Wake up. Don’t open your eyes. Just wait. 90 minutes of dreaming sleep makes you forget. When you open your eyes, you will remember. Even if you don’t, he will remind you. The flipping-flopping under your ribs. The cardio-acrobatics. The tightness in your chest. The burning. The sense that your heart is not of you anymore. It’s not yours. It’s out on loner. It’s a library book, a Blockbuster video, a matted mutt in an echoey concrete impound warehouse for orphans. Your heart is nothing. You are incidental. Your life is not as valuable as it’s supposed to be.
Now open your eyes. You didn’t forget. Still he reminds you. I might kill you.
Everyday is a cycle.
Every hour is a cycle.
Every minute is a cycle.
Every nanosecond is a cycle.
Every nanosecond is frozen sick, death always looming, always possible.
Everyone will say that this is true for everyone, which is true for everyone but still much more true for you than for everyone.
Dying is an Easy-Bake oven. Surviving is a failed cure for cancer.
You will take your feet from the warm bed and place them on the cold laminate floor that is tainted with a spot of red paint. You will dress. You will take your pills. You will brush your teeth. Floss. Fluoride mouthwash. You will go urgently to the bathroom when he makes you. You will find ways to get through the nanoseconds, through every cycle, from forgetting and remembering and the fatigued banality of pain, the wounds and the rape, to the popcorn sensation of his attempts to murder you before the world.
Surviving is an oxymoron, a self-contradicting scam. Surviving is a fight. Surviving is tedious.
Surviving is an Arctic desert where rain falls every day.
Surviving is disappointing and an enormous relief.
Surviving is nothing.
Surviving is your career. You will always hate the word.
Surviving is the teddy bear your mother threw out when you didn’t call her often enough.
Surviving is a burden.
Surviving kills.
Surviving is all there is.
Diana Spindler 