“Lina.”

It’s funny how your own name, if said too many times, sounds strange to you.

“Lina.”

After 18 years, saying it one time too many makes it sound strangely foreign. It just doesn’t sit right in your ears. It tastes bad as it falls off your tongue.

“Lina.”

It’s also funny how your own name, being spoken in the quietest moments by the most important people, can anchor you. Even when you feel as random as a tumbleweed, or as fragile as an eggshell, something as small as your name can bring you back into reality.

I turned my eyes up to his in paralyzed shock. He had never seen me that way; I had never wanted him to. I had never been so vulnerable, so exposed as I was then. But as he picked me up off the carpeted landing at the bottom of the stairwell and carried me out to my car, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to go back to the robot b**** I had been masquerading as before. This was going to change everything for the both of us.

He placed me carefully in the driver’s seat of my little blue CRV that had waited patiently outside the apartment. It had probably expected me back sooner than this. It also probably expected me to be alone, and not with Magio carrying me like Cinderella’s shattered, treasured glass slipper. He squatted down, and in the warmth of the night, we both felt the chill of what had just happened hit us like a train.

“I don’t know how this happened,” he began. He was choking on the words as he let them escape his mouth. I put up a hand to stop him, and he obliged. He put his head in my lap and tried to hold it together for me, but I could feel his whole body trembling at the thought of the horrors that had happened in his own home.

I didn’t have tears. I didn’t even have words.
All I could do was shake my head numbly.

All he could do was shake his right along with me.

“I asked you to stay,” I said after fifteen minutes in deafening silence. He pulled his head away from me and turned his kaleidoscope eyes up to meet mine, but I refused to acknowledge his stare. I knew it would result in tears or anger or a combination of the two, or, even worse, my pitiful weakness overtaking me and somehow I would end up apologizing for what I had just said.
It sounded like I was blaming him.

I guess, in a way, I was.

“What?” He asked after a moment.
“I said, I asked you to stay.”
“You—”
“No, I begged you to stay. Not only did I tell you not to leave me alone with him beforehand, but I also looked you in the eyes and begged you not to go as he closed that door. I begged you.”

Hot tears slithered out of my eyes and trailed down my cheeks as I took one long, shaking, gasping inhale. He took both of my hands in his, holding onto me as I fell apart before him like a sand castle. He knew a hug would only make it worse, so he just held onto me and hoped the storm in my eyes would pass soon; that was all he could do, but that was all I needed from him.

When the sobbing subsided and the sense of tired wistfulness set in, all we did was stare at each other, and hold onto each other, and hope that the sun would come up in just a couple short hours. In the darkness, we saw each other clearly for the first time. In the silence, we heard each other’s’ heartbeats. In the warmth of the night, we felt each other’s deepest thoughts being mirrored in the other person’s face.
And we felt not so alone.

What Magio didn’t know when he carried me out to my car was that he was also carrying my horribly disfigured sense of self-worth. That’s the strangest part about being sexually assaulted: you feel like you’ve done something irreversibly wrong, and that you’re not worth anything anymore, at least for a little while.

That’s also why, in the days that followed, it was so hard to make everything work again. It was hard to be around people; it was hard not to be around people. But I knew I needed them. Sleeping was the best part of my day; sleeping excessively made me feel useless and pathetic. But I knew I needed it. I was awful to my family; I couldn’t explain to them what had happened. But I knew I needed them.

Everything was a mess.

And then one day it wasn’t.

I decided that I shouldn’t spend fifteen hours out of the day locked in my room with my good pal Netflix (a true friend, by the way). So I went for a run. And that was the first time in a long time that things felt really normal. I was still embarrassingly slow and out of shape, but it was the time out of the house, the time in the sun, and the time to tune out my own thoughts with music that made me say to myself, you know what, things are going to be okay.

The moral of the story is that things get really messy sometimes. You lose pieces to the puzzle and you say, well, I guess I can’t do that anymore.

But guess what? Sometimes, the pieces of the puzzle are right under the table. Just because you dropped them, it doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. You just need to look for them really thoroughly and they’ll come back to you. And then you can continue on.