Chapter 1 #3
Until then, I hadn’t even realized that I had a sleepwalking problem.
While living on the street, it wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up in a location where I didn’t remember falling asleep, but back then, I assumed it was just a symptom of exhaustion and malnutrition.
Not to mention I frequently disassociated during my more unpleasant… “jobs”.
Compared to that, not remembering where I fell asleep seemed like a simple problem, but no. Apparently, I’d been wandering the streets of San Francisco while completely asleep. It was a miracle I hadn’t been hit by a car.
I’d been told by the nurses that sleepwalking could be a symptom of stress, and that seemed to be the case for me as well. As I recovered, my sleepwalking episodes had decreased. It had been over a year since my last one, so hopefully, they were gone for good.
Once everyone had said their piece and congratulated me, the kitchen staff brought out a knife to cut the cake. There were no candles to blow out, as apparently that was considered too much of a fire hazard, but I was given the first piece. Right off the corner, so I got the most frosting.
Because, as everyone knew, cake was really just a vessel for transferring frosting into my mouth.
Once I had my piece, I thanked the staff again before retreating into the corner of the rec room so the others could also get some cake as well. Many of the patients, especially the new arrivals, didn’t like being crowded by other people, so I gave them as much space as possible.
Fuck, a lot of these patients looked young. At twenty-two, I wasn’t exactly old myself, but some of these new faces looked like they hadn’t even hit puberty yet.
It was like looking in a mirror. The heavy bags under their eyes, their defensive posture whenever someone came too close, and the way they kept flinching over nothing like they were waiting for pain that never came.
Yeah, I recognized it all. That was exactly what I looked like when I first arrived here.
It would have been a depressing sight, except, I noticed that every time one of the patients was handed a piece of cake, their faces still lit up into a genuine smile.
I laughed to myself as I took a bite of my own cake and savored the way the sugar melted on my tongue. It really was the simple pleasures that mattered most.
I was about halfway through my cake when I felt something tug at my sleeve.
At first, I looked to my side with my face tilted slightly up, expecting it to be one of the facility staff who were all a little taller than me, but I saw no one there.
It was only when I adjusted my gaze down, very far down, that I noticed the young girl standing next to me.
Based on her face, she looked to be about sixteen, but her short stature and stick thin body made her look more like she was twelve. The way she fidgeted like a nervous mouse didn’t help her young appearance, either.
Yeah, I’d been there, too. I remembered that constant feeling of nervous anticipation when I first arrived here. It still came back sometimes, and the most unexpected moments, but I’d gotten better at controlling it.
I waited for her to say something now that she had my attention, but she just kept fidgeting quietly, never looking directly at me.
“Can I… help you with something?” I asked, to break the silence.
Clenching her delicate hands into round little fists, she seemed to gather all her courage to look me in the eye. It only lasted for a moment, but in the brief glance, I saw a chaotic swirl of different emotions in her brown eyes.
“How did you do it?” she eventually said. Her gaze had already retreated to the floor, so she was talking more to my shoes than to me, but I still heard her voice clearly. There was a rough rasp at the end of her words, which almost made her sound like she had a lisp.
“I’m sorry,” I said when it finally registered to me that she’d asked a question. “I don’t understand. How did I do what?”
Her hand flicked to the side, probably meant to indicate the party all around the room, but instead, it looked more like she was swatting away a mosquito.
“You graduated. You’re… better. How did you do it?”
Looking down at her, I experienced a strange out-of-body experience, like I’d suddenly become a different person.
Less than an hour ago, I’d been watching the video about the delay of the bell ringer case, thinking about how Clay was so much farther along his healing journey than I was.
It felt like, no matter how hard I worked, I was losing a race I didn’t even know I was a part of.
Yet, here was this girl, who’d experienced similar trauma as I had, looking at me in the same way that I looked at Clay. To her, I was the one winning the race that she was falling behind.
What should I say?
Everything was such an overwhelming blur when I came to the recovery center that I barely remembered the first few weeks.
What would I have wanted someone to say to me back then?
“It’s a long journey,” I eventually managed to say, stumbling through the sentence as I second-guessed every word. “All you can do is take it one step and a time and try not to compare yourself to anyone else. You’ll just stress yourself out, and it won’t actually help.”
That was obviously not what she wanted to hear.
She’d probably wanted some secret advice that would guarantee her success, like a cheat code in a videogame that would allow her to skip right to the final victory.
Unfortunately, I could give her no such thing, as there was no shortcut in the journey we all had to take.
Her expression remained downcast, staring at her hands as they twisted around each other.
I looked around the room, trying to catch the eye of a staff member to silently ask for help, but unfortunately, everyone was busy managing the room full of patients. Biting my lip as I worried over what to say, I looked down at the half-eaten cake in my hands and an idea came to mind.
“Look,” I sighed. “I get that it sucks and that there is no easy road to recovery. You’re probably angry right now.
I was when I first came here, and honestly, I still am.
It’s not fair that we have to deal with this shit, and recovery is very unpleasant.
So, the only advice I can give you is to take time to enjoy the small pleasures when you can.
” I raised my plate, indicating my slice of cake.
