Broken Girl(9)

I felt like I was hit by a truck. Not only did I pull off the nonstop suck-n-f*ckfest down at the Square, but then I went straight to my evening pavement. Tonight I upped my prices and pulled in a couple foreigners; they paid big bucks to watch me masturbate. Whatever turns you on and pays my bills. My entire take was fifteen hundred bucks. I had one condom left when I called it a night and it wasn’t the Magnum; like I said, hit by a truck.

After my shower, I got ready for bed while I watched the time tumble past five thirty in the morning. It was a quarter to six and I was wide awake. Sure my body was exhausted, the tequila and pot were wearing thin in my blood but my mind wouldn’t shut off. This was the time when childhood memories would come at me with a vengeance; I had no way of containing the dusty clouds of delusion. Keeping my heart on lockdown only produced a selfless, cold-hearted bitch who believed if she didn’t invest, she wouldn’t lose. Preservation was my only friend. The problem with that was when I was exhausted and the haunting memories boiled to the surface to punish me, there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop them. Like the imprisoned child I was, these were the nights that shattered me.



‘You’re making me do this my little Rosalie. You give me this sickness, you see, you keep causin’ all of this in my body.’ He grabs his sickness. His eyes are dark, his fingernails are sharp.

Pain.

Searing pain.

Tears roll down past my temples, tangling in my hair.

Tangles.

I’m cold.



I’m in my bedroom alone. All alone, a moment seared into my soul, another vision, feeling, my body purging my past.

I get out of my bed and pace back and forth across my room.

“I can’t keep it in any longer,” I yell at myself in the mirror. I’ve done my best to hold it in for three long years. I never told a soul. I’m being eaten from the inside out.

My stomach twists at the thought of telling anyone. I can’t. But I need to.

‘Rosalie, you think by holding in your secret for three short years, anyone is going to care? Wake up girl, nobody cares.’ The voice in my head pipes up and betrays me.

“My stomach hurts, I can’t stop the truth from bubbling out. I have to tell someone,” I holler out loud.

I need the voice to understand.

It’s me, it’s me that needs to find a way to stop feeling so yucky so dirty for what happened.

‘Then what? What do you think anyone’s going to do with that information? It’s too late to do anything. Keep it in your soul. No matter what. Trust me,’ the voice in my head snaps.

“I won’t. I’m twelve now and I’m stronger! I have to tell someone. I have to get the poison out of my mind. I can’t take it anymore.”

‘Rosalie, nobody can know about my sickness. You understand? You are the only one who knows. It’s our little secret.’ His words sear across my mind.

“I don’t wanna die.”

‘You won’t if you keep this just between you and me.’

The traffic in my head is too much. Memories—words—voices it’s all too much.

‘Three whole years later? What’s going to happen? Nothing, that’s what. Get over yourself; people get hurt. You suck it up and move the f*ck on, little girl.’

Cracking in half, everything draining from my soul.

‘Our secret.’



Torn . . .

Apart . . .

In Seconds . . .



I rubbed my eyes, hoping the harder I pressed my fists into my sockets the horrid visions in my head would stop. Fuck, I didn’t need this tonight. It had been six months since my last episode. Six months of freedom from the nightmares. The repulsive feeling curdled my stomach, my heart was in a race it couldn’t seem to win, no matter how fast it was beating. My memories created a desert in my throat that day. It shattered the peace I’d tried to embrace in my adulthood. A hope with a sliver of peace only available to little girls who had found their voices as adults.

I was the little girl who sweated out the poisonous recollections from her flesh night after night. Tonight, the memories drenched my skin, dampening my clothes. The only physical shift I could manage was rocking back and forth. I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapped my arms around my legs and surrendered to the fact that the act of one monster, one hour, of one day, eleven years ago, destroyed a lifetime I was entitled to have.

Pushing myself, I got up and walked around. I figured if I changed my physical place in the world, maybe it would change my reaction to it. I couldn’t pinpoint why my body betrayed me or my mind f*cked with me so hard, other than pure exhaustion. I didn’t want to be that little broken girl anymore. I didn’t want to own the ache that scarred more than my physical body anymore. I just wanted to pick up my life from the point where I shackled my heart in iron locks with steel chains. I wanted to pull out the weeds of hate that were buried deep. Weeds that sprang from the collateral damage of a childhood tainted by a despicable f*ck who chose to capture my innocence and hold it for ransom my entire life.

“Ro? You okay?” Sybil whispered shifting to look at me from her bed.

“I just couldn’t sleep,” I answered. The problem of sharing a studio apartment with someone, was that our beds were merely steps away from each other, only separated by an open space we conveniently called the living room.