not to sound like a total skeeze, but I have a condom. I consent.

You are quick and pant a lot. Jackrabbit is all I can think. The next thing I know, you pull out and my stomach is wet in the dark and in a panic I say, Did the condom stay on? And you say, Not exactly. You apologize that the sex wasn’t better.

In the morning, you lift the sheet to appraise my body in the filtered sunlight and smile your approval. When you catch me looking back at yours, you kick your startled legs and pin the sheet down, but not before I see you are as hairless as a porn star. On your way out you say you had fun and we should do it again sometime.

By midday at work, I’m anxious about the condom mishap and my friend and co-worker walks with me to CVS to buy Plan B for forty dollars. The old pharmacist is kind, judgment absent from his face. I swallow the first pill and hope it won’t make me sick.

A week passes before I see you again. Sylvie invites me, you, and Steve to her apartment for drinks. You arrive last, wearing that same green shirt. When they leave us alone on the patio you knot up your eyes, press your cigarette between your lips and exhale a smoky, controlled How you been? I want to laugh. Steve has already told me you asked for my number. I tell you about taking Plan B, still thinking it was an accident, that we’re in this together. You say you’re sorry but don’t ask how much it cost or offer to pay. As we all walk downtown, Sylvie jams our hands together and runs away. It’s too soon, you say, extracting your hand and putting it in your pocket, and I want to laugh at this too. But then you tell me about your recent heartbreak, a woman who, in the middle of sex, said I don’t love you anymore.

I savor a single drink and talk to Sylvie and Steve while you play pool. Then you walk me back to my car and kiss me in the shadows against a truck that isn’t yours.

I think maybe the second time will be better.

The house is dark, my roommates asleep when we arrive. You have trouble getting it up and say, This isn’t really doing it for me.

That’s when you ask.

That’s when I say No. But you do not listen.

That’s when I say, Please stop, and you say, Relax and it won’t hurt.

Once, when my ex and I were having sex, I felt a sudden sharp pain. Ow, I said. He didn’t stop. Ow, I said again. He didn’t stop. In a fraction of a nanosecond, I shut my eyes in shock, turned my head and thought, This is what it’s like to be raped. He stopped. What’s wrong? he asked, his eyes full of concern. When I couldn’t speak, he lifted himself off of me and laid down beside me. I told him what was wrong. He said he hadn’t heard me. He kissed me and apologized.

That is my only frame of reference: if words fail, body language—its movement, expression, stillness—will communicate all there is to know.

I am not a person to you. I am a means to an end.

So, I shift my body under you, ready to spring. Then you growl over my shoulder and I realize I don’t know you at all. I freeze. But you refuse to read my body. I am not a person to you. I am a means to an end.

A month later I sit in a thin smock on an examination table and tell the nurse I may have contracted an STD when she asks the reason for my visit. I’m reminded just how legible my face must be when I hear her say outside the closed door, She’s very nervous, and then my nurse practitioner enters the room and asks softly, What’s up, babe?

I only tell her about the missing condom. The tests come back negative, which seems like dumb luck, especially when I hear third hand that one of the women you slept with before me called you to report symptoms.

---

Before you move away, I say I have something to give you. Steve and I have been dating for a month by then. We’re at the goodbye party your theatre friends throw for you in the country when I walk you to my car and hand you Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks. Maybe it’s because we’d talked about them, and now I don’t want their spines on my shelf reminding me of you. Maybe it’s because I want to remind you of this thing we shared outside your violence.

Early in the evening, the party gathers around a fire pit and someone asks us each to share the story of our worst lay. I keep quiet and notice the silence of another woman, whom I know you’ve also slept with. After dark, she and I sprawl out on the trampoline, stare at the stars, and laugh about how bad in bed you are. Later I will wonder if she is also laughing to balance an unacknowledged pain.

---

A month after you leave, your body far removed from mine, the marbled words I held against my tongue that morning appear in my journal. In your absence, I am ready to own them: date, acquaintance, rape. Until then, I had believed I was in control of my life, that I was able to keep myself safe. Naming what you did meant admitting neither was true. It meant admitting it could happen again.

This admission, even to myself, has a price. I develop quirks that are hard to hide. I’m newly afraid of heights, balconies, flying, bridges, and tunnels; a generalized fear of structural collapse. I sit on the second-story balcony of a bistro and try to have a conversation with a friend while I imagine the supports crumbling and the floor tilting, tables, chairs, plates, silverware clattering to the street below as I dangle from the iron railing. Crossing bridges, I lift my palms to the sky in supplication to be upheld; I suspend my breath inside tunnels.    

