Living Off Past Trauma [EDITED]

Miracles Can Happen

Published: 24April2025
Edited: 16une2025

Onika Calhoun//Jones
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30 June 2024

The steady beep of the heart monitor echoed through the sterile quiet of the hospital room. Pale afternoon light filtered through the blinds, striping the bed where I laid  still — my body a fragile map of life suspended, my chest rising and falling like the gentle tide.

But inside my mind, it wasn't quiet.

I stood in a vast, endless white space. There were no walls, no ceiling, no horizon — just a surreal calm, like the eye of a storm. I looked down at my hands; they shimmered faintly, unreal and weightless. Across from me, a figure emerged — soft, glowing, but familiar. My own face stared back at me, only this version radiated something steadier, older... freer.

"You can't keep holding this," the voice came — mine, yet not. It was calmer, more resolute. My self-conscious mind, the deepest core of me that had been buried under years of silence and shame.

I stepped back instinctively. "I'm fine," I whispered. "It's over. I survived."

"No," the voice said, approaching gently. "You buried it. You survived the surface, but underneath? You're still bleeding."

A tear welled in my eye, shimmering like glass. "What do you want me to do?"

"Tell them," the self said, taking her hand. "Tell your friends. Tell someone. Tell the truth."

"B-but I told Lamar, I told mama....isn't that enough-" Tears coated my vision.

"But there are your siblings. There's Lola...Sky, Lizzo. They deserve to know, you can't keep bottling up" The voice stepped closer.

A storm of memories washed back — Tjay's face in the dark, the pain, the confusion, the fear at fifteen. His hands, his words, the aftermath. The hospital visit I went to with my mom. The sterile words of a doctor explaining damage. Words like ovaries and scar tissue and infertility. Words that choked the breath out of my young lungs.

"I was a kid," I said, my voice trembling. "I didn't know how to fight him off. And when I couldn't get pregnant later, I felt broken. Worthless."

"You weren't. You aren't," my self conscious whispered, brushing a thumb across my cheek. "You are not what he did to you."

More tears came — hot, aching tears I hadn't let fall in five years.

"But I'm healed now," I said. "The doctors said... my body recovered. I'm pregnant now..."

"Your body healed. But your soul? You're still carrying him like a ghost on your back."

The white space trembled faintly, as if my thoughts alone disturbed it.

"Let it out, Onika," my self conscious pleaded. "You don't have to keep pretending. If you speak it — if you name it — the power he had over you dies. You'll be free."

I dropped to my knees in that endless space, my body wracked with sobs — not from pain, but from the dam finally breaking. From five years of silence finally ripping open. I felt it: the release, the weight beginning to lift.

"I'm scared," I confessed.

"I know," my self conscious said, kneeling beside me. "But you've already lived through the worst of it. This? This is healing. This is truth."