“These little things mean a lot more than you realize. So, you should probably go get yourself a slice before all the cake is gone. I wouldn’t want you to miss out. ”
A small smile came to her face, and a weight lifted off my heart. She heeded my advice, joining the line to get her own portion of cake, and I was once again left alone.
I finished off my own cake in a few more large bites, but it didn’t taste quiet as sweet on my tongue as it had before. Although no one came near my corner, the room still felt too crowded. The air was hot, being breathed by so many different people at once.
I needed some fresh air.
After throwing away my plate, and with the taste of frosting still on my lips, I headed for the door that led to the roof staircase.
The recovery center was a tall building, with six stories.
The first two floors were used for treatment, but everything above that was reserved for dorm rooms. Some patients who came here were fortunate enough to have a home, but many were not.
So, there were four full floors used to house people in need, and the rooms were always full.
Now that I’d graduated, once I moved out, someone new was going to be immediately moved into my space, and the room that had housed me all this time would instead offer shelter to someone else in need.
For right now, none of that mattered. The only thing I cared about was the fact that the size of the building meant there were a lot of stairs for me to climb before I, eventually, reached the door to the roof.
When I’d first arrived at the facility, I’d been banned from going to the roof since I was deemed as a suicide risk. A six-story building wasn’t particularly tall compared to the skyscrapers of San Francisco, but it was more than enough to end my life if I jumped off the top.
That wasn’t a risk anymore, and the staff could now trust me to come up here whenever I wanted. The roof had often been my safe place when I needed to get away from the constant noise and chaos of the dorms.
I felt the tension melt off my shoulders as I leaned against the waist high wall around the edge of the roof and looked out of the city.
Night had already fallen, and the city’s buildings were aglow with lights.
Artificial light was all we had, since the smog hanging over the city blocked out most of the stars.
Taking a deep breath though my nose, I held it in my lungs for a second before breathing out slowly. The March air had a refreshingly cool bite to it that felt like it scrubbed my lungs clean from the inside.
I thought I could ignore the bell ringer case. I told myself that it had nothing to do with me anymore. They didn’t need me. The case was progressing fine without me, so I could just focus on my recovery and put it all behind me…
But I’d just been fooling myself. Of course I couldn’t ignore the case. No matter how well I healed, there was still a small wound in my heart that would continue to fester until I got justice. So long as my abusers went unpunished, I would continue to feel like a victim.
Now, it looked like I would never get justice. The video said that the case had merely been halted due to the lawyer on our side dropping out, but I knew what that meant. The bell ringers had a lot of power people in their ranks, and they were using the power to bury the case.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
Once again, I was just as powerless as I’d been all my life.
The concrete bit into my elbows as I leaned my weight against the half wall blocking off the edge of the roof. Car horns and revving engines wafted on the air, accented by the sound of drunken shouting. The joys of living in a major city; silence never truly existed.
There was no warning. One moment, I felt nothing but the breath of the wind, and the next moment, something shoved hard against my shoulder. I pitched forward, my body half hanging over the edge of the roof. My fingers scraped against the concrete as I desperately tried to catch my balance.
The distance of six stories narrowed as though my eyes had turned into telescopes until I could see every crack in the sidewalk below me.
I barely had time to realize what was happening before there was another shove against my back, sending me completely over the edge of the wall.
My own scream stuck in my throat as my feet flipped over my head and I plummeted.
For a moment, I was in freefall, and panic turned my every thought to white noise.
It was pure luck when my desperately flailing hands caught on something. I felt a solid surface under my fingers and held on for dear life.
The sound of footsteps running away quickly faded, and I was left with nothing but the noises of the city hanging below me.
I stared at my own hands as if looking at an alien species. In my fall, I’d managed to catch an edge of decorative molding about two feet down from the top of the building.
“Help,” I tried to shout, but it came out as barely more than a whisper. I could barely hear my own voice. Panic had seized my vocal cords, stopping me from calling for help.
Not that anyone would have heard me. I was on the side of the building facing an alley. There was no one below me to notice my position.
My eyes pointed up toward the sky, stretched so wide in fear that I could feel air under my eyelids. Each breath I took came in a panicked little puff. Neither blood nor air made it to my brain.
“Okay,” I babbled to myself. “Okay. I can… I can do this.”
Bullshit! I’d never done anything like this before. Until this moment, I’d never even done a pullup. I didn’t even know I could hold my weight up by my fingertips. Yet, here I was.
The top of the wall wasn’t that far away. If I raised myself up and stretched my arm as far as I could, I’d probably be able to reach it.
My hands felt frozen, either by the cold air or by fear, I couldn’t tell.
“Fucking, come on. Just do it. One. Two Three.”
I hefted myself up as high as I could and let go of the wall with one hand.
I reached my arm forward, grasping half blind for the edge of the roof.
For a moment, my fingers found purchase on the concrete, but it wasn’t enough.
As soon as my weight came down, my grip faltered, and my hand slipped off the edge.
“No!” I shouted, properly this time, but there was nothing I could do. I instinctively closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the roof grow farther away or the ground come rushing up to meet me.
Someone shouted my name, just before I felt something grab onto my hand. My shoulder jolted in its socket as my fall suddenly halted, and my whole body knocked against the wall.
Someone had grabbed my hand just in the nick of time.
In a daze, I looked up to see a familiar face staring at me from over the edge of the roof.
“Clay?”