Letter 007

I Could See What You Did to Me.

That is one of the things I remember.

Not just that they hurt.

Not just how they got there.

But that every time I looked in the mirror, I could see the difference in my appearance.

I could see what you had done to me.

And every time I noticed it, I reacted all over again.

My hair was different too.

You pulled it.

It came out.

Eventually enough of it was gone that I was bald.

People noticed.

Immediately.

There was no hiding that something had changed.

I couldn't keep what was happening to me contained inside the places where it happened.

I carried it outside with me.

Getting dressed became a reminder.

Washing my face became a reminder.

Reaching for hair that wasn't there anymore became a reminder.

Catching my reflection without meaning to became a reminder.

You had changed what I looked like.

And then I had to walk into the world looking different enough that other people could see it too.

People would notice.

People would ask.

And sometimes I didn't know what to do with their concern because I was still trying to understand what had happened myself.

There is something terrifying about having your body tell a truth before you're ready to talk about it.

But what you did to my appearance wasn't the only thing that changed.

You changed my relationship with safety.

Before you, home was supposed to be the place I could close the door on the rest of the world.

After you, closing the door didn't make me feel safe.

Because I had learned that terrible things could happen there too.

You took my sense of safety in my own home.

And once that disappeared, fear didn't stay neatly contained to you.

It spread.

I became afraid of people I knew.

And if I couldn't trust people I knew, how was I supposed to trust people I didn't?

Strangers scared me.

Familiar people scared me.

The outside world scared me.

Sometimes even being inside scared me.

There wasn't an obvious place left where my body understood that nothing bad was about to happen.

So I stopped going out.

For a long time, I barely left the house.

The world kept moving while mine became very small.

There were places I could have gone.

People I could have seen.

Ordinary things I could have done.

But leaving required something I didn't have anymore:

the belief that I would be okay.

That is another thing people don't always understand about physical violence.

They see the injury.

They imagine the injury is the damage.

A bruise appears.

A bruise heals.

A wound closes.

Hair grows back.

And eventually there is less visible evidence that anything happened.

But the violence doesn't necessarily leave when the evidence does.

Because you don't only remember it with your mind.

Your body remembers what it learned.

Mine learned that another person could hurt me.

That someone familiar could become dangerous.

That a room I considered safe could stop being safe.

That everything could change before I understood what was happening.

So even when you weren't there, sometimes the fear was.

I carried it into rooms you had never entered.

Into conversations with people who had never hurt me.

Into ordinary moments that should have been ordinary.

My world became organized around avoiding another terrible thing.

And I hated that.

Because you had already taken enough.

But knowing that and feeling safe again were two different things.

Safety came back slowly.

So slowly that sometimes I didn't notice it returning.

A trip outside.

A conversation.

A moment when someone stood near me and my body didn't immediately prepare for something bad.

A day when I realized I had been living instead of watching for danger.

And eventually, the mirror changed too.

The bruises disappeared.

My hair grew back.

My face started looking familiar again.

But I don't want to tell this story as though growing my hair back fixed what happened.

Or as though the absence of bruises meant the absence of damage.

There are injuries that disappear from photographs long before they disappear from the person in them.

For a while, I thought healing meant becoming the person I was before you.

I don't think that anymore.

I cannot unknow what happened.

I cannot give that version of myself the innocence she had before she learned what another person was capable of doing to her.

But I can give her something else.

I can believe her.

I can stop minimizing what she survived simply because eventually nobody could see it anymore.

I can take back the ordinary things.

Leaving the house.

Being around people.

Closing my own front door and knowing that the space behind it belongs to me.

Looking into a mirror without searching my reflection for evidence of someone else's violence.

You do not get to be the permanent meaning of any of them.

The bruises were yours.

The reflection is mine.