I got to work late for the first time in a year and a half. Within that time, I had been coming to this grocery store diligently and working with a smile on my face. Customers wrote comment cards, saying that I was a sociable person and co-workers that I had never met knew my name.
“Nicole, why are you late?” My boss, Sue, came up to me, staring directly into my eyes.
“I called…” I was hesitant with my words as little things tended to set her off.
“That doesn’t matter. Where were you?” She asked harshly.
“I was at Emergency.” I glanced down at my leg, and quickly back up to her face.
“Why were you there?”
“I had to get stitches in my leg about a week ago, and they split apart so I had to get them redone.”
“What did you do now?” She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side.
“I slipped… on some ice… landed on a piece of metal.” I said, twisting my ring around my finger.
“That does not justify my line ups.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Sorry? You’re sorry! Sorry doesn’t cut it young lady. Now, go to your cash.” She turned her heel and walked away toward the courtesy desk, not even glancing back. I walked toward cash one, the punishment cash.
My first customer asked me what the conversation was about. She was a regular shopper and I was used to seeing her around the same time every week. I explained to her what had just happened.
“Can you suspend this order for me? I have something that I need to quickly attend to.”
“Okay…” I started the next customer’s order, watching where the woman was going.
She picked up her purse, and the next thing I knew she and Sue were having a heated conversation. I raised my fingers slowly to my forehead, trying to massage away the headache that I could feel coming on.
After my shift, Sue pulled me aside once again.
“What the hell do you think you are doing? Telling customers about our personal business. I am so disgusted with your professionalism right now!” The hands went back onto the hips.
“She asked so I told her. You have always said to tell customers what they want to know.”
She turned around and walked away once again, but this time out of the store. I was left standing there, with three minutes left of my shift. I swiped out early and walked upstairs to change out of my work uniform. Suddenly I collapsed. I don’t know what happened. My head began spin and I felt like I was being pushed back in time. F L A S H.
When I got out to the car, both my parents were there. I found this rather unusual, as my mother usually put the onus on my dad to pick me up.
“Hi honey! How was work today?” My mom turned around to face me with a fake yet surprisingly welcoming smile on her face.
“It was all right.”
“Was Sue the Shrew there?”
“Yes…”
“Was she mean to you?”
“No mom. We didn’t talk.” My dad smiled at me in the review mirror and reached for my mother’s hand.
“We have a surprise for you…” My dad? A surprise? My dad never said much, and this was an especially rare occurrence.
“You know how we weren’t going to be able to make it to visit family over Christmas?” He asked.
“Yes…”
“Well, your mother and I both managed to get the time off, so we are going to head out tonight.”
“Right now?!”
“Yep, the suitcases are in the trunk!” He laughed happily.
“But that’s all the way in Ottawa!”
“It’s only four hours! We got you a coffee.” My mom handed a Tim Horton’s Cappuccino over to me and my father put the car into drive. Driving long distances with my parents has not been an enjoyable task since I was three. Back then, we sang Sharon, Lois and Bram the entire way, and I sat in the back mooing at cows as I saw them in the fields. Now, they sing to their drug addict seventies music, like Dr. Hook and the medicine band, and Pink Floyd, as I sit in the back and watch the milk slowly sink to the bottom of my coffee, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
“Where are we staying?” I asked as we neared highway 416. There was only about an hour left.
“Grandma’s house.” They responded in unison.
“But aren’t grandma and Mike in Florida for the winter?” I asked.
“We’re getting the key from Aunt Joan.” My mother responded. My Aunt Joan was my grandmother’s sister, who only ever talked about her seven proposals that she had before she gained about three hundred pounds after marrying my uncle.
I shook my head and pulled out my journal, which I kept in my bag at all times.
I don’t understand why my parents insist on putting me in this position. Maybe I should tell them what happened… if I did tell them, I wouldn’t have to be here right now. It would save me from all of these feelings that keep flooding back as I get closer and closer to Grandma’s home.
I can’t tell them. It would hurt them so much, and I don’t want to do that because they mean so much to me. I don’t want to see my mother cry; I don’t want to see my father’s thin lips. What else am I supposed to do? Just keep it all inside and act like nothing ever happened? What exactly happened? I still don’t know what to call it… I was so naďve at the time, I didn’t realise that things like that happened to people. I thought that it was just in the movies, that in reality shit like that never happened.
I feel my entire body tensing up right now, I feel the stress building inside me and I just want to let it escape. Crying doesn’t help. It never helps. I am numb and I need to feel something. I need to scream, I need to do something to relieve how I am feeling.
Last night I tried to figure things out. I sat on my bed; papers scattered in front of me, and decided that I wouldn’t put it off any longer. I needed to tell mom and dad exactly what had been going on. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
I don’t want to tell them. I want to put it all behind me, act like it never happened. With every passing day, that grows harder and harder. I cry myself to sleep at night for reasons that I’m not aware of and I am trying to deal with things in ways that aren’t normal; ways that I am not ready to admit to.
