***Trigger Warning – contains potentially distressing material pertaining to sexual assault
The Day After A Long Night
The very next morning when I woke up in the kind woman’s apartment, I could smell breakfast. The kind woman had made pancakes, sausages, toast, and some type of mushy stuff. I just ate pancakes, and I remember thinking that they were not as good as my dad’s, but I was hungry. I do not even remember eating the day before.
At the time I had awakened, it was apparently near noon. The kind woman said that I must have been exhausted because she had called me to awaken several times, but I was “dead to the world” in sleep. So she decided to let me sleep. She figured that I had to have been exhausted from the long walk, and as I recall, it was a long walk.
After breakfast, I helped the kind woman clean up, and then I prepared for the day. Some time afterward my preparation for the day, the neighbor from across the hall where my aunt lived came to pick me up. While I got my things together, she and the kind woman had conversation but in seemingly hushed tones. I pretended to watch television while trying to eavesdrop, but the only thing that I could make out of the conversation was that my aunt needed a break from me and had chosen to spend the day away.
So, the neighbor across the hall had opted to spend time with me. I remember thinking that I was just being passed off, and I felt a little reluctant to share my energy with the neighbor. I really wanted to go to my aunt’s apartment, but even better, I wanted to go home.
Afterthoughts
When I think about that time frame in my life, those women that surrounded my aunt and me at that time were very supportive of me and her. They gave a lot of their time to both of us despite their own families and responsibilities. The women were my aunt’s friends although I sometimes thought that they were more friends to her than she was to them.
When I think about how the women shrouded my aunt with their compliments and fawned over her any time she had some type of drama in her life, I realize now that they were nothing more than flying monkeys and enablers. They enabled my aunt’s behavior, and although she may have been very ill with cancer, my aunt was often not a nice person even to these women. They seemed to take a lot from her, and they seemed to do so willingly.
Some of the women, like the woman on the third floor, attempted to be the voices of reason. Yet, other women, like the woman across the hall, trusted everything my aunt said about almost anything. In many ways, the women all enabled my aunt’s behaviors especially when she spoke against me. Specifically, to my face, the women attempted to show me they cared about me all while trashing me behind my back when they were with my aunt.
If my aunt had nothing nice to say about me, then these women had nothing nice to say about me either. The only woman who never took my aunt’s side was the kind woman, and it was my aunt that seemed to lash out against the kind woman the most. The kind woman had protected me in a multitude of ways when the other women – including my aunt – had not protected me. The kind woman seemingly went against the grain. She did what my aunt did not want her to do.
In fact, if it were not for the kind woman calling the police to report the sexual assault against me, I doubt that the police would have ever been involved at all, that my aunt would have had to go to court, and that the attackers would have faced whatever punishment that might have received as a result of having to go to court as well. In fact, I would have lacked any care whatsoever since my aunt, mother, and grandmother were more than willing to keep the assault from ever coming to the light of day again.
An Untrained Therapist
Nevertheless, however, when the neighbor who lived across the hall from my aunt’s apartment decided to spend some time with me, I remember us going for a long walk along the same route that I had walked when I was running away. I do not remember particularly where we were going, but the entire walk was a way for her to provide me with what she believed was much needed therapy.
The neighbor from across the hall had attempted in her desperation to tap into my brain in an effort to understand my thoughts and feelings. Because I did not know this woman in an intimate way, I remember being somewhat obstinate to her methods of trying to gain intimacy with me. I could feel myself standing up on the inside of myself in retaliation against her attempts to talk about something that my mind refused to engage with me.
I remember the neighbor from across the hall relating her own personal stories about challenges, but I simply could not connect with her. There was a blockage of sorts within me that would not allow for her to penetrate through to me. I looked at her smile and perceived her to be friendly enough, but I simply could not trust her.
