TWELVE MINUTES

by Kathryn Hewitt

  “How Dare you, how dare you?” she whispered the repeated question. But I wasn’t fooled. “Cass. Do you realize that by blaming yourself, finding some irrational wisp of ‘proof’ that you were at fault, that you deserved what happened to you…and that’s a fact…this is something that happened to you, inherently removing you from accountability…by saying this, you are saying that I asked to be Raped? That I, Registered Nurse Diane Michaels wanted to be beaten within an inch of my life, that I wished to know what it felt like to be assaulted by an object?” Diane was shaking.

  That was when two miracles happened.

  In that moment I understood. I was Not to blame. I did nothing…Nothing. I was a good person who had an awful thing happen to her, but that awful thing was never asked for, consciously, or not.

  As I was flooded by this, I felt a heat surge through me. A healing heat that spread from my chest and through my damaged ribcage, the molten strength traveling down my arm into my hand, simultaneously surging up and across my healing face. I’d stood without realizing, now facing Diane as she continued to quiver. Her mouth opened as if to say more, but she didn’t.

  Diane was at a loss for words.

  So apparently was I, as I clung to her, hugging Diane as if we were sisters, hugging Diane because we were. Holding her tighter than I knew my mangled body could, sharing my newfound power as we both silently cried. I realized in that moment that Diane was not perfect. Diane was not healed, despite her outer armor. Diane wondered what she had done to be treated as she had.

  “You’re right,” I whispered.

  “We’re right,” she whispered back as she clung to me, showing me that she needed me just as much as I needed her.

  SIXTEEN

  “Would you stop?” Kara was in top form. She’d barged into my bedroom without knocking, something which she knew I hated, as well as something she would totally scorn Mom for.

  “You’d totally go Beastmode on Mom for that,” I sniped, ignoring her implied request for me to turn off my music and get up. Correction: to turn off Morrissey and get out of my room. But hey, apparently I was a glutton for punishment.

  In that moment, I understood what Kara was trying to accomplish, but I was stubbornly refusing to pull my head out from the deeply burrowed hole in the sand that I’d cultivated. I was ignorant of much of my assault, and I was pleased to stay that way. I had experienced enough firsthand, for many lives. So, aside from purchasing pepper spray and working out with self-defense videos, I avoided delving too closely into the circumstances. But as hard as I worked to ignore the specifics, it would forever be with me. So at some point, I had decided that I could tune it all out by becoming a hermit. And I'd be damned if Kara was going to be the one to convince me that this was a bad idea.

  It happened. Nothing could change that, Nothing. And dear god, I would never wish it on anyone.

  “Let’s go out. Wanna go shopping?” Right. I rarely left the house, and when I did, I was usually with my mom, since for a small lady, she could seriously strong-arm someone. Otherwise, I chilled in my room or the living room, although I was hardly living. But I was ok with that; look what happened when I was out there living. He happened.

  So I was happy as a clam to stick to the fortress of my home. After the divorce, my dad had moved out but ‘we’d’ kept our house. Us three girls had pretty nice digs. We all had our own bathrooms en-suite, and my room was big enough that I had a couch and tv set up in one corner and my King size bed didn’t crowd the room. Lucky used to be a thing. Now I was just grateful.

  Rachel always says that I’m blessed. I usually cringe at the word, feeling just about as far from ‘blessed’ as I feel from my old life. But she says that I need to focus on how I am lucky or fortunate, keep in perspective the good things that did happen, you know, stuff like how I wasn’t murdered blah blah blah…

  I got it. Intellectually I understood Rachel and what she was doing, I just wasn’t there yet. Maybe one day, but I wasn’t making any promises.

  I still saw Rachel 3 times a week, which were basically the only three times that I willingly left the house. Rachel didn’t like my introversion; she felt that it wasn’t healthy to isolate myself. I always informed her that it was impossible to be isolated in my house where my mom, my sister, and James were permanent fixtures. Rachel always gave me the same saddened look. I guess eventually I was supposed to put myself second and work to make Rachel happy. That wasn’t the point of therapy, I knew, but I also knew how artfully insidious therapy was. This non-personified entity somehow brought you to your knees, stripped you naked and bare and hopeless, then managed to raise you up like a Pheonix, shaking ashes from foreign wings that were painfully unfurling from disuse. It made me both impressed and resentful.

