Story

I can’t remember a lot of my early childhood. It’s glimpses of summers spent in

Maine with my family. Building sand castles with my cousins, fighting seagulls with water
guns, drives to Fielder’s Choice in my grandma’s convertable. It’s flashbacks to my
teacher burning the popcorn for our class parties, spending hours a day on the
playground at my school. My early memories consist of bits and pieces of joy that come
together to form an incomplete puzzle of a happy childhood.
It’s hard to remember much else, friends and family will bring up an something
that happened at some event and I’ll have no recolection of ever even attending. But
sometimes, on nights when 10-11 pm stretches far longer than the 60 minutes it really is,
I’ll think of other things. I’ll think I remember doing a handwritting test for the police, but
I don’t know if that actually happened. I’ll remember an unexpected hand, a halfhearted
apology, and hearts racing as I hid from a stranger. I know that happened. On these
Twilight Zone Nights, I’ll try to defeat my mind, try to reach into the crevasses it wants to
keep hidden.
Fourth grade is when my mind decided I’d be safer if it kept secrets from me. That
summer was one of the best, before leaving for Maine, I spent almost every day with my
best friend. My mom would drive up to her house before leaving for work, I’d talk to her
grandma and eat breakfast until I could go and wake her up. Most days we’d go to the
river and swim, sometimes we brought tubes and went over little rapids. True
Coloradians. Every once in a while, we’d go to the rec center to swim. One of these days,
we were playing mermaids at the pool. Her grandma left the rec center for 20 minutes to
grab lunch. We promised we would be fine alone for that long, we’d never leave each
other’s sight, and we’d stay in the pool. As we were playing mermaids, with our imaginary
shiny tails and water powers, we ended up racing through the river walk. Not to brag but
I’ve always been a strong swimmer, I ended up on the opposite side of the river walk, and
for a 4 foot something kid, that distance seems huge. I was looking around for my friend
when I felt someone’s hand in an unwelcome place. I whipped around to see a fat, bald
guy wearing glasses, he said sorry and kept moving. I was frozen and sat down on some
nearby stairs to wait for my friend. Eventually she came around the corner and into my
view. She joined me on the stairs and told me that this same man had done something
very similar to her. I told her he’d touched me too. We spent the next ten minutes hiding
from this grown man we didn’t know. And he spent the next ten minutes looking for us.
When her mom and grandma came back I told them what had happened. Her mother was
horrified, and told the front desk, who called the police, while the friends mom called my
parents. At some point, both my parents, my friends mom and grandma, the police, and
the friend and I were all in one of the conference rooms. We told them what happened.
They took us to separate rooms to make sure our stories matched up. We looked at
security footage to show the police who the man was. He was in the parking lot. My dad
wanted to find him and kill him. I couldn’t understand why exactly. I didn’t know why the
police were here, or why my dad was angry, or why my mom was crying. I didn’t know
why because at the age of 9 I didn’t know what sexual assult was. After we went home, I
never heard anything again. Until one may just two or three years ago. My friend sent me
an article from 2017. The man who’d assaulted us had commited suicide. He killed
himself for reasons I can’t pretend to know. But somewhere deep inside of me, a scared
sliver of a nine year old tells me he killed himself to get out of facing the consquences of
his action. After I read the article over and over everything felt too tight, too close, too
much. I went outside but the trees were still standing over me, impassible barriers keeping
me planted on the Earth. The roof was the only place I could breathe. I was pacing the
roof, screaming and sobbing and looking at the three story drop off the side. I called
another friend, who calmed me down, rooted me in the ground. That messed with me. It
was so betraying to learn he killed himself. The assult had moved to the back of my mind,
I’d always assumed he was in jail, prosecuted by the justice system. The very system that
had failed me. It failed to punish my assultor, it failed to bring me justice, it failed to save
me. But perhaps the most betraying, the realization that my parents knew. I came to my
dad, sniffling and scarred, and told him that my assultor was dead. He told me he knew
already. I was floored. My world cracked. My father was the person I trusted most in the
world. Finding out he knew the thing that was plaguing my every thought, and hadn’t told
me? Devastation cannot come close to what I felt.
Of course, I understand why my parents didn’t tell me. Nine year old me didn’t
know what happened, didn’t understand the severity of my situation. There was no telling
how I’d react if a month later my parents told me he killed himself. It was a bad situation,
with no good way to talk about my situation.
It, quite simply, was dealing with adult problems as a child. Dealing with real world
issues before I knew what the real world was.