Robbed

From early childhood, I wanted to disappear. Not to die—to evaporate, to become particulate matter, motes dancing in a sunbeam, noticed only when there was too much of me in the air. I was wronged. Robbed. Not in a grand sense—no chalk outline. But a quiet shortchanging of the soul before it understood currency. In the drollery of my development, it was decided: my hair would be red— not Botticelli's royal crimson, but the Ophelia-Medea archetype, "crazy redhead," amplified by a buffet of mental illness diagnoses tossed in on a dare. My skin: pallid as a Victorian child dying of tuberculosis among bronzed, sandy-haired girls in a beach town. By seven, I understood the otherness that would define me. So I wanted out. Naturally, next came the drugs. They couldn't change my form, but they didn't have to. At seventeen, a pale green OxyContin pill— scored like a fossilized lake— became my passport to oblivion. I crushed it. Snorted it. The high: a warm, beige fog that made fear irrelevant. My body, a too-tight freckled suit, became a distant thing. I thought, This is what it feels like to be normal. Here is what I have never said out loud: I am not addicted to the drugs themselves. I am addicted to freedom from myself. The worst part of self-destruction is its intimacy. You become so close to your addictions that leaving them feels like killing the part of you that taught you to survive. So now I am forty. A year sober in church basements with terrible coffee. And I am still afraid. My fear starts in the belly. A gentle, warm expansion, like a furnace in an ancient brownstone. It rises through parquet floors, curving staircases, towering columns, searching for cold bodies to thaw. Then it constricts my chest— a hand grasping another in a pact of suffocation. It bursts from my eyes, raging and wet, incapable of going dry. Grief for a life I didn't live. Anger for the robbery. And a terrifying, bottomless tenderness for every broken, well-intentioned version of myself, real and imagined. But then it stops. Distraction saves the day— scrubbing tiles, organizing books, walking miles with podcasts about neutron stars. Cyclical servitude. Until distraction fails. The furnace reawakens. I told you: I was robbed. But here is what I have only lately begun to say to anyone. the robbery made me a keen observer. My exile bred a cartographer's skill for mapping unseen borders in a room, the tiny daily desolations in others. A miserable, lonely superpower. I see her, the girl on the beach in the straw hat. The teenager crushing green tablets in a locked bathroom. The woman in her twenties who thought numbness was grace. The woman in her thirties who couldn't remember the last time she'd felt sober sunlight without it feeling like a threat. Again, I am forty now. I am still learning to inhabit the space I occupy. Some days the furnace wins. Some days I stand very still in the middle of a room, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, and I ask; What if, instead of disappearing, I was seen? What if, instead of a ghost, I became more than the witness of small things— But also one of the things witnessed? I don't have an answer. But I have stopped running from the question. That is the only freedom I have ever truly earned— which is to say, not freedom at all, just a longer leash on the same old furnace. It still wakes. I still wait.