“Katherine?”
I nodded.
“Come on in”

I walked into the office and he turned on the white noise machine so no one could hear us then shut the door. For the first time, I was nervous about talking to him and I realized that I wouldn’t tell him what I needed to that day. I didn’t think I would ever be able to tell anyone.

Eventually, I was able to tell my psychologist about it. I told him about how the man I had been in love with, the one I lost my virginity to, raped me three years ago and how I had suppressed my feelings about it for years. I was seventeen when it happened. Occasionally we would park behind a building near my house to have sex because my mom was at home. We parked there one night and had sex for a little while before he decided he wanted to try anal sex. I told him no over and over because I wasn’t comfortable with it but he wouldn’t leave me alone so eventually gave in. We were in a little old sports car and I was on my stomach with the front seat leaned back. A few seconds into it I told him to stop. He told me to “give it a chance” and kept going. So I decided I would to try and make him happy but a few seconds later I decided that I really couldn’t take it and told him to stop again. He said “hold on” and kept going. It hurt so bad. I was crying and I tried to get away. I wiggled up the seat to get away from him. For a moment, I got him out of me but he followed me up the seat and got back in. My head was touching the ceiling of the car and I had no where to move, no way to get away. When he was finished he held me close and tried to comfort me and get me to stop crying before dropping me off at the house. He hugged me and said he was sorry again before driving off.

I cried myself to sleep that night but the next morning I just told myself that he had just made a mistake and it wasn’t that big of a deal. I started making up reasons as to why it didn’t matter and within a day or two I had “forgotten” that it had happened. For years I kept it inside and pretended like it didn’t bother me. There were days it bothered me. A special ed kid came up behind me and put me in a headlock joking around one day at school. I started yelling at him telling him to let me go but he wouldn’t. I was about to elbow him in the ribs when he finally let me go.  I had to run to the bathroom to avoid hurting him and get my heart to slow down. When I got to college, the band had a trip to Disney World. A line for one of the rides was in the dark and crowded. A guy in my group was right behind me and I started freaking out. Not visibly, but my mind was racing. I wanted to run out of the line screaming.

My sophomore year in college I ended up having sex with another man. He was (and is) an amazing person and to this day I don’t think I will ever be able to thank him enough. He was never persistent about sex. If I told him to stop, he would stop with no questions asked. I didn’t tell him about the rape until months after we first had sex and months after I jumped away from him one night out of instinct. I’ll never forget the look he gave me that night. That is what made me want to start talking about it. He looked so concerned. It was then that I realized what the rape had done to me. I felt like I had a disease, I still kind of do. Sometimes I still feel guilt for giving my rapist permission to do it in the first place, but after therapy I am able to change that thought process when I get it.  I was diagnosed with depression (from the rape and from emotional abuse from part of my family). I still have the depression but I don’t see a therapist any more. When I feel depressed I write about it or whatever is bothering me at the time and it helps a lot.  My biggest problem has been the anger and confusion I still feel. Sometimes I get mad at myself for not turning him in and wonder why I didn’t and if he’ll do it to someone else. Then I get mad at him because sometimes I think that things didn’t work out with the other guy because I do still have some problems from it. I haven’t had any problems with having sex since that first night I just still have questions about how the rape affected me and I would ask him what he thought. Not a lot, I only asked questions about it once or twice but I think that just screamed “she has problems” to him. It makes me feel like I have a disease I can’t get rid of. It makes me so angry that I have to deal with this because of someone else doing that to me.

Despite all of that, I still believe that everything happens for a reason. It made me a stronger person and made me realize that I need to follow my instincts and never let any guy push me around. I already had a passion for law enforcement before it happened but the rape just inspired me even more. Even though I can’t change the past, I hope that one day I can make the difference in someone’s life whether it be arresting a rapist or doing paper for burglaries or other crimes.

I’ve decided after thirty years of suppressing my feelings of shame, guilt and being afraid,  that it was time to break the silence of my abuse. I am sharing my story as a healing process for myself, but to give other survivors a hope for recovery.

If I had a chance to go back in time and redo any part of my life, would I?  Or If I only knew back then what I know now would I change any part of my past?  My answer would be no.  Although I would never willingly put myself through the pain and trials again, I wouldn’t change the outcome.  If I wouldn’t have gone through these times, I would have never become the stronger person I am today.  My wounds have healed, but the scars remain as a simple reminder that something good can emerge from painful situations.

