The Girl You Were, The Woman You Are

You are four years old, and you are made of light.

This is your belief. That you are transparent. that your heart, lungs, and the tiny birdcage of your ribs would all be visible if you were held up to the sun. You're that vibrant. unwritten.

In the morning, your mother braids your hair. She has delicate hands. She hums something wordless as you sit between her knees, and you suppose that this is what safety sounds like. A faint vibration. An empty song. 

You love the weight of water in the bathtub, how it holds you. The way your father lifts you onto his shoulders, and you are taller than the world. The taste of strawberries, how the seeds stick in your teeth. The feeling of grass under your bare feet, each blade a tiny, harmless green knife.

You are learning your body. What it is capable of. How to run without tripping. How to climb without falling. How to spin until the world blurs and you collapse, laughing into the dizziness. Your body is a good place to live. You don't know yet that this can change. 

There is a moment. There is always a moment.

You are six, maybe seven. The light is different now. Thicker. It doesn't pass through you anymore. It stops at your skin. You are in a room that you know. The walls are the same. The carpet is the same. But something has shifted. The air has teeth. 

Your father's hands.

(You will spend years trying to find other words for this. Trying to make it make sense. But there are no other words. Just: your father's hands.)

You leave.

Not the room. You can't leave the room. But you leave your body. You discover you can do this. That you are not trapped inside your skin after all. You float up to the ceiling. You count the tiles. One two three four five. You make patterns. You find shapes in the texture. A bird. A cloud. A face that isn't yours.

Below you is a small girl. She is very still. She has learned stillness the way other children learn to read. Quickly. Out of necessity.

You watch her, and you think that's not me. And it isn't. Not anymore.

Time does something strange. It folds. It skips. You are there for hours or maybe minutes. You can't tell. The girl below you is breathing. You can see her chest rise and fall. So, she must be alive. You must be alive. When it's over, and it is over, eventually, everything ends, you come back down. You slip back into your skin like pulling on a coat that doesn't fit right anymore. Too tight in some places. Too loose in others.

You don't cry. You don't know why you don't cry. Your father says something. You don't hear it. There is static where his voice should be. You go to the bathroom. You wash your hands. The water is cold. You watch it run over your fingers, and you think these are my hands. You have to remind yourself. You have to check.

In the mirror, your face. Still yours. Still the same.

You don't understand what happened. You are seven years old and you don't have words for this. You don't have a framework. You only know that something has changed. That the world has a trapdoor and you fell through it.

You think: Maybe I imagined it.

You think: Maybe it wasn't real.

You think: Maybe I did something wrong.

You don't think: This is abuse.

You won't think that for eight more years.

Maeve is twenty-four and she is standing in her kitchen.

The kettle is boiling. She is making tea. Earl Grey. Milk. No sugar. The same way she always makes it.

Her hands are shaking.

She doesn't know why they're shaking. She was fine a moment ago. She was drawing. A commission for a children's book. A rabbit in a garden. Something innocent. Something safe. Then, the smell of something. Soap, maybe. Or aftershave. Something ordinary that isn't ordinary at all.

And now she is seven years old and twenty-four at the same time. She grips the counter. The laminate is cool under her palms. She focuses on this. The temperature. The texture. The realness of it. You are here; she tells herself. You are in your apartment. You are twenty-four. You are safe.

But the child doesn't believe her. The child is still counting ceiling tiles. Still floating. Still waiting for it to be over. Maeve has read all the books. She knows about trauma. She knows about dissociation, about the way the body keeps the score, about implicit memory and triggers and the fucking polyvagal theory. She can explain it all with clinical precision.

But knowing doesn't stop it from happening.

The kettle screams.

She turns it off. Pours the water. Watches the tea bag float in the cup, dark tendrils spreading like ink, like blood, like something spilt that can't be cleaned up. She takes the mug to the couch. Sits. Doesn't drink. 

Outside, it's raining. October rain. The kind that doesn't stop. She thinks about calling Olivia. But what would she say? I smelled something and now I'm seven years old again and I can't remember how to be a person.

Olivia would understand. Olivia always understands.

But Maeve is tired of needing to be understood.

She pulls her knees to her chest. Makes herself small. The child's posture. She doesn't mean to do this. Her body just remembers. On the coffee table, her phone buzzes. A text from her mother: Thinking of you, sweetheart. Love you.

Maeve stares at it.

Her mother is thinking of her. Her mother loves her. Her mother has no idea. Maeve types: Love you too. She sends it.

She is exceptionally good at this. Being the daughter that her mother thinks she is. At performing normality. At holding two truths at once: the truth her family knows and the truth that lives in her body. The tea goes cold in her hands.

She is four years old and made of light.

She is seven years old and learning to leave her body.

She is twenty-four years old, and she is still learning how to come back.