Unprompted

There are things far too terrible and far too terrifying to reveal in any other way than fiction. No one would understand, let alone would even believe me, if they knew the things I keep hidden.

I am the secret keeper. Always have been. I kept secrets for one man for 32 years. I hate lying, but it’s all I ever seem able to do. I wonder if that’s why I don’t talk much.

My friend tells me her son has begun speaking like a baby when he’s not around children his own age. She tells me he spits in her face and throws toys at her. She can’t imagine what the problem is. All I can do is stare at her, but I couldn’t say it, even if I wanted to. How do you tell someone you think their kid is showing symptoms of PTSD because all she and her husband do is drink and use drugs?

Her dad drank too, so she’s a secret keeper, just like me. You can always tell them. They look almost too sad to be real.

There’s a home video of me, just a bit younger than her son is now. We are at my preschool graduation. The kids are singing and at first I sing with them, but eventually I see myself withdraw into my own head, and it makes me sick because I know what is happening to that kid, to that little girl, to me, and I can’t stop it.

If I were to write a true fictionalized story of my life, it’d come out a lot like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. At some point midway through the second book, the reader would think, “Wait a minute. How could all of this really be happening to one person?” The answer, of course, is that victims get re-victimized. I was always so weak, so vulnerable, so easy to take from. So people kept taking. And that’s how you make someone like Lisbeth Salander. Take away all her desire to make ties to the world and then, surprise, she stops trying to make them. I listen to all the women talk tonight, all of them victims of sexual assault, and I can’t fathom telling them how many times it’s happened to me, how many different men, how many different ways, how many different worlds of denial I tried to wrap myself in to make it all feel not real, make it feel like fiction, take away its power.

But I don’t say anything. I am the secret keeper.