I could never have envisioned that my life would be forever changed by various experiences . At the age of nine my parents divorced. A girlfriend of mine, thinking she was being comforting, molested me. This happened on several occasions and deep inside I knew it was wrong. I did not understand the complexity of the issue, so it was easier to stop being friends with her. If we were not friends, than it would stop and go away. I was confused and ashamed, so I told nobody. I wanted to forget, so I buried those feelings deep inside. At this point, I was forced to grow up at the age of nine.

Not only was I sexually abused, I was also emotionally and physically abused by my family members. Because of the abuse, I had low self-esteem, which led to having trouble fitting in at school, and I eventually became rebellious. I began using alcohol to cover up the pain. My life continued to spin out of control, and at one point I had thoughts of suicide, even threatening to kill myself.  I was crying out and thought my actions showed all my pain. But because I was so good at hiding my feelings everyone thought I was fine.

My abuse did not stop, but continued into my adulthood. A month after graduating from high school I attended a party with a friend of mine and was raped.  What was left of my spirit died that night, along with all of my dreams. To make matters worse, when I got home my mom yelled at me because I got back late.  I cried for months afterwards.

At this point I decided that no one cared and that no guy would ever want someone like me. The one thing that made me special was now gone. I felt abandoned by everyone. For the next six years I functioned in the world, but mostly without feeling; merely surviving. I relied only on myself and I trusted no one.

At the age of 23 I married my first husband and soon afterwards he began being abusive. My self-esteem was so low that I stopped caring about myself and others. Now at another low point in my life, I contemplated suicide. But somehow, I dug deep down and found the courage to pick myself up. We tried counseling with no results, so after two years of marriage it ended in divorce.

I decided to try counseling again, this time with a woman who was a Christian.  Not only did she help me see all the things I needed to work on, but most importantly was a great witness to me. For the first time, I saw that I blamed God for letting all these things happen to me. Why would a loving God let these horrible things happen to such a good person?

I knew my built up anger and resentment was from never dealing with all the pain from my experiences.  I went through a period where I wanted vengeance on all the people who had hurt me.  It was their fault and I wanted them to pay for what they had done.

As I grew from my experiences, I decided that it was my choice to be the victim or I could be victorious over my trials.  I finally decided that in order for me to ever be happy I needed to let go and forgive the people who had let me down and hurt me so tremendously.

Forgiving them seemed easy, because I knew they would eventually have to go before God and be judged for their wrongdoings.  But the hardest part was forgiving myself.  I still harbored some self-blame and anger for putting myself in those situations.   But I finally realized that no one has complete control over every circumstance, and that it was not my fault for the other person’s bad behavior.

In the last ten years I have made a lot of progress, but I am far from perfect.  I struggle from time to time remembering my experiences.  As a result, I suffer from depression and anxiety, and it has taken a long time to trust and love again. And though I have dealt with a lot of my pain, the scars remain and are a reminder of the past.  Because of my experiences I find it hard to make friends, as my basic response when someone gets too close to me is to push them away.

I have learned that with God all things are possible.  Without my faith, I would probably not be here today.  I now understand that bad things happen to good people, and it is not as a punishment from God.  I feel that it’s not what happens to you, but how you react and deal with the trials in your life.  You can let them consume you, or you can decide to overcome the adversity.

Writing this has been the hardest thing I have had to do in my life.  I have known for years God has wanted me to use my experiences to inspire others.  Doing this has given me a great amount of healing.

Just recently, God is teaching me that my experience was not just about me.  It was so much bigger than my pain and hurt.  It made me see that I needed to make a stand for all the people who can’t speak out.  I know there are many people out there who need to know that they are not alone and that there is hope for recovery.  My heart hopes that from sharing my experiences I may inspire someone else.  For if I help just one person then everything I’ve been through has not been in vain.

My heart feels such sadness and passion for people who have been affected by such  horrible injustices of the world.  There are a lot of people who have been sexually abused that you may know, but they are so ashamed, powerless, and damaged from the experience that they are unable to share what happened.

In a sense, my healing process has just begun.  I’ve had to look back on my past and see how my experiences have effected me and my relationships.  And I realized that I became  this unlovable person to protect my heart from letting anything hurt me again.

