WERE ALL THOSE YEARS SO SAD by Jeannie Ewing

Content Warning: rape

I held her in my arms, this younger version of myself—a teen, a mere child. She sat in a dark corner of the room, alone, knees to her chest, shivering. I can’t remember why she thought she was alone, because those were the years she surrounded herself with people: friends constantly rotating in and out of her daily life both at school and at home. 

There were family gatherings, holidays, birthdays. Friday night football with pizza and ice cream following. There was prom and MORP and homecoming. She filled her life with other human bodies, to fill the void she could not otherwise identify. The yearning that strained the ache in her heart was to be noticed and loved, but she believed she did not belong.

As I approach her, I keep these things in mind—that adolescence was, for her, dismal and bleak. They were sad years. 

“You don’t have to stay here by yourself,” I tell her. She doesn’t look up. I sense her sorrow, maybe grief, and I want her to know I have waited a long time to attune myself to the silence she carries. Now is the time.

“I’m sorry I forgot about you for so long,” I continue. Finally, her eyes flash upward, and she seems to accept my meager apology: the way I’ve kept her invisible, like everyone else has, until this instant, the way I’ve shoved her into a cave within me, dank, cold, and hollow. 

“Would you like a hug?” I ask.

I offer her my hand, and she tentatively accepts it, rising to her feet. I open wide my arms, and she collapses inside them, burying her face in my chest. She heaves and sobs, and I hold on tightly. “I won’t leave you,” I tell her. “You are part of me. You are with me always.”

It’s clear the deeper unraveling won’t happen in this moment, but I remember what she is living now: 

the volatile outbursts from my younger brother as he threatened to kill me wielding a kitchen knife during his bipolar rages, and I’d scurry to my bedroom before he could get to me, barricading the door with a loveseat and waiting for him to walk away;

a boy who shoved me against a locker in a darkened hallway and grabbed my breasts during semiformal sophomore year;

a different boy who digitally raped me after I blacked out during an alcohol binge that, when I returned to consciousness, rendered my vagina sore and my dress hiked up to my chest;

another boy who asked me during U.S. History class my junior year, “Do you spit or swallow?”

a boy I loved who arrived at my house unannounced during senior year who pushed me to the floor, straddled me, and attempted penetration before I kicked him in the nuts;

emotionally absent parents who fretted over my brother’s erratic behavior, as he skipped school and hung out with the punks and outliers who participated in gang activity and illegal drugs.

There’s more, I know, but these incidents defined the gaping wounds slashed in her heart by betrayal and time, the way she spends her time trying to forget. They are the impetus for her bad poetry that her Honors English teacher reads aloud during class, impressed. She neglects her body. Actually, she loathes it. Every day she stands in front of the bathroom mirror for seconds, never longer, because she recoils at the sight of her own face.

Never mind the rest of her: her large breasts, her wide hips, thick thighs. There is no place to love a body that has become objectified by horny teenage boys. Flesh is not sacred, after all, nor is pleasure or desire or want or need. All of these sins taint her life, because she is filled with passion and pain. There is longing in her limbs and loins, but she denies them. These she is not permitted to feel or unveil or entertain, because they lead to the destruction of the soul. 

That’s the cause of her hiding herself in the corners of every room, everywhere. Once, she sat on a couch with eight teenagers at her best friend Rachel’s house, stuffed like canned tuna yet feeling very much out of place. This was the day Jared told a new friend in the group, “What you see is what you get with Jeannie,” which she took as the height of insult rather than the compliment she views it to be today.

Everyone in the room chortled with glee, but she carried an invisible onus, and she didn’t know why she wasn’t happy like the rest of them, why she couldn’t smile when she sat in a roomful of friends who seemed more like strangers in that moment. 

They were sad years for her, but were they lost years? Was there nothing good to hold onto? 

There was music and writing. There were the robins who nested in the bush by the front porch every year. She recognized them, because they had a ring around one eye and a tuft of feathers on top of their head. There were movies with candy and buttered popcorn, late shifts at the restaurant and shopping sprees at the mall on Saturday afternoons. There were lazy Sundays spent in rural northwestern Ohio visiting her aging grandmother—a quiet reprieve from otherwise brimming days. 

She doesn’t recall the sunrises or the vacations to the Caribbean now. She can’t seem to conjure her favorite steak dinner at the Pine Valley Country Club or the fizzy sodas with cherry grenadine topped with whipped cream. Swimming or sunbathing. Reading on the screened-in porch with Muffin, her cat, curled up at her feet for hours until dusk settled in. 

The times she accompanied her mom to the local Amish produce stand and hefted cases of freshly picked green beans or ripened strawberries to the van, hauling them in the house, washing and chopping and stealing a morsel or two when Mom wasn’t looking. The decadent strawberry shortcakes her mom would make for dessert that night, the flaky warmth of biscuit combined with crisp, tart juice from strawberries. 

Delights of living are bygones when you are hurting and broken and no one seems to notice. At least, no one asks. To the outside world, you are fine—maybe better than fine, because everyone tells you how sparkling your eyes are and how your cheeks have this natural rosy glow and why do you wear makeup when your skin is so radiant and clear—but inside there is a tempest raging, and you cannot make sense of any of it. 

That’s the version of myself I met, and I knew she was still convinced she wasn’t welcome in the world, that she didn’t fit in and never would. But today I am neither young nor old. Middle age has a way of softening one’s perspective and sharpening the memory. I look behind me, but I also look ahead. And what I notice when I glance over my shoulder is that the teenage girl I once was feels left behind, uninvited, so I turn around to reach for her.

I will return to her again and again, for as long as it takes to restore her faith in her gift, in herself.