Then Beat And Breathe
THEN: BEAT AND brEATHE
“Watch! You will watch!”
Memories of my father’s harsh command rumble through my head as I cower in my room. My small hands shake with every image of the grisly scene flashing through my head.
The stranger’s twisted screams. Blood exploding over walls and stoic bystanders.
They didn’t even tell me his crime. I kept wondering if it was the same as mine and this would be me one day.
I’ve encountered plenty of violence in my nine short years on this earth. Witnessed it. Experienced it. In some ways it’s my entire existence, since I live under the constant threat of blood and pain. Any time I do something they don’t like, I become the eye of the storm. They call it “training.” I don’t know if other kids are trained in the same way. I don’t know a lot about life outside these walls.
Today’s training, though...
I choke on each breath, fighting to clear my mind of the poison. But there’s no escape. It coats every recess of my head. Now it’s spilling out into the air around me like an invisible cloud.
And there’s no promise of relief.
No one I can talk to. No space to vent or means of processing the gruesome, confusing scene they just forced on me. I’ve learned the hard way these feelings have to stay inside, where they fester like a devious disease that slips in unnoticed, then seeps into every vein and artery. Eventually, the toxins infect my heart, where it pumps the poison back through my body in a maddening cycle.
I need a way to get it out. It’s suffocating me. Killing me breath by breath…
My gaze rests on the desk in the corner of my bedroom. It’s sparsely filled since they don’t allow “frivolous indulgences” like art supplies. But there’s one object they endorse. They applaud meticulous records and strategic planning.
With trembling limbs, I push myself to my feet and stagger toward the desk. My hands barely cooperate as I slide a notebook toward me. I grasp a pen and fight like hell to bend it to my will.
Devious disease…
I scrawl the phrase on the first blank line.
Heart infected
Lungs ingesting toxic air
Beat and breathe
Beat and breathe
I drop the pen and scrub at my face. The hideous words scream back at me in blotted ink, but they don’t hurt as much when they’re on the page.
My chest is lighter.
My hands are no longer shaking.
The terror I felt just a moment ago has faded into a dull throb in my chest. Temporary, like the cut on my hand. It hurt so much when the knife first slid over my palm during last week’s instruction, but now it’s little more than a nuisance.
I pick up the pen again.
Fear is a scratch not a scar.
Air rushes into my lungs freely for the first time in hours as I trace the comforting words.
My words.
Words that will never be free outside of these pages, but maybe that will be enough.
Maybe I finally found a place to safely store my soul.