I am also learning what the true meaning of love is.  Now I understand that love isn’t so much a feeling, but a choice.  The perfect example is how God loves us even when we are undeserving of his love.  This means loving other people unconditionally.

Though I’ve made much progress I still have a ways to go in my journey to heal.  I don’t know how long it will take, and I might not ever fully get over the tragic experiences.  My goal is to continue sharing my story giving all the glory to God.  I believe He will give me the strength to stand up and speak for survivors of abuse so they can see there is hope for the future.

It was the first day of my third year of Yeshiva High and I was trying to be good, sweet, wifely.  I sat up straight, with every step of my vertebrate lined up against my chair like so.   My hair-bob bounced exactly one inch up and down on my head like so. I was the girl whose insides were difficult to envisage: did I truly have the same whoosh and whirl of brown digestion inside me as all of the other human beings?

I did.

And it made me feel doomed. That very day, my morning oatmeal was digesting acid-first into my stomach and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It made gurgling sounds, zigzag radio static sounds. I was coughing to try to cover it all up but this did not prevent the other student from curving their heads back to try to catch a glimpse. I thought it was unfair because what is inside your body, under your skin, is supposed to be kept private.

“Maybe you’re pregnant,” Tamar laughed, clapping my stomach, “Maybe you had sex with a boy!”  I wanted to smile at her, of course.  I wanted to let her know that hey man, I’m a good sport, I’m a jokester too, but I couldn’t.  The acid bubbles had shot past the ladder of my ribcage by then, smack into my chest.  It burned like hell. And it wasn’t just gas and fluids in all the wrong places, like usual, but shards of glass seemed to be stuck in there too.  “Holy fuckin God.  Holy Jesus shit!” I yelled out loud. Whatever the correct phrasing for cursing was, I knew I was mangling it. “Holy God.  Holy fuckin’ God. Mother of Jesus! Mother of pearl! Mother of death!”

Ms. Rivkin and the class waited in silence for me to complete the monologue.  “Mother of death!” I yelled again. The pain finished off and my body enjoyed that cool, sinking, after-pain feeling; the grand reward.  “I’m really sorry,” I said.  “I think it was food poisoning.  I’ve never been in so much pain before.”

Ms. Rivkin just stared at me in silence.   She let her eyes, which were a pleasant navy color, orbit around their rims for a bit, and then ordered me to walk to the front of the class.  She gestured me to get down on the ground, on all fours. “Vands in front! Palms facing the floor!”

I did as I was told.  I felt a tail wagging out of my hindquarters and bunny rabbit ears rooting upright. I looked at my reflection in the window, just to make sure I wasn’t really an animal.  I wasn’t.  I then looked past my reflection, through the glass square, and watched all the wobbly autumn greens and oranges in the sky.  The world was still a special place every now and then, I reminded myself.

Ms. Rivkin stepped onto my hands, arranged her heel exactly where my wrists snap. The heels weren’t stilettos but they were some kind of stony material, sharp enough, I figured, to carve a good bruise.  Ms. Rivkin then jumped on my hands, without a word or sound.  When she landed, I could almost feel my hand bones splitting out away from her heels, making room for them.  I didn’t cry though, didn’t want Ms. Rivkin to believe she had the power—and it really did seem a Godly power—of extracting salty tears out of the human body and down my entire length of cheeks.

“Masha will never be assaulting God’s name again.  No one in the class will ever be assaulting God’s name again.  Is that clear?”

“Yes, Ms. Rivkin,” the class chorused.

“Masha?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go vack to your seat and don’t look up for from the floor for the rest of the day, understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t vant to see that delinquent face of yours for the rest of the day, understand?”

“Yes.”

When the bell rang, I didn’t wait for Tamar and Aviva like usual; I wanted to walk home by myself.  The sun was a hard, sulphuric yellow that day and for just a minute I mistook it for a surveillance flashlight tagging me a criminal.  O the humiliating thrill of being a criminal!  On the train, I used to pretend I was a prisoner in a movie scene.  Young and beautiful with hands pinned behind me in cast-iron rings.  My body taking the shape of a deformed, armless prisoner of war, the shape of an ostrich!  My entire family and Jewish community of Boro Park ashamed of me, mourning for my soul, but still, the sweet thrill of it all!— blood rising to the top of every vein producing that hot, full-body choreutic explosion: I. Am. A. Criminal.

