TRAPpED

 Chapter 1  February 12, 1984; 6:42 a.m. The kitchen floor was cold. It seems the cheek is more sensitive to temperature than other areas of the body. The linoleum didn’t feel as hard as other times I’d met with it face-to-face. But the drops of blood looked as it always did, sticky and dark. Maybe my face had become calloused from all the scar tissue, as my beatings got worse, or maybe I was still too fuck up to feel anything as solid as the ground. My spinning head started to slow down. I felt like I’d just stepped off the Tilt-a-Whirl at a carnival. No point of reference, nothing around me staying in one place, everything changing shape. My body, numb and lax, felt like it vibrated, so much that it hummed from the inside out. Though I lay motionless, I could feel every cell in my body vacillating in frantic horror. It was mass chaos without the coordinated efforts of my brain, which was off-line and useless at the time. With the toxic concoction that had flown through my body for the past several days, like every other time, the voices, in unison, grew louder and louder with each pump of my heart: “MORE METH!... MORE METH!...Like in the final mile of a marathon, my heart struggled to thrust yet one more time. That moment of truth where I realized I had to live through another day became an enforced reality, and I lay there in total contention and fear of the whole world, Glen, and all of life itself. Every ounce of my being was struggling to keep me from going back into a comatose state, or even better – dying. I didn’t have the nerve to kill myself, but I didn’t care much if it happened. I just knew one day Glen would exceed at doing it for me. Still, all areas of my body continued to scream like an angry, frantic mob, “More Meth! More Meth! More Meth!” As I rolled my head to face the ceiling, the saliva slid down my face and neck and into my left ear. The repulsive feeling allowed me to silently feel more humiliation ever so deservingly. I lay flat on my back, unable to lift my head. After a while I sat up; I began to remember who I was. I don’t think I ever felt more disgusted with anyone as I did at those moments of waking from near death. I don’t think I hated anyone more than the sorry little bitch at ground-zero. I loathed being trapped in my own skin. As the millions of dead cells floated aimlessly through my body, I sat, like every morning of this kind, thinking..., thinking..., always thinking about the past..., about the things...all of the bad things that had happened to me, how bad life was. Chapter 12  His dark-skinned face was right against mine. He growled at me and glared with squinty black eyes that looked like they had never seen a day of happiness. It was as if I was staring directly into the eyes of death. I began to have flashbacks of the first time I was beaten and raped, my heart felt as if it was going to beat out of my chest, I was so scared and angry. As he held his gun to my head, he unbuckled his pants with one hand. Then he unbuckled mine. I choked out another scream as I lay there in living terror. My back was up against the center console. It felt like I was being bent in half. He grabbed my neck and peered into my eyes with disgust and started raping me. He pounced on top of me, right there in my car. His stench of tequila and stale cigarettes was sickening. I desperately rolled my eyes left and right looking for someone or something to help free me from this monster. I suddenly remembered that there was a knife under the passenger seat. My right hand groped around the floor, feeling desperately. With each failed attempt to find the knife I became more and more frantic. I was hyperventilating and beginning to lose it completely. I felt something cold at my fingertips, and a second later I buried my knife somewhere into his upper body. What still scares me today is, I really wanted to kill this animal. Since he had to leave the driver’s side door open to hang his feet out while he was raping me, I managed to kick him out of my car. I gave him a final push as I was screaming guttural noises of sheer terror. I rolled my car down the hill, got it started, and sped to my sister’s house. I was so shook up that I don’t even remember driving there. I’m surprised I even found my way home. I had his blood and my blood all over me. I pulled my car around to the back of Terry’s house and just sat there gasping and shaking. My head was still bleeding some and my eye was swollen. When I finally started to come to my senses I reached into the back seat and grabbed an old sweatshirt. I started wiping the blood off of my face, neck, and arms as good as I could before realizing that my seats and the console had blood all over them too. My mind was racing with fear of getting caught.