Hardly Breathing, but I Exist

Trigger warning: sexual assault

A dense light slid through the spaces between the buildings across from the rectangular apartment where I slept, its warmth shining onto my forehead through the crocheted blanket I had wrapped around me like a cocoon. There were not many trees in the city, leaving the air to be shared by the opening, talking, drinking, vibrating mouths of nearly 8 million inhabitants. We shared the light, too, as it blended our silhouettes in a shadow puppet show that played out across the fire escapes that aligned like a makeshift mezzanine. My eyes adjusted to a day that seemed newer in the absence of a reminder that I was going nowhere with my life. 

This city had slowly killed me, leaving my body to ask for favors and drugs. There had been too much of everything—unfamiliar faces, flashing lights that held no purpose other than to distract—and too little of a quiet that had often been disguised as nothing. I now realized that silence in New York City was a threat. It meant that the store managers had gone home, the CEOs were tucked into their carefully designed apartments, the musicians were rolling around on stages in basements bars, and the Washington Square Park dwellers who sat with pigeons on their shoulders had found a temporary shelter. I had come to Manhattan only three years prior with a mind that optimistically viewed the future as something that would not harm me. There was promise in the lies I had accidentally told myself. 

Usually I would wake up and find bodies on the floor, sleeping beauties too drunk to make it home at night. Not everyone was welcome here and many would not want to be, but I suppose I found that it was a place to lie down at night that did not expect me to wake up, and that comforted me. 

I slept until long past noon. This was not unusual, but also frowned upon by commuters who had wrinkled suits by mid-morning. I found one of my three pairs of pants on the floor beside the couch I nestled into. I shuffled through the pocket. Two dollars. There was still some white residue on its edges, last night’s dregs. 

I closed my eyes and fell back against the pillow. A triangular, particle light swam above me. Suddenly he was there, the person I could not rid from the forefront of my mind. The night before he had pressed himself against the thin blanket that hardly protected me against late fall. It was cold, but the warm hand on my back woke me. I had not been dreaming, only existing on the surface of sleep. When I turned toward him, he quickly moved away and collapsed himself into a wide, wicker armchair against the opposite wall, as if he had been there all along.

You’re really winning me over. He had said to me a few months prior. His words had coughed up my bones, displaying them upon cigarette butts and tattered lingerie that had seemed so impenetrable with the tags on. 

He had pushed me against the bathroom wall, whispering things that hardly seemed real anymore. My breasts exposed, my jeans down to my knees, I was emboldened by the immediacy of his want. We would not wait. It had to be now. His direct stare had initially startled me. It undressed me until I was bare. I was breathing, really breathing—loudly and then softly.

The two dollars still sat in my palm. I folded them into a neat, thin stack and rolled off the couch. There was evidence of a recent gathering, or so it seemed. Every night was a gathering in this studio apartment. The owner of the apartment was a lonely widow whom I had met at the bar three floors below, only six months earlier. We became friends through hazy conversations and the short interval between night and day when the bar was most rambunctious. She allowed me to keep one of the regular “beds” in her apartment for some reason that was unknown to me. There were circumstances for my being there. I had fought with my family, arms raised, the drugs found in the coin slot of my pocketbook. When I had approached Elouise and asked her for a place to stay, she invited me with one open arm, the other holding an overflowing pitcher of margarita. 

The apartment existed as a hand-me-down: its once vibrant colors looked as if they had been machine washed on the wrong setting too many times. The yellow walls were painted like bananas that were beginning to rot. All of the furniture, two couches and three chairs, was patterned with colorful shapes. There were personal artifacts nailed all over the walls: decorative crosses, wooden frames with no photos in them, beaded necklaces that had been engraved in stone. Elouise’s taste was mess. She adored messy walls, messy items, and messy people. I suppose that is why she adored me. 

Elouise would say, “You are lost.” At the time, I thought that she did not mean to insult me, but used the reminder as a factual statement of my current situation. She told me that every day. Eventually I believed her and accepted this status as someone who could not be found.

The mornings when I woke up and Elouise was home were filled with the only joy that existed in my life. She would bring me a bright, colorful mug filled with hot coffee and we would laugh about whatever came up. She would complain to me that I had to clean up my “corner” or the place in the apartment where my few bags were thrown. She would ask me my plans for the day, which were often nonexistent. Nevertheless, we clinked coffee cups each morning and toasted to an absence of success. There wasn’t much else to celebrate.

I was standing in the hallway attached to the vestibule of the bar, the hallway attached to my stairs. The stairs . . . they were mine now. I had never intended to own anything here. I was waiting for Hayden. He had finally returned a text message I had sent only two hours earlier. He answered, telling me that he was at a bar we used to hang out at a few blocks away. Used to. I haven’t known him that long.

