Bloody trigger in the woods
Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 8:54PM 
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ENTRY IS BLOODY AND UNSETTLING. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK OF BEING GROSSED OUT.
I have been blocking my blood for the last 6 years. By blood I mean blood between my legs, menstrual blood. I always hated it for a reason I didn't understand, so first I got pregnant with my son, then I breastfed him, and then as soon as I could, I got on a Depo Provera shot that eliminated my period for the next 5 years. 5 years is the maximum amount of time you can stay on this drug. I loved every minute of it, until, by the twist of fate, I had to stop in November, the month that I visited Russia and saw my father, 1 month before I remembered that I was sexually abused and that it was him who did it. Since then it took my body several months to get into a normal rhythm. I had my first period last month, but it was barely spotting. This last week, however, I got one for real. One when I stood up and felt as if my guts spilled out, as if I've lost half my weight with every step. One day it was particularly heavy, that one day was when I got FROZEN - but I didn't get why until the next day I connected it to the fear of being alone in the restroom, of looking at my legs, of seeing the blood, of feeling dirty, hurt, and ashamed of myself. I still didn't fully get it until I went to therapy yesterday evening.
On my way to therapy, my feet got cold and my palms sweaty. I have't gotten this feeling in a while now, since March. My panic attacks have seized to almost none since then, and I felt I got over most of my memories. The closer to therapy I got, the more panicked I became. I kept seeing images of blood in my mind, and in therapy, while drawing the blood on the tiles of the restroom floor, I got into another panic attack. I remembered my panties - I haven't remembered any of my underwear from my entire childhood, not a single pair. I remembered it so clearly, as if I held it in my hands yesterday. They were bloody. I was 5. Then I remembered being taken to the ll-week daycare on the train by my father, him dragging me into the woods, and raping me there. Then dragging me to the daycare and leaving me there. I thought I wasn't going to be able to make it home after that session, I felt degraded, shaken, and devastated. I forgot how much I wanted to remember the first time he did it - this was the first time. In the woods. I thought it was on the train - but it was a prelude - the real thing happened in there.
I went home, numb. I didn't believe my own body. I thought, I made this whole thing up. This is all bullshit. This couldn't have happened to me. How do you do such a thing to a child? How do you??? Yet the more I thought about it, the more it downed on me that everything in my behavior prior to me remembering makes sense, and is true - the avoiding of the blood, the fear of the woods, the shaving of the pubic hair for years and years (stuck being a little girl), the avoidance of sex in the bedroom and a strange attraction to the woods, my constant attempts to ask my husband to go try it there, yet when we would get there, me doing everything mechanically and him being grossed out at my behavior. All of this made sense. Still I wasn't convinced. This must have been the hardest thing for me to repress, and now it is the hardest to accept.
Tonight I was biking home, and as I stood on the red light, I looked up at it, and suddenly I connected it with a scene in my novel, the scene about the main character and the little self of that character, from the past, leading her into the woods to show her what happened to her. The second I made that connection, I nearly fainted right there, on the red light, among cars, on the bike. It is true, it happened there, and my body has been trying to tell me for so many years. I want to go there, to those woods, to see them, to step into that spot, to mourn my virginity - to bury my pain. Here is that scene from my novel:
Somebody pulled at my sweatshirt. The little girl from the bus, the one that drowned, stood behind me. I gasped in surprise, I was so used to hearing others before their touch.
“Catch me?” She smiled from one of her blonde pigtail to the other.
“Aren’t you supposed to be...”
“Dead? Not yet. Can you catch me first?” Her voice rang clear through the surrounding silence. I hesitated. She scrunched my sweatshirt into her little first and pulled again.
“If you catch me, I’ll be safe!”
“Safe from what?” I probed the ground with my right foot, and she ran.