---

From another state you send me a friend request on Facebook, which I delete. When I’m packing to move to a new apartment, I find the missing condom crumpled behind my bed and admit to myself that you must have pulled it off. I discuss my suspicion with a friend who knows other women you’ve slept with, and she confirms this is something you’ve done before.

---

Four months later, you return for a visit. Steve and I are still together, but he doesn’t know about the rape and I am not ready to tell him. There is a blizzard. Steve, another friend, and you, all drive to my apartment to borrow a snow shovel. The sun has already set as I sit at my desk with all the lights on, the indoor shutters open. You don’t come inside.

In the dark you might have seen me, but I couldn’t see you—as if I were on a stage; you, the uninvited audience.

Later, I join everyone at the bar to face you in the light, to see you see me, my body intact in spite of you. We do not speak. Your ex shows up and I watch your eyes flare and your jaw lock in place. Her betrayal stirs you more than your own. I have proven nothing to you, only to myself. I can survive your presence, your gaze, you—and walk away unshattered.

I tell Steve during the second blizzard that winter. I’m falling for him but won’t say so until I know whether he will believe me or call it a misunderstanding. We lie down on his futon, and with my eyes on the ceiling and my hand gripping his, I ditch my prepared script and tell it simply: It was date rape. It was anal. It was your friend. And I cry. He holds me, angry and dumbfounded, asks if he should confront you, warns me it won’t be quiet, and I say No, that if anyone should, it should be me. I am conscious that my body froze, didn’t fight you off, and I tell Steve I’ll have to explain myself for the rest of my life. You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone, he says.

The culturally inherent shame is so entrenched it takes a while to believe him. When I do, I realize that what we find so uncomfortable, so disturbing, about acquaintance rape is not that the line is blurred, but that the line is so easily crossed. When I start to think that things were blurred, that the night was grey, I remember the clarity of my No. I remember that I bled, though not all assaults draw blood. And I remember your words: Relax and it won’t hurt. These are not words spoken to someone who consents. These are words spoken to someone who resists. Couched in your command was an admission. You knew you were hurting me.

What we find so disturbing about acquaintance rape is not that the line is blurred, but that the line is so easily crossed.

After dark, Steve and I tramp through the snow-plowed streets with friends to the one open bar downtown. It has floor-to-ceiling windows and the light from the street lamps gives everything, even the slanting snow, an orange tinge. After we down a couple vodka citrus highballs, Steve leans in and whispers he can’t wait to get me home and kiss every inch of me. In his room my body is lit with kisses and I want to lift myself but can’t, suddenly a cinderblock. I can’t put myself on display and feel safe. He chokes up and says it’s all his fault. Why? I ask in surprise. Because I introduced you, he says.

---

In the new year, I begin telling the women closest to me and their responses vary.

One assumes, He held you down?

Another says, My ex used to rape me repeatedly, and when I ask why she didn’t tell me, she says, I didn’t want it to define me.

An older woman says, Something like that happened to me. But she does not name it.

Another says, I was raped. It was the sixties—men just assumed you wanted it.

Still another says, What R-word? when I speak in code and shushes me when I say anal in a public garden as we walk in search of a new art installation, something made of sand.

I tell my mother in the car so that I don’t have to face her as I speak. After I’ve used the fewest words possible and cry, she parks the car, turns to me, and says, Can I kill him? I laugh out a mouthful of air in relief that there is no need to clarify, to recount in detail your assault on this body she made.

---

Steve and I have been dating for over a year and have just moved in together when we receive an invitation to a wedding we know you will attend. This is the nature of acquaintance rape, even after you’ve moved hundreds of miles away. People say your name around me, not knowing what you did, and my face learns not to grimace at the sound of it. I want to attend the wedding, refuse to alter my decisions because of you. But as the date approaches, when I shut my eyes, I think of sliding a razor across my wrist. It doesn’t feel suicidal. It feels primal, exorcistic. As if bloodletting could drain the demons. It takes me weeks to tell Steve. I stand in the shower, my arms around myself, and tell him I keep seeing the image of the blade on my skin. He stands outside listening, the curtain drawn between us.

I recognize the danger and finally tell my doctor what you did. She recommends a therapist whose office is beside the train tracks, which forces us to suspend conversations mid-sentence over the roar of the engines. I don’t have much money or time, so I get to the point. When I say, I was raped, she hands me a box of tissues and asks if I was a virgin and I am annoyed this woman twice my age seems to subscribe to the myth that only the pure and untouched can be raped.