My parents don’t know anything. They don’t know that I am doing drugs, they don’t know I am drinking, they don’t know how I feel. They are under the impression that everything is perfect, that I am still their perfect teenager.
It’s hard to live up to. Being an only child, feeling like you can’t do anything wrong because of other people’s expectations. I want to live up to that, I want to seem okay, which I think is why I have always been so good at hiding things.
I have a list of excuses already thought up to explain suspicious injuries. Falling down the stairs, skiing accidents, cat scratches, slipping on ice. People buy these excuses because they perceive things to be the ways that I want them too perceive them. I have them believing that everything is all right and that I am just prone to accidents. It seems like a good story.
Now we are almost there, and I haven’t been there in almost two years. I haven’t been there since he did… that… this is going to be just a wonderful holiday.
Unfortunately, we had to walk through the garage to get inside the house. Yellowed insulation could be seen poking its way through the cracks and the cramped space was very damp. Hammers and saws hung on the walls, sometimes moving slightly from the force of the wind that came through the open garage door. In places nails had been hammered into the cement, making the rock crack from the centre out.
A workbench lined the far wall, covered with dusty boxes of decorative birds and flowers. Empty bottles of rum lay flat on the table while the full ones were hidden behind some expired Ontario license plates on the crowded shelves.
The air was thick with moisture and smelled of the wet, mouldy driftwood that was decaying in the corners. In one spot of the roof, a small crack had accidentally been made; causing a drip that could be heard if you listened carefully. I didn’t want to remember. My hands began to shake and I quickly stepped inside the front foyer. I stopped briefly to look around. The birdhouse that Mike had made stood in the front hallway and a musky odour enveloped me, bringing me back to the year before last, the last time I saw my Grandmother’s husband. I headed up the stairs, to the small spare bedroom.
I took the cushions off the pullout couch and leaned them up against the far wall. I reached for the handle to pull out the bed, but it wouldn’t move. I tried again, with more force and again and again, but nothing was happening. My mother poked her head in the room.
“Honey, I must have forgotten to tell you. That bed is broken so you are going to have to sleep in Mike’s room. I left some extra blankets on the bed.”
I nodded, picked up my suitcase, which my mother had packed for me and headed across the hall. It was now roughly three o’clock in the morning and I was exhausted. I picked up the phone to explain to my best friend where I was and…. No dial tone.
“Shit, she canceled the phone line.”
I was now completely isolated.
I am so scared right now. I am sitting on his bed, looking through his things. Something is so wrong, so unbelievably wrong. I want to cut right now and I can’t believe that I just told you that because I have never actually written that down before. I am so stupid… dealing with emotional things by hurting myself? How does that make sense?
“Quod Me Nutruit Me Destruit” – What nourishes me also destroys me. -
It seems like the room is shrinking, like it is locking me in here, forcing me to feel emotions that I don’t want to feel. Sometimes I get this feeling. – I don’t know what it is- when I feel lightheaded and dizzy and I feel numb all over, sometimes like I’m floating, sometimes like I’m sinking. The only thing that can break it is a scratch on a forearm, on a leg, on the stomach. It’s just something to release me, to let me feel again and I hate myself for doing it.
Finally getting this down on paper is going to be the end of me, especially if my parents read it. Than I would have do cry or die, or something to that extreme because I would definitely not be able to look at them again.
How am I supposed to sleep in here tonight? He touches me, abuses me, than I am forced to sleep in his bed. I put myself into this situation, it is all my fault. Everything always is.
I pulled open the drawer and lifted out a dusty black photo album. I blew on the front cover, and slowly opened it up. He stared at me from the front page, wearing an army uniform. Flip the page, a love letter from my grandmother, and a father’s day card from his daughter. I felt a stinging pain crawl up inside me and fester inside of my head.
I took my hand, scratched my nails hard against my stomach, felt nothing. At that point I knew that I should have brought something with me. Need to write something else…
It’s a hard thing to explain. The feeling that you have when you are somewhere that brings back a lot of memories that you really wish you could forget.
I am torturing myself by sleeping in his bed, looking through his things. I don’t really know what I wanted to find, good things or bad. I guess that I am looking for something horrible, something that will justify my feelings.
I am finding old pictures, old love letters and memories from when he was in the army, from when he was a child.
Omigod. It’s overwhelming. So overwhelming. Shit, I think I am going to break. I really think—I don’t know what I think. I need to get out of here.
Maybe writing a letter to him would make me feel better. I need to feel better…
“Dear Mike,
I have all of these amazing memories of you. The time you built a tiny pool in the backyard because I was afraid to swim in the lake, the time you wanted to take me out fishing but crashed into my parents’ car on the way out of the driveway. I tried to only remember the good things, because they do outweigh the bad. But the bad things keep coming back, invading me, forcing me to think about them. I wish that you didn’t affect my perception on things so greatly.
