Yeah, I’d been there, too. I remembered that constant feeling of nervous anticipation when I first arrived here. It still cameback 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 ofthe 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.
