My head feels like it’s spinning. I think I
must have fallen
asleep. When I come
awake, we have stopped again. I t is
still daytime. The man tells the other passenger that we are
home and then whispers something else that I can’t hear. I
still can’t see the
other passenger but can hear someone
exit the car. The man that grabbed me tells me to be quiet
and I won’t be hurt.
He says I need to be very quiet or
I will
upset his very aggressive dogs. I do not want to do anything
to anger him or the dogs. He seems big to me. He says he
is going to take me in the house and for me to be quiet and
not say a
word. He throws
a blanket over my
head and
leads me
somewhere. I want
to go home. My brain feels
less foggy than
it did before.
I tell myself I
am having a
dream and any minute
I will wake up and my mom will be
there to hold me and tell me it was all just a bad dream.
But
of course this is reality I
must survive. I don’t ever
remember
having a nightmare quite this vivid. I was afraid of ET for a
while when I first
saw the movie. I
used to think
that ET
would come to my house and be all dressed up like when
the little girl in the movie dressed him; in my dream, he
was
mad at me
for that for
some reason. That
was a crazy
dream but nothing as scary as this.
When we are inside the strange house, he takes off the
blanket and instructs me to sit on the wicker sofa. He is a
very tall man. He has
very light blue eyes and brown hair
that is thinning on the top a bit. His nose is kind of long
and
his skin is a bronze
color. I t looks
like he spent too much
time in the sun. He does not look like a bad guy. He looks
like a normal guy. Like any ordinary guy you would see in
everyday life. But he is not! He couldn’t be … could he? He
shows me a black thing with metal ends that look sharp. He
calls it a “stun gun” and he says he will use it again if
I try to
get away. He turns
it on and
I hear the
strange zapping
sound I heard before when my body would not work. The
sofa I ’m sitting on has a lot of cat hair. I look up and I
see a
cat sitting on
a washing machine.
The cat looks
like a
Himalayan Persian
tortoiseshell and there
is another one
that looks like a very fat, tabby torty. I ask if I
can pet them.
He says if they come
to me, then I can.
One comes over
and I give it a pet.
It’s hair feels silky and real. I think
this cat
is the only
thing that feels
real right now;
everything else
feels like a nightmare but this is too real to be a dream.
The man says to follow him.
Reflection
Looking back on
that day, feelings
of dread come
to
mind. I was eleven
years old, still very much a
kid. I was
very scared and
alone. I didn’t
know what was
going to
happen and if
someone had told
me what I
would be
enduring for the
next eighteen years,
I would never
have
believed them. I had
no idea what was going to happen to
me. What this man
had in mind for me was
like a foreign
language. I had never
been subjected to any form of sexual
abuse before, hadn’t ever heard the words either. My only
reference to sex was what I
had seen on TV or movies and
then acted out when playing Barbies, which would be in the
form of Barbie and Ken laying in the bed together side by
side. That is
what I
thought “sex” was. I
know—silly, right?
But that is the truth. My aunt Tina says that I asked her once
how babies were made and she explained it to me. I do not
remember asking her
this question and I don’t
remember
her answer to me. Even if I
had understood or remembered
what she told me,
it still would not have prepared
me for
what Phillip did
to me. No
amount of preparation
could
have helped me
understand why another
human being
would do what he did
to another human being, a little
girl,
for that matter. I
still don’t get it.
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন