I held my breath.
No one understood why.
I was twelve when my mom asked me a question that caught me so off guard; all I could do was hold my breath and lie. I wanted to tell her, I wanted to explain everything and just take a breath for once. But I couldn’t trust anyone.
Instead I wrote down the things that I couldn’t say. I wrote things that I didn’t understand on scraps of paper I found around the house. Each scrap allowed me to sip in just a little air, to exhale just a small sliver of breath. Once the thoughts were out, I would crush the paper, tear it into even smaller bits and hope that with the paper, the thought would disappear too. The emotion that I couldn’t comprehend would escape me instead of sitting in my throat, slowly suffocating me. It never worked for more than a few seconds, minutes, a day if I were lucky.
* * *
I was sixteen, crush after crush confirmed what I knew to be true, and I still couldn’t tell anyone. I was still the same. Still silent. Still holding my breath. Still fumbling around in the sea of darkness I now called home. Now I built forts in my mind, finding that they could always stay up there, I didn’t have to move them around like I did in reality. We moved a lot, but I could always keep up my imaginary forts. My mind was a safe haven now, somewhere no one else could get into. I could call it my own.
My mom still asked me how my day was every day.
I still always responded with fine.
No one understood why.
I was twelve when my mom asked me a question that caught me so off guard; all I could do was hold my breath and lie. I wanted to tell her, I wanted to explain everything and just take a breath for once. But I couldn’t trust anyone.
Instead I wrote down the things that I couldn’t say. I wrote things that I didn’t understand on scraps of paper I found around the house. Each scrap allowed me to sip in just a little air, to exhale just a small sliver of breath. Once the thoughts were out, I would crush the paper, tear it into even smaller bits and hope that with the paper, the thought would disappear too. The emotion that I couldn’t comprehend would escape me instead of sitting in my throat, slowly suffocating me. It never worked for more than a few seconds, minutes, a day if I were lucky.
* * *
I was sixteen, crush after crush confirmed what I knew to be true, and I still couldn’t tell anyone. I was still the same. Still silent. Still holding my breath. Still fumbling around in the sea of darkness I now called home. Now I built forts in my mind, finding that they could always stay up there, I didn’t have to move them around like I did in reality. We moved a lot, but I could always keep up my imaginary forts. My mind was a safe haven now, somewhere no one else could get into. I could call it my own.
My mom still asked me how my day was every day.
I still always responded with fine.