  Seeing as I was still a fledgling with a broken wing, Rachel’s eyes practically popped out of her head when I announced off (and heavy) handedly, that I planned to return to school this fall.

  As in one month from my bombshell.

  Who was more terrified in that moment? Rachel or me? The victim/survivor who was testing herself by allowing a tiny morsel of trust in society to incubate, to mature enough as to allow her to venture out by choice? Or the therapist who probably actually knew more than I was willing to admit? I feared it was Rachel, and that scared me even more.

  “What made you decide this?” Rachel asked as she schooled her features and tucked an obstreperous greying curl behind her ear. She looked genuinely intrigued, and that didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t like the times when felt like a specimen, like something of fascination that warranted study for the sake of intellectual pursuit. I rationally knew that this wasn’t the case; Rachel’s sole goal was to get me into a better mental place so that I could live my life…healthily. But sometimes I felt like a petrie dish, that all of my millions of pieces were spilled for perusal and analysis, neglecting to preserve that magical element that makes that someone Me. Instead, those glittering particles were brushed into the trash to make room for my discrete and angular shards, perfect for the microscope and easily transformed into Science. Hard and fast and concrete.

  Hard and Fast…my face pressed to concrete.

  I blinked.

  Rachel was staring at me and I knew her well enough to recognize the look of resignation that she’d allowed to pierce the veil of her professionalism. I knew I’d done it again, allowed my obsessive self-analysis to segue into an ‘episode.’ That’s what Rachel called what happened when I fell back into the Rape, when I was transported there and inevitably blacked out momentarily. Rape. I was testing out the word. It was sharp and foreign to my tongue.

  I’d gotten good at it, though...my episodes. I could lose consciousness and then be alert before I fell out of my chair. Progress…it’s a bitch.

  “Tell me what brought it on.” I hated the Serious Rachel tone.

  At first, I’d fooled her into believing that I had no understanding of what brought on these blackout episodes, but eventually I was weak one day and cracked. It was in my session after Diane’s cinnamon gum debacle, and I broke down and admitted that this was one of the worst ones.

  I’d always been cursed with an overly sensitive olfactory sense. Consequently, I was big on scent memories. Scents left an impression on me; one whiff and I was transported back to whatever distant event that was intrinsically linked in my subconscious to that smell.

  And I’d always hated cinnamon.

  I’d admitted to Rachel that it seemed that once I was reminded of the ‘Attack,’ as Rachel liked to refer to it, in a visceral way, I fell back into the scene and apparently that translated to losing consciousness. Through sobs and a tear swollen eye, I'd vehemently begged Rachel to make it stop. She just shook her head.

  Then Rachel stood up, walked to my chair, and kissed her palm before placing her cool hand on my cheek. She said quietly, “I’m trying, Cass. And I will never stop trying until I do.” The only sound that followed was the door as it closed, her words lingering in
a gauzy cloud, the threadbare fibers barely maintaining their bond.

  I understood. Rachel could only help by teaching me how to heal myself.

  Some days, it felt ok to be broken.

  SEVENTEEN

  I’d barely recovered from my introduction to Charlie, and I ran into him…almost literally, as he was standing in the doorway of my second class of that first day, handing out papers as an overeager classmate plowed into the back of me.

  Overstimulation.

  I was in a far back corner chair clutching a slightly sweat dampened syllabus, as it was all crashing in on me.

  Charlie.

  Handing out Syllabi.

  Unexpected human contact from behind; Unmovable obstacle preventing me from getting to my destination. Near human contact, as former collision propelled me toward latter perfectly fitting green T-shirt.

