Like Gravity(3)

The biggest difference between us, though, isn’t detectable if you look only skin deep. Because below the surface, where no one can see, something is broken inside me. Or maybe not broken, but definitely missing.

Hell, maybe I never possessed it at all.

Because its indisputable that Lexi is warm, glowing and vivacious; her eyes dance with that indelible spark of life. Instead, I am cold; empty of that inner glow and utterly unable to make my emerald eyes appear anything but lifeless and guarded. Comparing Lexi to myself was like comparing the sun to the moon: her, a warm life-producing star around which everyone orbits, and me, a solitary, barren moon, brightened only by others’ reflected light and riddled with craters.

With a sigh of resignation, I pulled back from the spiral of depressive thoughts I swirled into whenever I compared myself to Lexi. She’d been best my friend – my only friend – from age eight on. We’d even applied to college together and, after a miserable freshman year of on-campus housing and randomly assigned roommates, we were about to be sophomores with our very own hole-in-the-wall apartment.

Our two bedroom, double bath suite took up the entire second floor of an ancient, dilapidated Victorian-style home, which had been roughly chopped up to accommodate student renters. Yes, it was a dump, and yes, the hot water rarely worked properly; but it was ours, and the rent was only $450 a month – far more affordable than some of the swankier new properties littering the student housing neighborhood.

The downstairs neighbors kept to themselves; we’d yet to meet them, and we’d moved in a month ago. Conveniently, we didn’t have to cut through their apartment to reach the stairs, as our landlord had constructed a rickety, steep outdoor stairway, leading up to our second floor balcony. Cobbled together with plywood, it probably wasn’t the safest entryway, but it served its purpose.

State universities generally draw in all types – jocks, preps, nerds, princesses. With nearly 20,000 undergrad on campus, I’m sure some people felt lost, overwhelmed by the crush of academia. Where others may have felt alone, I reveled in the anonymity. Here, I had no past. No one knew my story. If I felt the urge to vanish into the crowd, faceless and disconnected, no one would even glance up from their own lives long enough to notice. It was the exact opposite of my high school experience, and it was everything I had hoped for when I’d applied.

Crawling down to the foot of my bed, I pushed open the window to let some of the humid Virginia air creep in. The late August night was dark and quiet; the bars had let out hours ago and no one loitered on the street. Most people would be getting up early tomorrow, eager to start the new semester. After about a week of attending every class and taking copious notes, what I called the “good student syndrome” would quickly wear off most undergrads. The end of early-semester diligence generally marked the launch of party season and, consequently, the end of quiet nights on my bar-riddled street.

Taking advantage of the undisturbed night, I scooted slowly off the foot of my bed and out onto the slate roof stretching directly below my open window. The rooftop was nearly flat, wide enough for me to lie with my – albeit short –legs fully extended. Technically, it served to shelter the wraparound porch below from the unrelenting Virginia elements, but in my mind, the roof was created especially for me. It was my special spot, my private nook – the one place where I could block out the rest of the world and feel safe.

Safe.

I guess it shouldn't seem like such an unattainable state. I’m sure it isn’t for normal people. But I had accepted long ago that I was not, nor would I ever be, a normal girl. After the incident fourteen years ago, I’d been taken into state custody until my biological father could be notified. My mother had never wanted anything to do with him and, as he was long gone by the time she’d discovered she was carrying me, she’d never tracked him down. I spent the first six years of life believing that it would always be just the two of us – that we didn’t need a man to make us a family. And in the years after, I’d started to believe that I didn’t need a family at all.

Since she’d never informed him of his fatherly duties, after my mother’s death there was some confusion about what to do with me. It took Child Protective Services nearly six months to find the man whose name was listed on my birth certificate. The delay, apparently due to his extended business trip to Beijing, left me stranded for months without a guardian. So, as my mother had no living relatives, I was placed into a group foster home until my father could be bothered to collect me.

Most of my memories from that time are inaccessible to me. I’m not sure whether I forcibly blocked them out or involuntarily repressed them, but whatever the case, that time in my life remains a blur.

Some images are clearer than others; I can almost still hear the sympathetic voices of the social workers and doctors as they explained to me that life as I knew it was over. The all-consuming despair I’d felt at the loss of my mother had never really gone away.

After the incident, I know I didn’t speak to anyone for several months. The foster mother I’d been placed with made sure that I ate and dressed each day. A psychologist stopped by several times each week to chart my progress in her small state-issued notebook, assuring me that everything would be okay. But really, what else could she say?

Nothing was okay. I was a six year old ward of the state who’d witnessed the violent murder of the only source of love I’d ever known. I would never be “okay” again, despite the shrink’s reassurances.