Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 25: And now

I land with a dull thud on the floor of the shed.

The thing that I'm most aware of is a man's heavy panting in the air right next to my ear. His rasping breath merges with the far-off sound of someone screaming and fills the space inside the shed, vibrating and oh, it is everywhere.

I am completely separate from the body lying between that horrible weight and the snow as it melts into cold filth. It's as if I am nothing more than a vibration, like the scream, or like the man's breathing as it seeps in my ear and fills my head with darkness.

There, free of my body, I realize something with a comforting certainty that I have never felt so deeply before: Whoever this person is – what he did to me is wrong and always will be.

But I don't need to know this person who growled "Come with me" in some context I was never meant to remember. This person who poisoned my drink. This person who must have slammed my head against the side of the shed with such force that it knocked out one of my earrings. There in the dirt, hidden under the step, the tiny golden bird had waited for me to discover it and ascribe meaning to it where there never was any meaning.

It was given in love and lost in violence and that is that.

Ever since Thomas's birth, I haven't wanted to know who his biological father was because I just don't need to know.

I have spent months searching for some kind of truth in all the inexplicable shit that keeps happening to me. And in the end, the fragments of memory that sometimes flutter back to me and the half-bits of information that seem like clues are not, actually, deliberate messages from an otherworldly place that makes infinite sense – what Owen called "God in Heaven" once – all being carefully orchestrated to lead me to the identity of this rapist.

Because this story is not about him.

He forced himself into my life, into my consciousness where he still looms, but he does not deserve space in my story.

Here is another thing I realize now that I am separate from my physical self: Forgiveness is not about him, either.

It doesn't matter to him, after all, whether or not I choose to hold onto what he did to me that night. He doesn't suffer in the least when I let it all swirl in my chest, waiting to smother me in my sleep.

He probably never thinks of me at all and I could hate him for it. And I could hate him more for not knowing that I hate him, for not even caring whether I forgive him. But the only person who is worse off for not forgiving him is myself.

This truth is suddenly a part of me; it vibrates right along with me at the same frequency, as if it has just been waiting for me to notice it here.

So I decide to let go of him.

I let myself forgive him, this person who will always be faceless except for whatever parts of him look out at the world through Thomas's eyes. I forgive him and he will not be real for me anymore.

But now the sound of screaming is getting closer. I am back in my body, suddenly and gratefully alone on the damp floor of the shed except for the now overwhelming presence of this horrible scream. It seems to cram itself into the far corners of the shed and then charge back at me, seeping into my lungs as I struggle to inhale the frigid air. The same high-pitched, hopeless sound burst out at me from the shed on that night I followed the flashlight beam out here when everyone else was asleep.

That was the night I tripped over the fallen log and landed on that fucking grilling fork.

Instinctively, my hands fly to the wound where the fork's prongs pierced my side all those days ago. I gasp as my fingers sink into my abdomen. The flesh gives way easily and collapses in on itself.

It has started to decay.

My rotting body is caving in away from my fingertips and I know that the scream crashing through every particle of space inside the shed is coming from me.