Five Days Missing
There are things we fear as women. Everyday, pedestrian things. Things that lift the hair on our necks, that stiffen our vertebrae, that ratchet our already heightened nervous systems to a state of alert.
Perhaps he sits an inch too close to us on a public bus. Perhaps we hear his footsteps behind us on a street that’s just a little underlit.
He might be that guy from work, the one who made an advance, the one we had to rebuff—maybe it pissed him off; maybe we denied him something he felt he was owed.
Maybe it’s missing the last train home. Or those several agonizing seconds it takes to get the key out of our purse on the front doorstep at night. Maybe it’s smiling in the wrong way at the figure on the street corner, sensing him watch you, eyes boring into your body, as you go.
It can be coming upon an intruder in our own homes—here for the television and the jewelry but deciding that while he’s here he might have something else, too.
It’s locating the door in every room.
It’s the sizing up of peers, of neighbors, of colleagues, of the guy behind the counter at the store, the one sitting a few seats away from you in an otherwise empty movie theater.
It is the minute-by-minute decision-making, the endless calculations, the mapping of escape routes, the constant, exhausting negotiation of egos.
These fears have become so embedded in the breath of my own life that they are as known to me as the lines on my palm.
Yet I never thought to fear this. I never allowed my mind to wander that far, to stretch itself to something so completely outlandish.
Now I am trapped, bound, and it is so very dark. My head pounds, hot and heavy, something wet and sticky congealed at the base of my skull. When I touch it, an image of split fruit flashes into my mind—nauseating—and I kick myself for having been prepared for every eventuality but this one.
There I go again.
Blaming myself. For being a woman. For allowing myself to be taken when, in reality, nothing in my power was ever going to stop you, was it?
You are the one who has done wrong, who has harmed. You are the one who has turned my life on its head and reduced it to four damp walls; one pipe; bound, bruised hands.
But the next step is on me. I am the one who is going to have to find a way to get out.