She stopped a few yards into the thicket of the forest and beckoned me. I looked at Paul. He lay peacefully on his side, as if asleep. I heard a crack of a branch from the impatient stomping of the little girl’s feet and turned to look at them. She wore small red flats, a miniature replica of my mother’s shoes – only shiny and new. Mother? I swayed towards her, my feet and hands tingling. It was so easy. Maybe this was the way out, just to leave it all and run to her, play catch and forget about who I was, be a little girl again. And I ran.
Sirens move fast in the water, any travel on foot is painfully slow. I had no weight, it left me. Trees bounced apart to let me through, grass played ball with my feet – catch and release, catch and release. The girl’s red flats fluttered brightly in the purple dusk, colored by the evening sun. I didn’t notice how the day suddenly grew old, but now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except playing catch.
“You’re too slow!” The girl poked her freckled face from behind a pine trunk.
“I can’t keep up with you...” My lungs burned, I longed to cool off in the water and breathe with my gills.
“You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me!” She ran out of my earshot, and I stumbled forward, afraid to lose her.
Trees darkened into a whispering mass, sky obscured by thick canopies. I stopped. Familiar fear rose through my spine and shuffled every single hair on my scalp. I didn’t want to go there, I didn’t want to play catch anymore. Her hand appeared out of nowhere, bitten off fingernails dug into my white skin.
“Why didn’t you catch me? I’m not safe now.” She hung her head, hugged by lonely pigtails on each side.
“Are you… mother?” I took a step back.
The little girl stretched her lips into a grin.
“Nope, but close enough. Now I have to show you something.” She grabbed my wrist and yanked me deeper into the forest. My heart shriveled, but my legs moved, dragged down the corridor formed by tall cedar trees. And then they parted into a round clearing. The girl pushed me towards the middle. I staggered.
In the middle of the clearing stood a twin size bed.
Its curved laminated head and foot boards ended in four turned knobs on each corner. Fake brown wood contrasted with snow-white sheets and feather pillows and lavender shadows from the dusk. I tried to speak, but my tongue glued to my lips from a dreadful anticipation. Something wasn’t right, what was a bed doing in the middle of the woods?
The girl darted to the bed with a shriek of delight and jumped on it. She bounced up and down until the feathers started floating up from the pillows, and her feet beat the sheets into a tangled mess. Her giggles echoed through the silent sky, and she extended her right arm towards me.
I walked up and tried to catch the girl unaware.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What’s yours?” She shot back in between jumps.
“Fishy.”
She made a pouty face. “That’s not a real name. What’s your real name?”
“Do you know it?”
She bobbed her head up and down enthusiastically, and motioned with her finger.
I leaned in to listen, but she slid to the ground and pulled the sheets with her. There, in the middle of the ashen mattress, puddles of blood formed letters, one by one. Ally White. Blood kept seeping out, from inside the mattress, until it turned into one dark scarlet puddle. The puddle grew larger and a familiar vibration overcame my senses. The sound of rippling water, my home, the lake.
My muscles bonded into one piece of stone. The little girl wiped tears from her cheeks.
“See, I’m not safe now.”
She climbed into the puddle. Blood immediately soaked through her cotton light-blue dress, drenched her pigtails, and seeped through the covers that pulled up from the ground.
“Will you tuck me in, please? Pretty pretty please, I’ll do anything please?” She stretched her lips into a practiced smile, and I retched up stale air from my empty stomach.
“Please?” She whispered.
I thought of warm summer water and sat down, pretending I’m on lake shore, in the sun, and the water is warm. I lifted the sheet and saw that the girl was chopped to pieces. Her head was separate from her torso, from her legs and arms. Yet she still smiled. I hugged her with the sheet and tried to gather all of her together into one. She kept sliding apart, slippery from… just warm water. Just think warm water.
The girl cried, and an urge overcame me, as I found one clean spot on the top of her head. I leaned in and kissed it, then I hugged her and cried.
I cried an hour.
I cried two.
I cried until I washed away all blood. I cried a lake. She was in my arms, and we swam away from the shore.
Reader Comments (2)
I cried with you.
Thank you...