Although I believe she did try to reach me via her hugs and hand holds that I snatched away from because I did not want to be touched, she was more or less an untrained therapist. I could only view her as my aunt’s neighbor and friend. Plus, she had obviously said some unsavory things about me which her daughter always seemed to express to me at any moment’s notice. So, I was not very trusting of this woman. In my eyes, it was too late for her to turn back to being a person she never really was to me in the beginning.
Too Late To Turn Back
After what seemed like an awkward time with the neighbor from across the hall, I was back at my aunt’s apartment. From the looks of things and the behavior of my aunt, it was obviously too late to turn back with her too. Things between my aunt and I were never to be the same again. Too much had occurred between us, and there was a rift that I had no power to mend.
For a few days, my aunt gave me the silent treatment and only spoke to me when she felt it was absolutely necessary. I remember having to practically fend for myself when it came to food preparation and simple things like asking her questions. For me, it was hurtful because I was forced into isolation from her. Whenever I did try to speak to her, she stonewalled me – would not answer me, acted as if she did not hear me, and pretended that I was invisible.
Instead of communicating with me, my aunt communicated in baby talk with her child as if she were addressing me like I was not even there. After a few days of this, I sank into a mist of darkness within myself and simply tried to make do. I remember crying profusely into my pillow into the nights while silently praying for a way back home.
My aunt also launched a smear campaign against me that was no longer as silent as it had been when she gossiped about me but was more vocal in my presence. For instance, she made fun of me to her neighbor-friends about my mannerisms. She talked to them about me even though I was present and could hear her every word. She also called upon the children of her other friends to run errands for her as if to triangulate me against those children to make me jealous and blot me out of the picture of her life.
After a few days of this behavior from my aunt, a sudden change in her attitude towards me occurred, and that is when I learned that a social worker was coming to the apartment as a follow-up to my running away. My aunt told me to keep quiet and not to answer any questions, but as I recalled, I really had no choice but to be honest about what had occurred that led up to my running away.
I simply told the social worker the truth – that I ran away so I would no longer be a burden to my aunt. I explained that I knew my aunt had cancer and was very ill, and I just wanted the trouble I had caused her to end. For a moment, I remember there being silence. I think that my aunt and the social worker were both dumbfounded by my response. I additionally explained that my behavior was not a reflection of my aunt’s actions as a mother because I was not her child. I just wanted to go home.
By the end of that social worker’s visit, there was clarity that although the summer season was not over, my time with my aunt was coming to an end. The events that had already transpired during the summer had wreaked havoc in such a severe way that I had no idea of the trouble and damage that was to come. Yet, I was ready to leave, and this readiness had resonated with my aunt because she agreed with me.
Although I was stung by my aunt’s admission that she was ready for me to leave too, I was deeply saddened by the sigh that seemed to leave her body at the thought of my departure. Despite my sadness, however, I quickly thought about how ready I was to return home – a place that I knew was safe even though there was such chaotic dysfunction.
I just knew that I wanted to be in my normal chaotic environment around people whose behaviors I had learned to predict with ease. I was tired of walking on eggshells in a strange place – a place that had not welcomed me but violently ripped me apart and tossed me into a traumatic version of a life that I was unable to withstand without dissociating from it. I wanted to leave that land, and I welcomed returning back to a land that I knew and a land that knew me.
I wanted to go home. I was ready to go home. I even missed my narcissistic mother, and that for me was a major thing even then. I was ready to be back in my own territory, my own bed, my own daily routine, and my own solace. I was tired of navigating the streets of a huge city on my own. I had learned enough of its history to last me a lifetime, and I had not liked it enough to want to continue to stay.
My heart and spirit had been scarred and wounded in this city because of the sexual assault, and my aunt simply did not know how to help me to navigate through the pain. She did not understand that I was an angry child as a result of posttraumatic stress and that I was living in a constant state of fright and flight. In addition, she was living through her own struggles, and her own struggles were so overwhelming to her that she could not see my struggles. Her time with me was only increasing the speed of her death date, but at that point, it was too late for me or her to turn back.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 