Page 29 of What Goes Around

A product. A slave.

Something to be bought and owned.

After a while, I stopped fighting all together.

Not because it hurt less.

But because it changed nothing.

I cried until there was nothing left in me. Until even that ran dry and all that remained was this hollow, aching silence.

I had never believed in God.

But in the dark, with nothing else left, I found myself whispering anyway, words I didn’t even understand, asking for something I couldn’t name.

6 Months in Captivity

I didn’t know how long I had been there before time stopped feeling real.

Days dissolved into one another, grey and endless, stretching into something hollow that I couldn’t measure anymore.

I learned not to ask questions. Not to resist. Not to hope.

Ten men had used me last night.

Part of me still felt everything. The shame, the disgust, the hatred, the guilt that clung to me no matter how much I tried to push it away.

And part of me felt nothing at all, like something inside me had withered and died just to survive it.

They told me if I didn’t perform, I wouldn’t get my next hit.

And I needed it.

God, I needed it.

The drugs were the only thing that made it stop. The only thing that dulled the edges enough for me to exist inside my own body without breaking apart completely.

So I did what they wanted.

I existed, but not really. Not in any way that mattered.

Sometimes the drugs twisted everything. Reality bent and blurred at the edges until I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

That’s when I saw him.

A little boy sitting at the edge of the mattress, holding a small bunch of hand-picked flowers, stems uneven, petals slightly crushed.

“Get well soon, Mommy,” he whispered.

Something in my chest broke open.

I reached for him, desperate, my fingers shaking as I tried to hold on to something that felt soft, something that felt good.

But he always drifted away before I could touch him.

20 Months in Captivity

Every once in a while, they stopped giving me the drugs.