*Content Note:

This piece contains references to grooming behavior, child s*xual exploitation material, predatory behavior involving a minor, and trauma/CPTSD. No acts of s*xual abuse are described in graphic detail. Please read with care… and compassion.

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I’m in bed, staring up at the ceiling fan as it turns, trying to keep my eyes fixed on a single blade.

It has become a kind of meditation for me on mornings when I wake with so much memory, so much pain, so much emotion lodged inside my chest that I feel I might quite literally burst.

And I wonder how much this human can hold before she does.

Before she splits down the middle.

Before the mind fractures in ways that cannot be repaired.

I wonder how much damage has already been done to the delicate tissue of my brain over the forty-three years I have inhabited it. How much of that damage could be found on a scan—traced in shadow or light, pointed to by a stranger in a white coat—and how much remains entirely invisible, existing only in the architecture of who I have become.

And I wonder how many other women are lying beneath their ceiling fans this morning, choosing a single blade and following it around and around, trying desperately to make the floodwaters inside them recede long enough to get out of bed.

Long enough to make the coffee.

To answer the questions.

To tend to the people who need tending.

To move through another ordinary day with some semblance of normalcy, while no one around them has any idea how much effort it took simply not to burst.

This morning’s particular memory was of a man who played Jesus in a local church’s Christmas play for many years.

A man I loved deeply.

A man I once believed I would spend the rest of my life with.

He was a few years older than me. We met on Halloween night at a drum circle held inside another local church. There was a large tribe of us who gathered for these circles, usually beneath the trees at Cincinnati’s Ault Park, but when the weather changed, so did the location.

That night, my young daughter and I were dressed as Greek goddesses.

I was living through one of the most difficult periods of my life—a tumultuous divorce in which nearly a thousand miles and an empty bank account separated me from my youngest child, my son.

I was trying desperately to construct something resembling a normal life for my daughter while waiting for life to open some small window we could crawl through, one that might lead us back to him permanently.

Until then, I simply kept going.

I packed lunches. I made plans. I got dressed. I took my daughter to drum circles dressed as a Greek goddess.

I performed the small rituals of being alive while, somewhere beneath them, I was becoming a hollowed-out version of a woman.

And that was when I met the man who played Jesus.

At the end of the evening, more than fifty of us joined hands in a great circle and chanted Om together.

It is quite beautiful, actually.

Dozens of separate voices eventually lose their edges. The sound becomes one low vibration moving through hands and bodies and floorboards until it is difficult to tell where your own voice ends and everyone else’s begins.

My hand happened to be holding that of a short, long-haired, bearded man with a wide smile.

When the circle broke, we began talking.

The connection was immediate.

Kismet, I thought.

I know now, all these years later, that it was something else entirely.

Deep in the ocean lives the anglerfish.

From its head extends a modified spine called the illicium, and at its end hangs something extraordinary: a small, luminous lure called the esca.

A pretty little light in a place where there should be none.

Creatures in the surrounding darkness see it and move toward it.

Of course they do.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

Of course they do.

I had been living somewhere near the bottom of my own dark sea by then—grieving my son, drowning in divorce, trying every day to keep my daughter above water while quietly disappearing beneath it myself.

And then, in all that darkness, I saw something glowing.

So I moved toward it.

I mistook illumination for safety.

I mistook being seen for being saved.

I mistook the light for a raft the universe had thrown into the water and grabbed hold with both hands.

I did not yet understand that some things glow in the darkness not to lead us out of it—

but to draw us closer.

There were red flags, of course.

There always are, in retrospect.

Things that seemed small enough at the time. Moments I accepted explanations for. Details I folded neatly away because I did not yet know what they belonged to.

One of those details found its way back to me this morning.

During the years he played Jesus in the local church’s Christmas production, I went with him once. I wanted to see him perform. He had been part of the production for years, and loving someone, I thought, meant showing up for the things that mattered to them.

As it happened, I already knew the church.

It sat in a neighboring town, and I had passed through its doors many times as a girl – for services, Bible camp, baptisms, a wedding. It belonged to that strange geography of childhood: places you may not remember precisely but your body recognizes when you return.

And now I was walking back through those doors as a grown woman beside a man who had spent years playing the savior.

Again, I thought: kismet.

There was a girl in the production that night. He told me she was fourteen.

He didn’t introduce me to her.

In fact, he didn’t introduce me to anyone.

Almost immediately, I had the uncomfortable feeling that my presence was something he had not actually wanted. I couldn’t have explained why. There are things the body notices long before the mind is willing to give them language.

The girl flirted with him.

At first, I dismissed it as innocent—the harmless infatuation of a teenage girl with an older man, the lead in a play they had performed together for years.

Then I noticed the way she looked me up and down.

I smiled at her.

“Hello! So nice to meet you.”

She did not smile back.

I remember realizing that she did not see me as another adult in the room.

She saw me as competition.

I was in my thirties. He was in his forties. She was fourteen.

So I made it harmless.

A crush, I told myself.

Just a teenage crush.

Later, I asked him about it.

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s had a thing for me for years.”

For years.

I heard the words.

I just didn’t yet know how to hear them.

A few weeks later, we were sitting together when his phone chimed on the coffee table. I glanced toward the screen and saw her name.

“You text her?”

Something inside me tightened.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just helping her get through life stuff. Boyfriend stuff. She’s young. I sort of took her under my wing, you know?”

Maybe I could have believed the words.

But I remember his hand.

How quickly it moved.

How he snatched the phone from the table and angled the screen away from me.

It is strange what memory preserves.

Entire years disappear, yet a hand crossing the distance between a couch and a coffee table can survive perfectly intact.

That is the hand I remembered this morning.

That is the tiny piece of film my mind decided, without my permission, to pull from its archive and project against the inside of my skull while I lay beneath the turning fan.

Because two years later, while he and I were still talking about forever, his apartment was raided. 

He was arrested.

Then imprisoned.

For CP/CSAM (child s*xual abuse material).

There are moments in a life that divide everything into before and after.

That was just one of mine.

And perhaps trauma is partly what happens when the past refuses to remain past. When the mind returns to old rooms carrying information it did not possess the first time and asks you to walk through them again.

Look at this.

Now look again.

Look at the girl.

Look at the phone.

Look at his hand.

Look at yourself sitting there, accepting the explanation because you loved him and because the alternative had not yet become imaginable.

Years later, there would be language for what accumulated inside me.

There would be diagnoses and terminology (CPTSD, MDD). Explanations for why certain memories arrive not as memories at all, but as weather. As pressure in the chest. As water rising somewhere inside the body.

But the body had already begun keeping its own record.

Not in sentences.

In bone.

In blood.

In the sudden tightening of the chest when an ordinary morning opens a door you had not intended to walk through.

And so here I am.

In bed.

Staring at the ceiling fan.

Trying desperately to choose one blade and keep my eyes upon it as it circles.

Around.

And around.

And around.

Somewhere in the deepest parts of the ocean, an anglerfish is waiting in perfect darkness.

Its little light is still glowing.

And somewhere, something lost in that darkness is moving toward it.

Of course it is.

What else would something drowning do

when it sees light?

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