In the months leading up to the wedding I see her weekly and she gives me permission to hate you, which I do until I don’t need to anymore. I indulge my bloodlust in my mind, punt your ribs, scratch your eyes and break your nose, but it always ends with you cracking my head open on the walnut dresser my great-grandmother brought with her from Zurich. My therapist says you’ve given me a violence that doesn’t belong to me and when I ask her, How do I know where his rage ends and mine begins? she has no answer other than to suggest punching pillows or screaming in the woods. The first and only time I try beating and shouting into a pillow, I become more enraged and might laugh at the absurdity, except the anger inspires such terror in me. 

As the wedding nears, my therapist asks me to write you a letter I might never send. I punch the keys of my laptop and imagine that when I’m finished, my keyboard will look like my mother’s, her strong nails impressing crescent moons above the most common letters in the English alphabet (i, r, a, t, e, s, h, n, o). In the letter, I tell you what you did and how it changed me. I tell you that you engendered in me a hatred unlike any I have ever known, much of it self-directed, some of it not. I hated you for assaulting my humanity, my dignity. I hated your audacity, your sense of entitlement. I hated the mistrust stirred by your violence, which inevitably impacted my relationship with Steve. When I read the letter aloud in my therapist’s office above the grinding gears of the train braking below, she says, I think you should send it. I consider it as I select a shiny dress to wear to the wedding, a disguise intended to present me as unchanged, unaffected.          

Two years and five months after the rape, I see you for what I hope will be the last time. Our first encounter that wedding weekend is mercifully easy, two cars passing in the hotel parking lot, Steve and the groom speaking through open car windows, you and I silent. The day of the wedding, I do yoga to calm my nerves, shower, dress, and catch the shuttle to the ceremony site. A friend takes my arm and walks me down the stone path to the lawn where the men are gathered. As I move toward Steve, I catch sight of your eyes on my body and wonder if you have always looked so lecherous.

At dinner you sit across the table, diagonal from me, and ask about my writing. Steve runs his hand frenetically over the top of my thigh, his fingertips saying, It’s going to be okay babe, it’s going to be okay, as I answer carefully. I do not tell you my latest work is an unsent letter addressed to you.

The next morning, Steve and I arrange things so I won’t have to see you again before we leave. I will check us out of the room, he will say goodbye to you at the elevators. But instead of getting on the elevator, you walk Steve to the door where I stand. You shake his hand and then reach your arms around me. My whole body retracts internally. But then the touch is over, and it doesn’t sear like I thought it would.

Ten days later, I mail you the letter. In it, I remind you of your words, Relax and it won’t hurt, and ask, Who the fuck did you think you were, trying to talk me out of my pain? I tell you I know you pulled the condom off without my consent our first time together and that it, too, was a violation—of trust, sexual health, and my reproductive rights. I tell you about my denial and dissociation from the rape, and how I couldn’t name what you’d done until after you left town.

I don’t tell you I ordered a book called I Never Called It Rape by Robin Warshaw. I don’t tell you that it helped me understand why I pursued you afterward, plied myself with vodka, and kissed you that night under the porch. Warshaw explains this behavior is a way of normalizing violence, shrinking its terror by embedding it within the context of a relationship. It was my unconscious attempt at repair. But when a knife cuts, one doesn’t seek the blade to heal the wound. Eventually, I recognized my denial as a force of self-preservation, a suspension of truth that allowed me to be unafraid and fall in love with Steve.

After I send the letter, you unfriend Steve on Facebook and begin to fade from my story.

---

Gradually, I allow my body to thicken, to push back against Steve’s beautiful hands. Expansion makes me a smaller target in a culture that reveres thinness. (I read somewhere that the tissue of the traumatized vagina thickens too, and I wonder: Is it the same for other traumatized tissue, the body remembering its trespasses and reinforcing its defenses?) I build a barrier between me and the version of me that could be hurt. Because if I blame the rape on my alignment then with conventional standards of beauty, I regain control, increasing my girth and transcending the size parameters of someone who can be raped. Of course, this is folly. People of all sizes are raped.

Some days, when strange men turn from me, the excess pounds are a comfort. Some days, I am anxious to dig myself out from under this unburned energy, to reclaim an ease of movement and strength.

