Page 154 of Breathe Like Hell

I wish it didn’t happen.

It was all I could think. I was stuck in the same loop I’d been caught in for years. The one I had no clue how to break free of.

The wishing consumed me, and I couldn’t stop it.

How was I supposed to fight against that thought?

I wish it didn’t happen.

I fucking wish that more than anything on Earth.

I was devolving into some lesser thing, falling to my base instincts. I couldn’t come to terms with this trauma, because I couldn’t even think about it without feeling like this. Every time I thought about my brother, I thought about all the bad things he did to me, and then I thought about how I never told him to stop.

I thought about the girl in the grainy Photo Booth videos, grateful to have a new older brother who protected her from their father as best as he could.

I thought about the girl posting on her Instagram after her high school classes, longing for a different life, wishing she never had to go home.

I thought about the girl with a pit in her stomach on her eighteenth birthday because she knew it was going to end soon. He’d graduate college and move away and be done. How fucking sick was that?

And I knew it wasn’t consensual. I knew that.

I know that.

But my brain wouldn’t keep reminding me how many times I let him fuck me, and I never uttered a word against it. Didn’t say no. Didn’t say stop. Just let it happen.

Over and over and over.

Turning my childhood bedroom into a place stained by nightmares.

Darkness infiltrated every crack in the thin walls, every dusty corner, every hiding place, getting thicker and heavier until there was nowhere to go to escape it, until no more parts of me were left untouched.

Even now, when I saw someone driving the same car he used to have, it made my stomach drop. How many times had he ruined me in that car? Every driving lesson that ended with a coerced blowjob, every trip to the beach that ended with me getting fucked in the backseat.

The one person I loved most in the world taking my love and using it against me.

Punishing me with my love.

I hated the truth of that statement. Hated that I’d loved him that much. More than both of my parents, more than my friends. It felt like he was the only one who actually saw me, the only one who cared about protecting me. And I couldn’t stop loving him, even when he hurt me.

It was all a lie.

Tears rolled down my temples as I stared at the ceiling, making my hair wet. I was lying on my back, my spine pressed to the linoleum.

But my chest was completely motionless, my ribs frozen.

The world was closing in on me, and it was like my brain had forgotten how to send the breathe signal to my lungs. Pressure built in my skull, dark spots dancing in my vision, my fingers tingling and my face stiff. All my blood had left my extremities as my body tried to save itself from a trauma that was no longer happening.

Somehow, I managed to gasp in a single breath.

But then the same sensation enveloped me again. It terrified me. Was it possible for my brain to actually stop functioning like that? Forget how to tell my lungs to breathe?

More pressure was building in my brain and my face, a rope encircling my skull and pulling tighter.

Tomorrow, I would have to look at him again.

Tomorrow, I would have to be in the same shitty trailer he’d fucked me in.

The skin on my face felt tight, a needle-like sensation crawling over my cheeks and my lips. My hands were stuck with my fingers bent into claws, and my lungs were broken. They wouldn’t take in any air. I stared, wide-eyed, at the ceiling. Seconds were ticking past and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even try.