They didn't break me.
Breaking implies pieces. Pieces can be found, gathered, and put back together with enough time and enough patience.
What they did was worse.
They took everything I was made of and unmade it. Down to the foundation. Down to the parts of me I didn't even know were load-bearing until they were gone. And now I'm standing in the wreckage of myself, trying to remember what used to be here, and I can't.
I can't remember who I was before them.
I’ve been deconstructed from the inside out.
The weeks move.
Five weeks out from the accident, I walk without any limp. My surgeon uses the word extraordinary at my appointment and shows me my scans. He points at things, and I nod and schedule my final follow-up.
I don't feel extraordinary.
I feel like a girl who healed her body because it was the one thing she could fix, and everything else is still exactly as broken as the night she sent three men out of a hospital room and listened to the door close three times.
I drive back to campus.
I park.
I go to class.
I come home.
I make dinner.
I read.
I do all of it every day, and I do it well, and nobody looking at me from the outside would know that I am walking around with a hollow chest.
This is just what I am now.
Maybe men destroy, and that's all they do. I have to learn to live in the wreckage and call it my life.
It's officially six weeks out. My ribs no longer hurt when I breathe. My leg is strong. I've been back at work, back in class, back in a life that looks fine from every angle.
I'm at my desk, studying. I read the same page for the tenth time because my brain keeps wandering somewhere I don't want it to.
I give up on the page and put the book down.
I sit in the quiet, thinking. I am so tired of thinking about everything, so I close my eyes. Just one moment to clear my thoughts.
I hear my door open.
My eyes open, and I go still.
I turn my head when I hear silent footsteps enter, uninvited.
Three figures in black fill my doorway.
I stand up so fast my chair falls back and hits the floor. I press myself against the desk, and my heart is violent in my chest.
I open my mouth—
And then I stop.
