You lie on your bed, your head swimming with fear. Anything you do is going to hurt someone in some way. You'll be burdening them with your problems and your fears, destroying them as you spiral downward. You can't do that; you can't force them to live with this, and so you hide in your room.
There was a time when you wouldn't have given a second thought about burdening someone else with this, but you've changed since then. Now, you're used to hiding yourself, to flying solo. You carried around the burden of God, wonderful though it is, and shouldered the burdens of Stevie, Grace, Adam, Casper, and Judith and yet you survived. It was sharing your burden with Adam Rove that almost killed you.
You gave him your secret to shoulder, your faith to uphold, but he just let it fall on empty words. Sure, he believed you later, but that was after the damage had been done and you were immersed in a world of lamps and insanity that ripped apart your soul. You always wondered if it was the platitude, not the silence, that pushed you into desolation.
But there's even more, of course, for His creation is complex. It is not just the reasons of God that make you afraid to talk to Adam but the reasons of man as well. It was not to long ago that Adam had wanted to sleep with you; in his eyes, you were beautiful. You always kind of took it for granted, his love for you, but now what will see when he looks at you?
You'd love to delude yourself and say that nothing will change, but you now that's complete crap. Because, you see, you can feel the change within you, tearing apart the old Joan Girardi. To say that nothing has changed would not only be a lie but a platitude. And platitudes destroy.
…….
You stand in front of your mirror, trying on different outfits and hairstyles, trying to decide who you are now. Before you left for crazy camp, you dyed your hair black and styled it in bangs just to mess with His creation. When you wanted to be "bad" like Judith, you wore black and shed your scarves. You drew the boxes and then put yourself in them, painting yourself as whoever you wanted to be. But now there's no box to put yourself in, no fashion fads to flow with, and you're lost as to what you should be. There is no standard dress code when it comes to telling stuff like this to your brothers.
Telling Kevin and Luke is your unofficial assignment for the day, handed down not by the Almighty but by Mom and Dad instead (At least they're direct.). They seem to be on this big openness kick, chattering on about how talking about it will help you cope. Part of you wants to bite back at them, to point out just how open Mom was about the rape or how much Dad told you about Richard, but you're silent. Talking was what got you in trouble in the first place-talking to God, to Adam, to Dr. Dan… And yet you keep talking. You don't want to make that mistake again.
...It is a quarter past two when hunger drives you out of your room. You haven't eaten all day, and common sense dictates you can't hide up there for eternity. So you head downstairs, praying for solitude.
As turns out, you have no such luck. Just as you're sitting down at the table with your chocolate sauce, Pop Tart, and Coco Puffs (Thank Him for comfort food, at least), Luke comes in and sits down across the table from you. Thanks a lot.
He's sitting there across from you, staring at your junk food fest. Normally, you know, he would make some smart remark. But this isn't normal, and Luke's smart enough to realize that. You can tell he's on the talking, of asking you a question, and if you hear Are you okay? one more time you just might scream.
So you grab a napkin and a pencil from the counter and began to write. You scrawl quickly choppy sentences, blunt and to the point. And then, without thinking about it, you sign your name in delicate cursive, making it official, reinforcing the real.
You shove your makeshift confession across the table to Luke, grab your bag, and walk out the door.
...You wander the streets, dodging pigeons and pedestrians without much thought. It as though you're walking on clouds or water, undefined by effort and friction (See, you learned something in Physics.). Thoughts and memories run through your head in a jumble, so much so that you cannot distinguish one from another. Thinking without thought.
This helps you, though you don't have a clue as to why. You've done it for as long as you can remember, back even to elementary school. You would just walk off in the your little neverland, going nowhere because you had nowhere to go. Once, you tried to explain this to Dr. Dan, but he just smiled smugly as though you were just proving his point once again, proving your own insanity.
You're staring down at the sidewalk when a flash of red catches your eye. A little red-haired girl stands at the corner and waves. Around the corner, a black man standing at a folding table glances up and smiles. You cross the street and find yourself walking next to a boy with spiky brown hair who gently nods as you meet His eyes. Before you can say anything, He walks off, raising His hand casually in the air. It takes you a moment to realize that you don't have to say anything at all.
Then you begin to walk home, knowing that He is walking beside you. You always figured you wandered in search of something. But you weren't searching at all, just finding what was always there. You just didn't know it. And you've finally got an answer now.
Thank You.