  Dear God, was I going to survive? I had just touched someone. Not by choice, but that was what made it all the more awful. I wasn’t prepared, I hadn’t thought about the possibility. Stupid, I know. But I was so focused on overcoming my demons that I hadn’t considered random and accidental touch. I was too encapsulated in my own bubble. This was clearly a hole in my defenses…a big one.

  I needed to be on alert. Vigilant. If people couldn’t surprise me, I’d be able to maintain the power. That’s what Rachel said was stolen from me: Power.

  I bit my tongue every time that she said that.

  I understood her objectively, because I did indeed lose that.

  Unfortunately, unlike Rachel, I couldn’t quantify the things that I’d lost, and I absolutely couldn’t hierarchize them. And I wouldn’t. I’d owned all that I had lost, and I would own its loss in entirety. All of the pieces of this cruel puzzle were crucial to the end product: Me.

  Me, and all I had lost and would forever mourn.

  Rachel said that this was ok, but that I could mourn without being broken, and without it breaking me more. She didn’t use those words of course, but I knew what all of her flowery euphemisms really meant. I got it. It was ok to be sad, as long as you didn’t get lost in it. Use it to reflect; appreciate and be grateful. Use it as a tool to improve mental health.

  Feel sad, then, gain from it.

  Easier said than done.

  But I certainly didn’t want to stay like this for the rest of my life. School was my baby steps And my Grand Canyon leap, and I was in it to win it. I was a normal human once, dag nammit, and I would be again! Well, normal, save being a rape victim. Survivor.

  “Normal is relative,” I heard Diane saying in my head, “In this room, you’re normal.” She had winked at me and left. I’d stared at the door for a long time after she’d left, the ghost of her statement zipping around the room and jumping out from behind corners right when I was least expecting it.

  Yeah, just what I wanted. To be one of two victims of physical, sexual, and dehumanizing attack, in a room, in order to normal. Awesome. Don’t think I care to join that club, I think I’ll chose Indian Club…they make Samosas.

  FOCUS, I screamed inside my head. I knew first days were kind of gimmes, but I was serious about this. Starting out on a solid footing was necessary. I couldn’t fall behind, the stress of everything else I was falling behind in was already more than I could shoulder on most days.

  ALL OF THIS was flittering around my head like a hummingbird that suddenly went blind, as I sat hunched in my back corner seat pretending to listen as the Professor went through the syllabus. Grabbing the bottle of water from my bag, I chugged it as I focused my attention on the middle-aged gentleman at the front of the class, his brillo pad of salt and pepper hair just as wiry as his frame. He wore rimless glasses, the kind with arms that wrapped around the back of the ear, but the lenses of which were frame-free.

  I guess this was what a Journalist looked like. I almost laughed.

  And then I felt like doing anything but laughing.

  The guy.

  The guy who’d invaded my space in my earlier class, and offended me with his awful taste in gum, whom I’d nearly snowplowed right outside our class minutes before.

  The guy who, without the gum, smelled better than any guy that I had ever met.

  That Guy.

  Charlie. Charlie was currently, and enthusiastically, explaining to the class that he was the TA for the semester, to call him Charlie, and for everyone to copy down his number (which he quickly jotted down on the white board in endearingly neat but distinctly boyish script), and that he was our go-to for the next four and a half months. And that last half month, he smiled even broader, he’d be expecting 4am texts.

  And if I didn’t know any better, he looked at me when he said that.

  But clearly I don’t know better.

  Because his t-shirt really did make me wonder the brand, seeing as it seemed to be made for him. I’d never seen a guy in real life whose upper arms filled the arm holes snuggly, whose chest and ab definition could be made out through said Amazing shirt. I was sweating. I was definitely sweating now, as I thought of the 4am texts and the arms and the….

  Class was over. I’d totally freaked and spaced out on the rest of it, you know, the part where the Professor actually taught?! I’d be the 4am text, I thought miserably. I didn’t think that I could do this.

  Everyone was leaving and I quickly assessed that if I didn’t hop up now, as in right now, I’d be the last one left in the room with Charlie. My legs were moving before I could finish the thought. I’d barely taken the time to swipe up my bag as I bolted, fleeing the room as if it were on fire.