I saw his figure turn into the vestibule. For a moment, he stood there, staring at me through the glass pane on the door. I broke his gaze, pushing the door open.

“Hey,” he said, quietly.

“Hello.” I was particularly shy on this night, as we had not spent a night together in months. We had spent a night together, sleeping adjacent to one another, one body on the couch, one body on the floor, but there were no slight kisses in the center of the crowded bar or brushes of hands as we passed each other in the hallway to the bathroom.

He followed me up to the home I had made my Hell, a Hell that had started to feel like a comfort. I thought of the moments that had led me here, the decisions I had made in dreamlike intoxication. These were my safe stairway thoughts. When one is in transition, they are much safer. As I moved, I could still choose to run.

I opened the double lock to the apartment. Hayden walked in past me. Elouise slept soundly across from the doorway, rising slightly as her breath filled her chest. Hayden walked down the wide hallway that led to the front of the apartment, facing the glass ceiling, his reflection, a shadow.

I walked up behind him, slowly grasping for his hand. He pulled away and turned around.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” I could see his raised eyebrows even in the darkness—the leftover light from the streetscape casting a dim sheet across the side of his face. He unzipped his pants and fell back onto the couch. I fell to my knees. It went on like that for a while. I tried to concentrate, but only felt comfort in human contact, even as I was degraded. 

We moved together, servicing his needs. Staring forward, I traced the lines of a tattoo on his lower stomach that I’d never noticed. It was a pointilist image, a series of small dots; a circular throne or a genie’s lamp. I thought of the times I had lain on his mattress in his bedroom. I had never observed the creases in his body, traced the small parts of his flesh, or considered the meanings behind the ink on his arms. It occurred to me then that I did not know him at all.

“Take your pants off,” he said, suddenly. I turned to gaze in his direction, locking my eyes with him. His lips were pushed together, partially upturned into a demented smile. “You know where it’s going, because I’m not paying for an abortion.”

I turned around, slowly and used the couch as a support.

My mind began to wander to a diner in Chelsea. We had sat there, across from each other, smiling and talking about light things—books, movies. It was the morning after his birthday. We decided to brunch after sleeping at a friend’s apartment. I spoke and he listened. I talked about the poets I admired. He teased me, we laughed.

It was becoming unbearable. I raised my head, slightly, and asked him to stop.

I wasn’t really there. I felt as if I were looking down from the vent above the couch, trying to figure out what this vulnerable woman was doing in this place. I replaced her with a shadow that could magically disappear from her place on the couch and reappear beside her abuser with the means to defend herself. She would pull him back from the woman he abused and push him out the door with the strength that comes from watching another’s pain.

He continued to push me forward until my face was buried in the couch’s pillows and the only breaths I received were from the quick pull backward before I was shoved forward again.

“Stop,” I whimpered, during the time when my head was pulled back from the pillow. He continued to thrust. The shadow self would hear me when I said no and she would testify in court. She would be the witness that could have been there had the city streets not cleared, someone who watched from the office buildings that were aligned across the avenue. She would write the newspaper article that would expose him. 

Afterward, we sat on the fire escape. He held a cigarette with his middle and pointer finger and we sat across from each other. He looked toward me, but not directly at me, and apologized.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was hushed and raspy from too many cigarettes and the warmness in regret that comes before a good cry.

“It’s okay,” I said, quietly. “I wanted it, too.”

I sat alone and thought of how I wished to breathe like New York City. I had been full of people, just as the city always is—people who had given me their bodies, their spit, their lives wrapped in conversation that took place on bar stools. I had been full of people who had taken away my breath, and not in the romantic sense. The city was not alive, but the dimmed office building lights made my eyes seem dim, dull, and vacant. I wanted to breathe like something that did not use the breath as a life force, but as a source of power.

After he left, I collapsed on the couch, as I had many times, and pressed my face into the throw pillow below me. Hot tears soaked into the fabric as I pushed my face deeper, hoping to stop myself from breathing. If only it could be that easy, to end one’s life. It’s what I wanted at that moment, and during many moments, as my sunken eyes scanned bars and parks and subways for someone to let me rest my head on their shoulder. It is not what I wanted during most moments.

I turned my head. My thoughts had sparked an idea. I picked myself up and walked across the room to where the bathroom door stood. I pushed it open, allowing the small room’s light to flood my irises, and walked over to the medicine cabinet.