I can’t blame all of this on you, after all, most of it is my fault. Why can’t I come to terms with that?”
I woke up early the next morning to my mother calling me for breakfast, not knowing when I had finally fallen asleep. I could smell the overwhelming stench of bacon and eggs and hear the Christmas music blaring from downstairs.
I crawled out of bed, put on my housecoat and stumbled out the door and down the stairs.
“Morning…” I said groggily.
“Good morning sweetie! How did you sleep?”
“Pretty good…”
“Santa Claus was here!”
“It’s funny how you are more excited about that than I am!” I laughed.
“Shall we eat first, or start by opening the presents?” She asked me. Since I wasn’t hungry, it was obvious which one I was going to choose.
We gathered around the living room, each with presents on our laps.
“Nicole? Why don’t you open your present first?” My father asked me as he pulled out the camera from a drawer that was beside him.
I began to tare open the brightly coloured wrapping paper and I could feel mom and dad watching me as I held up a new cell phone.
“Thanks… it’s really nice. I like it.” They smiled and dug into their own gifts. Christmas was getting worse by the year.
After the presents were opened, I decided to have a bath. I needed some space, some time away from the family. When I got into the bathroom, a razor sat on the bathroom counter. I smiled as I locked the door.
Sitting in the bath, I slowly took the blade out of its plastic case. Just a little scratch on the leg wouldn’t be that bad…
“Oh shit…” I whispered.
I had made a mistake, had cut too deep and I knew that something was terribly wrong. Blood spilled out, tricked down my thigh to my knee. It wasn’t stopping.
I got out of the bath and wrapped toilet paper tightly around it. It bled through so I added more, until it I couldn’t see red anymore. I changed into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and headed back downstairs to the kitchen.
“Mom, dad? I am just going to pick something up from the corner store all right?”
“Okay honey. Take your cell phone.”
Waling down the street, I realized that I had finally reached my breaking point. I called my mother.
“Mom, don’t say anything. I just cut myself and I am heading to the hospital. It makes me feel better, because everything is just so messed up. I have gone through some things that you don’t know about, but I will tell you eventually. I am sorry.”
“Honey, what are you talking about? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, mom. Don’t worry.”
“All right honey. Be back for dinner.”
She didn’t understand.
F L A S H. I opened my eyes. Was that a flashback? Is that what a flashback is? Oh my… So dizzy, so very dizzy. I must write, I have to write. Pen… Paper… stumble to locker. Sit.
Nicole is sitting in her work’s change room right now and something really strange just happened. She just lost a span of time. Doesn’t know if it was a couple seconds, a couple hours… doesn’t know anything. She is so afraid.
She wants to cut herself so bad right now, I can tell. The expression on her face says it all and I can’t stand to see her like this. I am afraid of what she will do because you never can tell with her. One minute it seems like everything will be all right, the next, she hurts so much, if she starts crying she won’t stop.
Nicole is afraid that something is really wrong with her. She hates to hurt herself, but needs to hurt herself to get at least a bit of emotional gratification, even if it only lasts a few moments
In the past year she has gotten into drugs. She doesn’t purposely do anything harder than shrooms. Only that along with weed about three of four times a week. She loves to drink and hates herself for all of this because she can feel herself getting addicted. It’s the same with cigarettes. She knows they kill her. She knows that they are wrong... but she can’t help it. Along with cutting and beating herself up emotionally, they are her ways to cope.
Nicole feels so fucked up... she knows that she is screwing herself over but she just can’t stop. I know she honestly thinks that she needs to be hospitalised and this scares her because she wants to be normal. She wants to be as happy as everyone else seems even though she knows that they think the same about her. People think that she is perfect... miss honour roll student, great friends, great boyfriend, full of teenage fun girl... It’s a hard reputation to live up to.
What she hates the most is that she knows she can’t blame it all on Mike. She was beginning to be screwed up before he sexually assaulted her. She has all of this tension building inside of her that is just begging to be let loose, and someday it is going to explode in some inopportune place, at some inopportune time, whether she likes it or not. I really worry about her. I just wish that someone else would too.
Even the people that Nicole tells her deepest secrets too, they don’t even know the half of it. They don’t know how afraid she is about her risk of becoming an alcoholic, they don’t know how afraid she is about it being possible to not make it into university and becoming some bum on the streets. They don’t know how afraid she is at all.
Nicole is so scared about dying. It’s pathetic to her but it’s true. Dying is meant to be painful and Nicole thinks she deserves pain; after all it always seems to come in her direction. She is also afraid that something isn’t right. She has these crazy flashbacks, crazy thoughts, crazy feelings. She doesn’t feel sane anymore.
I threw the piece of paper down onto my lap. “What the hell am I going to do about this… especially if my own mother doesn’t believe me?” I ripped a corner off of the paper that I had just thrown and left a note for Sue.
“Sue, I quit. –Nicole”