I. Am. A. Criminal. The four words were chanting up and down my auditory lobe and it continued bobedeebeebopping as I approached Tamar Weisenthal’s apartment on my right.  I was very aware her brother Menachem was studying the Talmud inside, hoped to see the dim shape of him through the window.  Tamar, Menachem and I had grown up together but often Tamar would scurry off to piano lessons and Menachem and I were left to fend by ourselves.  When we were seven, I remember blowing out all of my nose slime onto my hands and then toweling them onto Menachem’s head, dyeing his hair an ill yellowish green.  He would then hug me, tell me he loved me, and run inside and cock his head under the faucet before his mother would come home and discover what we’d done.  We would make marriage pacts, the two of us, design all the charming details of our kids faces.  My eyes, your eyebrows, I’d tell him.  No your eyebrows, he’d say. But a few years later, we weren’t even talking, no gut Shabbas, nothing.  In the religious world, just when the romance hormones begin cross-multiplying themselves in the boys’ brains, just when the boys feel the gentle urge to skin the hide right off their neighboring females, they are expected to keep their distance.

Tamar opened the door to her apartment, pulled me inside with a hug.

“Baruch Hashem! Baruch Hashem!” she cheered. She led me to the dining room table where we played Gin-Rummy with Chinese playing cards.  She held her fan of seven cards real close to her face.  “Masha, stop looking” she kept saying. Her mother soon entered with a casserole dish in hand, steam waving from its crust and her six or seven kids took their seats at the table.  I took a seat diagonally across from Menachem, looked at him every now and then using only the corner of my eyes.  He had grown into an attractive man, that Menachem.  His face was quite youthful, all rounded edges, nice copper eyes that turned green in bad lighting.  The only problem was his mouth which was rowed with these huge splint-sharp teeth. Teeth for a rodent, my mamma once whispered to me with a laugh.

I didn’t want to stare at him so I tried to find something else to do with my eyes.  I looked at my arm hair. I looked at the dog.  I looked at Tamar, who was cutting her potato kugel into the shape of a star, swinging at the crust with these grand, seesawing motions.  No doubt about it she was soliciting for attention.

“Tamar,” I finally gave in, “What are you doing?”

“Its just, well you know… kugel,” Tamar’s face grew serious.  “Its just so ugly.  It’s like…like orphan mush.  I’m just trying to make it more attractive.”

“You are so mental,” I said.

“She really is,” Menachem said, staring at his plate, already regretful.  As he should have been.  Menachem was a frum boy, mind you, and was weeding his way into conversation between two girls, one of whom was not related to him!—surely this meant our great solar system had kicked out of orbit.  Surely this meant the planets were suddenly rotating the sun in the broken-wheeled motions of the hora instead of in its usual clean circuit.  I mean surely.

My father once said that sins happen in clumps.  You bee-bee-gun a bird for pleasure, enjoy the thuggish feeling of watching feathers blasting with blood and you begin killing animals higher up the kingdom.  Shoot to the top, so to speak.  I guess the same phenomenon was happening with Menachem.  He began talking to me with longer and longer sentence and it was not long before he had curled his upper lip behind his gumline and smiled at me.  It wasn’t some shy smile either but a giant comedian performance smile toppling over with all sorts of chemicals and romantic implications.  I even spotted a matching wink in his left eye.

I didn’t really know what to think of this whole ordeal but I did know that it had done something completely weird and probably damaging to my body.  Minutes after Menachem smiled at me, I felt this strange exotic movement in my vagina, like an ant farm. Lots of pieces of something small: ants, needles, sunflower seeds, all detonating off.  I think there was some pasty juices whooshing around in there too and I don’t know if I enjoyed it per se but I did want it to happen again and again. That night, I made sure my sister Rivky was asleep and I mean rock-dead asleep, and then I wriggled my fingers over the veil of my underwear, tried to recreate it.  What’s even stranger is the minute my hand scooted down there, there was an image of Menachem in my head looking and acting like a Mexican pop singer.  He was wearing a slinky jewel-encrusted button-down and he was talking so fast there wasn’t even room for breaths or pauses. Y es que yo quiero darle la mano al caido kdenyo quiero sanar todas tus heridas denyo quiero secar y tus lagrimas!