  It kind of was.

  I think I just discovered a new personal hell.

  Heaven Help Me.

  EIGHTEEN

  I had an imaginary friend as a little kid, around 4 or 5, something that I’ve heard is normal. There’s that word again: Normal. Well, this normal little girl had an imaginary friend named ‘Johnny,’ and he truly was my best friend. Also, Johnny was a pig. Johnny used to go home to Pigland when I went to sleep at night, and I’d require my mom to set a place for Johnny next to me at the table.

  But aside from the companionship and comfort that Johnny provided me, the truly greatest part about having him for a best friend who was always around (although hard for others to see, strangely enough), was that I could Blame Everything on Johnny! HaHA! I was an evil little seedling, but I understood that bad behavior led to punishment, and that I’d do anything to avoid it. In retrospect, I don’t necessarily think that this propensity to falsely blame was as nefarious as it first seems. I suspect that while Johnny was a figment of my imagination, he was also part of me, so when I misbehaved, so did he by proxy. I was also developing just enough of a moral identity to know when I was doing things that were wrong, so I shifted the blame. I hadn’t quite made it to a level of maturity to know much more than what was bad, and that I didn’t like to be punished, so if I did something “bad,” I’d prefer to find a way not to be punished. Enter Johnny.

  Needless to say, it didn’t work.

  Johnny stayed with me until I outgrew him. Until then, when I went on vacation with my family, Johnny would go to Pigland and I would write little letters to him in a journal that my mom had gotten for this purpose, assuring me that he could read it in Pigland. There wasn’t a huge amount of sophistication to these ‘letters,’ in fact, I hesitate to even call them that. It was more like a lot of misspellings, lack of punctuation, and backwards ’S’s.’ But the ever-present outrage was there, and I knew that Johnny was equally indignant over what my mean sister did to me this time. Humph.

  As I deciphered my childish scribbles, I felt a wave of sadness wash over me. Rachel had insisted that I start a journal, and when I had protested that I didn’t have one, she'd rolled her eyes and said that she knew that I had some old diary lying around somewhere, and if she knew girls like she knew that she knew girls, and Me for that matter, it was bound to have been written in only a handful of times. And, it was up to me if I chose to rip out those pag
es, or keep them in my journal. Sometimes I really didn’t like Rachel.

  She’d also smugly informed me that she was behind Diane’s pushing me to dictate, and that she had all of those pages and would give them to me when I asked for them.

  Like I said.

  As I read about something that Kara had done to me, making me play ‘Rug,’ a game involving me lying on the floor on my stomach while Kara walked on me, I remembered the game. And apparently, my only complaint at the time was that I always had to be the ‘Rug!’

  This weird scraping gurgle punctuated the silence of my attic, where I’d finally dug up my old diary, which, just as predicted, was 99% blank. Rachel! Arg. That woman really chapped my hide sometimes. I mean, I liked her, I think I was beginning to trust her, but my progress wasn’t personal. I just sucked at therapy.

  And, Oh my god.

  What the Hell was that sound?

  That sound, like a cat in heat on a hot tin roof, that was Me. That was me laughing, I think. Or at least an expression of emotion that resembled joy, as I remembered Johnny, and then Kara literally walking all over me. Sibling worship at its finest.

  This was a first.

  I was supposed to write down my firsts, good and bad. Rachel said that I wasn’t to categorize; that ying and yang and holistic and…well you get the picture. We are made up of good and bad and they are complimentary and interconnected. We are beings comprised of many components, none of greater or less importance. It was our job to sort these elements of ourselves, to identify and combat the negativity, and cultivate and spread the positive.

  “You are your own Master, Cassandra.” Rachel was sounding a little patchouli for my tastes, but I needed her to help me. I needed her to help me find Me. Not the fine old Cass, who was sassy and energetic and always there with a quip. Me, now. I needed to make myself before I could find myself. Rebuild in the image I chose. And I was looking to upgrade.