Three years after the rape, Steve and I visit Sylvie in her hometown, where she has returned to live. Steve’s friend Daniel attends the university there and we agree Steve will stay the weekend at Daniel’s and I will stay with Sylvie.

We all meet up at a bar and then go back to Daniel’s house, where everyone—Sylvie and I, Daniel and Steve, and Daniel’s two male roommates—continue drinking in his basement. The big and tall roommate points to the steel column in the middle of the room and says to me and Sylvie, Stripper pole. I glare at him but it doesn’t seem to register in his alcohol-sopped eyes. His perceptions aren’t so dimmed, however, that he can’t see, an hour later, that Sylvie prefers Daniel. In that moment he lifts up the loveseat she is sitting on and pours her onto the floor. She lands on her knees and spills her beer as she yells, What the hell? He is embarrassed then and says, I might’ve gone too far. Daniel laughs and agrees.

Meanwhile, the other roommate and I are locked in a grammatical argument. I can’t remember what point I am trying to articulate, but my nuanced construction irritates him and he interrupts to say, Well now you’re just trying to fuck an ant in the ass.

My body goes limp.

The scene is too familiar. Testosterone and alcohol. The men outnumbering the women—violence in the language and actions of the two men. My head falls onto Steve’s shoulder and I tell him I want to leave. But Sylvie is hitting it off with Daniel and doesn’t want to go. I tell her I am leaving without her, and swipe her car keys from her purse. Steve walks me out and as we ascend the stairs from the basement, my anger rises, strengthened by my movement, my agency. Steve sobers some as he tries to calm me. We reach the driveway when my rage catches and snakes through my body to my mouth and I scream in the quiet neighborhood, I fucking hate them! and slash the air with Sylvie’s keys. Only I’ve misgauged the distance between us, or Steve has taken a step toward me, and the keys rip through his t-shirt and the skin of his chest, but I don’t realize it as he wraps his arms around me and whispers, It’s okay, it’s okay. I let him hold me and breathe into the warmth of his body. Only when we pull apart does he rub his chest and check for blood; there is none, but apology still runs from my mouth.   

As I drive in the dark alone to Sylvie’s house, I am suddenly seized by fear. I have, essentially, stolen her car and I keep checking the rearview mirror for police lights. When I reach her house in the woods and unlock the door, her large black dog, the only dog I’ve ever feared, barks his alarm. I extend my hand past his massive jaw, the one Sylvie has to muzzle for the first ten minutes of my every arrival, and hook a leash on his collar. He stops barking, surprised, and I walk him out into the night—brazen and unafraid.

Years later, Sylvie and I will laugh about the night I stole her car. But I will also see it for what it was: trauma response. This is how the body remembers.

---

Five years after the rape, I see a second therapist whose office is across from the graffitied mailbox you pressed me up against once, your clumsy paw between my legs. I tell her my frustrations, desires, and fears about returning to my previous size.

I’ve done it before, I can do it again, I tell her.

When was the last time you did it? she asks.

When I wanted to show him that he hadn’t changed me.

But that was a lie.

Yes, that was a lie.

And because of this, returning to a smaller size feels like regression.

I have grown so much.

Maybe the next time you see me I will be too large for you to wrap your arms around.

Maybe

I

will

be

monstrous.

A word that grew out of danger, rising up from the Latin monstrum, meaning portent, threatening disquiet.

I sit on my therapist’s loveseat and she instructs me to plant my feet on the floor, close my eyes, and remember a time when I felt connected to my body. My brain takes an adolescent second to smirk over sex (consensual, mind-blowing, with Steve), but then my eyes swell and the smirk is replaced by a memory. I am twenty-one again and running along a sandy path before the boardwalk carries me over the marshes of the peninsula. I inhale the scent of pine and feel the strength and warmth of my muscles with each step of the nine-mile run. And suddenly, there it is, the lost thing that I am still mourning: my body. I inhabit it and it is mine and I am free, unburdened by you.

---

One morning after you assaulted me, I was out for a run when I saw you up ahead. My gut tightened and I slowed my pace. You didn’t see me as you bounded through traffic, probably late for work. I kept moving and by the time I reached the graveyard you were gone. When winter came that first year, I didn’t need much convincing to stop running and stay warm in bed with Steve. My knees lost strength and shifted, my patella pinching my ligaments every few steps.