The next day the phone rang and I knew it would be Menachem.  E.S.P. has been a genetic claim in my family for a short-stack of generations now.  Legend has it my grandmother had water-coloured Marilyn Monroe’s face the very morning the starlet killed herself but I’m sure there are stories life this in every family.

I picked up the phone with my right fist, the lower half of the hand still scabbed and maroon-colored from Ms. Rivkin’s heel.  I. Am. A. Criminal, I thought.

“Hello, Masha’s phone.” I said, coldly, carefully.

“Its Menachem.”

“I know.” I said.

There was a long pause.

“Masha do me a favor and meet me at the creek behind Meisner’s Deli.  No big thing,” he assured me.  “I just want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said.  I looked at my legs, naked and bone-pale on my bedsheets.  I stretched them out until they were longer, skinnier and the loose jiggling parts had gone completely still.  I felt weird unclothed while Menachem was on the phone, felt that reflex-fear that he could see me, touch me, smell me right at the sweat gland. Technology has a way of teasing your brain like that, the way it allows some senses to be there and others not.

“Oh, well great.  Good.”  Menachem said, nervously. He had been expecting a different answer.  “I’ll see you there at 9:00, okay?”

“I’ll see you there.”

“Okay well you know that I—”

“Yes?” I cut in.

“Nevermind.  I’ll see you there tonight.”

I imagined Menachem greeting me. He’d be standing where we agreed to meet, in front of that wimpy fungal creak with tree branches elbowing in and out of it.  He’d be holding hands with himself to keep from touching me, whisper in my ear, “Hey sweetheart.”  I tested out other versions of this in my head, “Hey sugar plum.”  “Hello, my dear princess.” “Well, shalom darling.”  “Oh, why hello, my beautiful Queen Esther.” “Hey hot stuff.”  The more I imagined his voice the more sticky milk poured from the spout of my vagina, down my thighs.  Perhaps this is normal but it had never happened to me before and certainly made me feel like the starred attraction of some interplanetary freak show.  I prayed to God: I’m so sorry God, it’s my body acting out, not me. I had nothing to do with this! But I wondered if humans are in fact responsible for their reflexes.  I wondered if free will stretches that far.

The subject of boys can rove around your head for a day or so but it will eventually hit a cranium wall, slide down it.  Eventually you have to consult a second party. I clicked through my phone, searching for someone, anyone who would understand.  I soon found the number for Chana and inhaled a huge gulp of breath—such relief!  Chana was my twenty two year old cousin who had followed her secular Israeli boyfriend all the way to Texas, a place I didn’t know much about, just knew it looked like it was about to drip right off the map of the United States any minute now. It seemed like the place you go if you want to escape.

“Chana, hi, its Masha,” I said. I spoke low into the phone.  A confidential voice.

“Hey girl!”

“Hey!” I said, trying to match her pizzazz.

“Whats up?”

“Nothing really I—”

“You don’t call your favorite cousin in two years and now you’re saying nothing really.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not really supposed to be talking to you.  I mean, you know how everyone is but you see—”

“What, tell me? You want to piss all over God? You had sex with a boy?” Chana had a gift for beginning conversations in the middle of them.

“Well, I got in trouble in school the other day,” I said.

“Heh,”

“Its not funny.  Well, it is in a way, I guess.  But ever since the um…incident… I’ve wanted to do more and more bad things… there’s this chanting going on in my head about being a criminal…”

“So now you want to have sex with a boy,” Chana snorted.  I could hear the Great Outdoors of Texas in the background.

“No, no its not like that at all its—”

“Listen, if it’s God or that infinity-year-old Torah that’s stopping you.  Well, that’s completely wack.  God is wack.

“Chana c’mon.” I said.

“Listen, whenever you find yourself believing in the ol’ geezer, just repeat in your head, ‘Holocaust.  Holocaust.  Holocaust.’ Sing it with me now, ‘Holocaust.  Holocaust.  Holocaust.”

My chest collapsed into a sigh.  Chana didn’t understand—I believed in God but I didn’t just let some rabbi stick the belief in my brain, let it stay there in place, unexamind.  I found God outside the synagogue, felt him with my own senses.  If you want to know the story, I was on a nature hike with father a few years back and had picked a chameleon off of a rock.  I was cupping him in my hand, wiping the day-old rain off of him with my fingers.

“Whats with all this white stuff?” I had asked my father, holding up a rind of dried skin.

