Leonard Cohen traveled light. I didn't

This trip

I’m trying to move toward the most difficult moment of my life in these pages, with these words. It might kill me, but I have to try. I need to figure out how it happened, why it happened, and how in hell I managed to survive. Because I should have died. It should have killed me or I should have killed myself. 

Years ago, many years ago.

I had no idea how the body, how my body, worked. I mean, I had a body but nobody had told me what to do with it and most of all what not to do with it. I only lived inside it and kept it separate from the brain people knew I had. I do recall that a girl could get in trouble if she held hands with a boy while she had her period.

The brain shut down when the body talked. I thought the body was unattractive, so if someone thought differently, I was at his mercy. I hate myself for that. I was a girl, not a woman, but I wasn’t thinking about that. Nobody had told me anything.

No date.

Somehow ‘it’ happened. Yes, just ‘it’. Then the worrying began. Sadly (for me) the worrying was nobody’s business but my own, because after all I was the girl. When I tried to explain ‘it’, he ignored me. Like it had nothing to do with him. Yeah, it was just my business. I knew that. Yet it had taken two of us. So there I was, stuck in a body, with a body, that I didn’t want, that I hated. Looking back, at a few photos, I was actually pretty. Thin, with nice eyes and perfect nose, hair not too bad either. None of this was in my head then. I just felt grateful when somebody paid attention to me, felt pretty and wanted. When the attention waned, I just had to suck it up as they say. I knew I wasn’t good enough, not pretty enough, to deserve anything better.

A month later.

I was sure there was a problem and I was still thinking it wasn’t just my business, but Catholicism was his excuse. My business. My problem. He had nothing to offer. I wanted to go far away. Seeing him hurt. Hearing him say nothing hurt even more. Words no longer existed. I tried super hard to get by on denial, to hope I hadn’t been a bad girl. Or so dumb.

Two months later.

This is bad. I want out. I want it out. I am afraid and the silence is becoming deadly. I must try to fix this. First, I will keep starving myself so I won’t gain weight. Maybe that will kill it, too. I am so, so, so miserable. 

Two months and a week or two later.

I have found the rim of our old claw foot bathtub. I hang my abdomen over it and bounce, several times a day. It helps. My stomach is flatter. Plus I don’t eat much. I will kill this even if I die in the attempt. 

I also have heard of clothes hangers and luckily we have lots. Metal, bendable, said to work. I will try that, along with the bathtub rim. One of the two methods has to work, has to be fatal. One or both of us must die.

A month or so later.

Nothing works. I hate myself, my body, my brain. This stupid thing moved and I hated it. Silence devours every thought and yet somehow I have school and a senior prom. Oh God, a stupid prom or ball. My dress is pink brocade on top and raspberry velvet below. Handmade. Perfect. Concealing. Yet I am garbage. I don’t deserve it. Silence smothers me, but he takes me to the dumb dance and acts like it’s all right. I hate him, my body, my stupid brain, the dress. I want to die forever and wake up somewhere else. I want to travel far, far away and live with nomads who don’t know me, who ignore me. Wear flowing robes and not speak a word of their language.

Two months later.

I give up. No more gowns or starvation or coat hangers. I am dead all over except in one spot. Why do I still get up in the morning? I am not going to school.

Two months later.

Freedom. I saw the idiot once. They must have called him and he showed up for half an hour. We went down the hall and looked through the glass. I tried to make him talk, but he said nothing. My mistake? Not hating him then and there. I hurt everywhere, but especially inside my head.

Years later.

I tried to love him, but he wasn’t mine and he was a demon. He must have known he wasn’t wanted, that he was hated because the coat hanger had failed. He knew and needed to punish the world. He was despicable. I wanted him dead more than ever, but was unable to do anything. I am not a murderer. I have to move far away, go to some exotic place, dye my hair, learn a trade. Run.

More years later.

He tried to claim me once with false words, but I refused. I despised him. He was nothing to me. He was already a candidate for a lifetime in prison. If I could plan the perfect crime, the perfect murder, I would definitely kill him. He doesn’t deserve to live. Neither do I, but I am not capable of committing suicide. I wasn’t able to commit murder, either, but every day I hope he’ll overdose on drugs or get mangled in a car accident driving drunk.

More years later.

Still thinking about the perfect crime. All the mystery and thriller novels I’ve read have not helped me find a way to carry it out. Living in the desert with nomads still sounds appealing. Maybe then I could forget how he reached out a hand while we sat in a booth in the diner and my skin turned frosty, like I hade frozen scales all over me, had a body with bones made of off-white ice. I looked right through him and still saw his dead eyes. The ice and frost immediately turned to stone and I just said I wasn’t the one to ask. It hadn’t been my story to tell. It was long buried. I’d been serving my sentence for years. Condemned to silence. Damned by Jonathan Edwards and his sinners and the ability to disassociate. Do not touch me. I will explode.

More years later.

I’ve traveled a lot, actually. It has felt good. Other countries, continents, languages, identities. No nomads, but still... I am afraid he might come after me because of that stupid conversation years ago in a diner. What would I do?

I need to travel really far away, to where nobody knows me. Nobody. To where I will have no body. This one is no longer young. I’ve tried to take care of it but not out of vanity. What I never knew was pretty back then definitely isn’t now, anyway. I wish the nightmares would stop. The brain never learned how to control them, so they’ll probably be with me until the end.

Last entry.

I live alone. Last night, around 11 p.m., I heard a noise at the door. I hadn’t locked it yet for the evening. Suddenly I could tell there was a face peering in the window beside it. Hard to see anything more, no features, because the porch light wasn’t on and only the street light faintly lit a form. The intruder started to open the door and I froze before remembering there was a small pistol on a high shelf in the next room. I heard a stranger’s voice ask ‘Where are you?’, grabbed the weapon I’d never wanted to use, and just fired. Out of fear. What else could I do? What would anybody do? I was terrified.

I hit him somewhere, maybe chest, maybe head, but it was a surprisingly good shot. More than that, I killed him. I don’t think that had been my intention, and obviously when I saw the blood I called the police. When they came and had done what they needed to do with questions and photos, I relaxed a little. When they began to remove the body, my own arms and legs and heart went slack. I said nothing, as usual, but did have to fight to keep a smile off my face. Dead. At last. Without the coat hanger.