With my second therapist’s encouragement, I begin physical therapy. On the first day, I can only lift two pounds with the left leg, only press a quarter of my body weight with both. If I were to fall while running, I wouldn’t be able to support my own weight. I do the exercises, sign up for my first race in ten years, and start running again. My breathing is labored, my lungs untrained, but I am slowly stitching back together the threads of connection to my body. My knees don’t hurt while running, but at night my bones wake me—they feel hollow inside me, unequipped to push back against the pain.

I am slowly stitching back together the threads of connection to my body.

That same year, I learn that meditation can help those diagnosed with PTSD and I sign up for a class. On the first day, the teacher asks us to pick a partner and tell them why we’re there. I tell an older woman with bleached hair that I’ve experienced a trauma that has separated me from my body. Then, unexpectedly, the teacher announces we’ll share our reasons with the whole class. Because I cry when it’s my turn, the older woman faces me at the end of class and says, I don’t know what you’ve been through but I can tell you I was raped with a gun to my head, and if I can survive that, you can survive this. Later, when I think of sitting quietly with myself, resistance presses like a metal beam on my sternum. I do not return to class. Instead, I force myself to do yoga, my shoulders shaking in downward-facing dog, all my joints weak—a woman unhinged.

And then, one day, something shifts. The voice in my head no longer says, You should, assuming it will meet resistance, and instead says, I will. I will feel better if I do yoga. In the movement from second person to first I am no longer outside myself looking in. I inhabit my body, take up residence inside myself.

---

Seven years after the rape, I read Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, and learn that bilateral stimulation of the body in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy can help the brain process traumatic experiences. I seek out a trauma specialist who practices EMDR. Her office is in a converted old house on a half-numbered street, squeezed between two whole numbered streets—which seems like a metaphor for something, like the place where trauma lives, in the half-space between a remembered past and a lived present, my body, the time traveler, slipping back and forth between the two.

After the introductory session, the specialist hands me two hard plastic pads the shape of worry stones, connected by electrical cords to a control device. While EMDR is named for bilateral stimulation of the eyes, the reprocessing of memories can also occur through stimulation of the hands with vibration, or of the ears through tonal sounds. As I hold one plastic pad in each hand, she adjusts the control buttons to demonstrate the vibrations I can expect to feel. There are at least three variations of intensity and three settings for speed. On the mildest setting, the gray pads quiver lightly in my palms, alternating from one hand to the other. The electrical current is strung between us, she in her chair and me on the couch. It feels both woo-woo and scientific as we work on “resourcing,” which involves constructing a peaceful place I can go to in my mind to rest between revisiting memories.

We spend several sessions exploring memories that cause light to medium discomfort. It’s awkward initially, as I’m unsure of the “right” answers in these structureless explorations of my own mind and emotional responses. But she reminds me that the only instruction is to react to what comes up as the bilateral stimulation of my body shakes things loose in my brain and we draw nearer to the white-hot pain. We practice visiting childhood memories and work our way up to the memory of meeting you. After six sessions, I tell her I’m ready to get it over with, to confront the rape itself. Seven years is so long and I am so tired, I tell her. Yes, she says, her voice gentle and measured, Let’s get it the fuck over with. I laugh and agree.

I am already holding the vibrating worry stones when she asks me to stand. She explains that as I recall your violence, I should feel free to respond in any way I want, to punch and kick, to scream. I am nervous and shut my eyes as I reenter the scene in my head. I am angry as I punch and kick without moving my arms or legs. Then suddenly I am crying and she asks me, What do you need right now? What do you need to do, what do you need to say? And one word rises up through my throat that has never once occurred to me in seven years. Not that night or any night after.

Help, I croak.

And for the first time, I think of my three roommates asleep in their beds, the British man well over six feet tall who lived across the hall and with whom I shared a bathroom, the woman in the bedroom below with her two protective dogs, and the other man downstairs by the kitchen who worked late and might even have been awake.

The novelty of the word astounds me, its size and shape expanding to fill the hollow space carved out in my brain by years of its absence.

Help, I repeat aloud in my therapist’s office to the roommates who aren’t there. In my head I scream it, and the power of my voice shakes my roommates from their sleep. The British man pounds on my door, the weak hook-and-eye latch wrenching apart. The woman below opens her door, and her dogs climb the stairs, snapping and snarling as they storm into my room.

You shrink from me then, naked, hands in the air, claiming innocence as infantile and inauthentic as your hairless body.

I don’t know what happens next and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the shattering in my brain. No longer catatonic, I have broken free from my freeze response.

My body remembers, and enacts a new ending. This is how the story changes.