My father explained how the animal takes on different colors in different habitats to avoid predators. “Now, that’s something the Big Bang would never have been smart enough to come up with!” He cried.  And it was true, I thought, relieved by this new simplicity and clarity inside me.  God did exist!

“So you are going to have sex with a boy!” Chana tried again.

“No,” I said, firmly, “No, not at all.”

“Hmmph,” went Chana’s nose and mouth.  “Then when?”

“I have to go now.  I’ll call you soon.” I folded my cellphone shut.  It was an hour before I was supposed to meet Menachem at the creek and I still needed to have a few words with God.  I did not want to apologize to Him or beg for mercy, but simply wanted to tell Him my side of the story.  I cast my head towards the sky and peeled my eyelids back so my eyes would go huge and mystical for Him, like a Disney character.  My voice in my head became a whisper.  My Dearest God, I began, then decided to switch to something more casual, Hey God…baruch hashem!…This felt more genuine. So listen God, I have something I’d like to talk to you about real quick…I am sure you have heard most of it already…that I’m meeting a boy tonight at 9:00 at the creak behind Meisner’s Deli.  I just wanted to make sure  you were not worrying yourself too hard…I mean, its not like I’m  going to have sex with him or do anything drastic like that.  We are just going to talk. Maybe kiss a little! But nothing more.  I have a feeling you won’t even care too much about any of this though because, well, I always figured my neighborhood and the Torah must have been a bit wrong about you…I’m not going to get too into it now but I really don’t believe you would create this huge world and then demand that one half of it not speak to the other half. That just seems so silly to me…so wasteful! So many wasted conversations!  Alright,, I have to go now, I’m so late but please do me this simple favor…please, I am begging you, do not watch us tonight.  Even if you aren’t judging us which I don’t think you are, it would just feel weird with your presence there, like my dad watching me or something.  Well, that’s about it, for now.  Have a pleasant evening.

Walking to the creek that night, I looked like a piece of night sky, sliced off to make a person—black velvet skirt, black cotton top, black lace trim cuffs, black headband.  I tottered on my heels for the entire half-mile to Meisners, then fit myself into the skinny alleyway beside it, walking horizontally.  I ducked under a couple of trees and looked out towards the creek.  A boy. about six feet tall was pitching a curveball of stone into the water.

“Strike, you’re out!” I yelled.  I could feel the joke flatten before it was even out of my mouth.  The boy swiveled quickly around.

“Hey there!” he said.

“Hey…” I tried to put his face together in the dark, “Menachem?”

“No, actually, its not—”

“Where’s Menachem?” I asked.

“Well, he’s actually—”

“Yes?” I crisscrossed my arms, waiting.

I had seen this kid before.  His name was Avi and I had met him a few times at Tamar and Menachem’s house.  He was always biting his fingers, not just the nails like normal people but would actually stick the entire three inches or so of finger meat inside his mouth.

“Well, its actually funny,” he said, “Menachem, well, you know how he gets scared real easily?”

“Scared,” I repeated slowly.

“Yeah, scared.  His mother has just been on his case lately and he had a feeling he’d get caught so he told me I could, you know, go in his place.” Avi, slowly parted my hair with his fingers, saying, “I would love to get to know you.”

Everything in my brain suddenly felt like it had turned into a cold shivery twitch.  Like how a death row inmate is supposed to feel when he is buckled into an electric chair about to breathe his final, conclusive last breath.  Funny how death and being with a boy can feel so similar, I thought.

“Are you okay?” Avi asked.  He sketched his finger down my scalp and into my neck cavity.

I didn’t answer him.  I just stared at his face which, in the 9:30 pm sky, was all shadow patches.  Cool blacks worn down to grays.

“Masha, are you okay?” Avi asked again, obligatorily.

“No,” I deadpanned, “No not entirely.” I moved his fingers from my neck to his sides and then did a strange, almost clinically insane thing.  Crouching to the ground, I gathered up a pile of leaves, crumbled the leaves in my fist and then slowly but urgently emptied them into Avi’s mouth. I laughed, loudly and chokingly. I let some tears out too. I then sprinted all the way back to Meisners, ducking my head under the low-slung trees.  I stepped my feet back onto the cold empty silent road, one foot at a time, and prayed to my dear friend God that no man could see the womanly shape of my body run through the dark of the night.

originally published with Emprise