I often imagined an image of myself as a young child stuck in a mirror. Our bathroom was the size of a thin closet, narrow with a window at the end, looking out onto the yards of the distinct gaudy stone lion gargoyles and white metal gates of Queens, New York. I would lean against the faux-marble counter, using my hands and upper arms to push myself up so that I could squat over the sink. The medicine cabinet was lined with a wooden border, with three panes of the mirror that opened into different compartments. I would press my nose against the glass of the middle pane, becoming one with my mirror self, and pull the other two panes outward, so that they would shield me in a triangular fortress. Inside this haven, I could exist in a world that was only made of repeating images of myself. I would wonder if these mirror selves were behind on homework, liked to ride bikes against traffic, had lost a father. If I could slip into a different world through this portal and trade places with another version of myself who was seeing the world from a slightly different angle—the window pane to the left of me, the crevice of a reflection that only represented the part of myself I could see—maybe I could escape the loneliness that I only found solace from in books.

Looking into the mirror in Elouise’s apartment, I realized that there was no second self. The person who existed in the memories before me, the version of the person I was now, did not exist. There was no yesterday. Tomorrow seemed far away. It involved tasks. There was no way I could be the person who had imagined separate worlds and reflections that were escapable. This mirror did not have panes. There was only one mirror, swinging out to reveal old tooth paste and a dusty comb. I could not fold myself away in this world. I could exist completely exposed, in a single room where I had often cried myself to sleep, or I could choose to find an exit route.

I began to search through the dusty bottles lined up on the cabinet’s grimy shelves. My fingers fumbled over the bottles, knocking them on their sides and causing them to clank against the cheap, plastic shelving. I had only just realized that I was shaking. 

I kneeled down and opened the cabinet beneath the sink, its oval grooves engraved with the dirt of many visiting bodies. There was a plastic Tupperware container filled with more plastic bottles, feminine products, and dental floss that had long passed its expiration. I pulled the container toward me, resting it on the edge of the inside of the cabinet, and began to clumsily ruffle through its contents.   

My hands swept against a cardboard box. I lifted it, staring vacantly at the square filled with pills. I had picked up a box of allergy medicine, which seemed to be the only package that contained more than one pill. 

I quickly ripped apart the packages, grasping the foiled plastic that came from inside the box and ripping it along the edges. I had to remove each pill, one by one, until they were all sitting on the edge of the sink’s counter, perfectly oval.

I stared into the glass for a moment. Who would believe a woman who had abandoned her friends and family to sleep in a drug den with a group of people she had only met a few months before? Hayden had spent the last few months pulling me through the depths of mental torment. My body had been dragged through the fields of a guerilla war where men at bars used white powder as ammunition to intoxicate the women of whom they took advantage. When acquaintances found out we had slept together, he had convinced them I had wanted it, as if I were ever in the position to say yes. He fed me his compliments with the cocaine he dispensed from his shirt’s front pocket, which always followed an array of beers and shots. After he had spent months grooming me for his own amusement and pleasure, he used my laser focus to beat into the ground all the pieces of myself that I liked most. I thought of my shadow self. She would believe me, the woman who existed in the mirror. The woman who would always vouch for another.

I scooped the pills into my open palm and discarded them into the toilet bowl. My body was heavy from the night’s trauma, immovable, as it weighted down into the couch cushions. I made room beside myself on my pillow for the shadow woman who had been my witness and record keeper. She would awaken much later than the next afternoon when I finally rose.

The next day, I found myself in a place where I feel low—in the space between the water and the tub. I hoped the light above me would become a light ahead—a desire rather than a reminder that darkness is not always dark. I held myself under until my chest felt tight and pained, plunged myself up from beneath the liquid curtain I had pulled around my limbs. I breathed the lilac scented air—candles from the dollar store, a field of flowers to return to from my tub.

I pulled myself up against the tub and rested on its solid edge, turning to fold my face into the alcove of my arms. I bent them together so that my tears could easily drain onto the edges of the back of my hands. I could hear muffled words from the space under the door only a few feet away from me. The apartment has filled up again—with talk and laughter and drugs.

When I was a child I would hide in the bathtub, my eyes pressed down against my forearms in the same way, my arms wrapped around my bended knees. The empty tub around me was a fortress to keep out any distress coming from my father’s mouth. He was old and worn—much older than my mother—and his memory was folding away into itself, only plucking out old thoughts that were triggered by the present moment. When I was younger, sickness was a solitary thing that many of my classmates had not yet experienced. I had to hide it away, in the corner of my mind, smiling vaguely, nodding knowingly when the other children talked about their weekend vacations. 

After my father was gone, when the tub was full with bubbles and funny pirate action figures, I could laugh and the cadence would echo against the walls, pulsating in an intoxicating haze that made me dizzy and joyful. In a waterless tub his presence was heavy but not exactly full, with bare echoes of his voice filtering under the door and into the dry air that held me like a thin blanket in a cold, dark room. When he was gone, I could move forward through the bliss of deep, fluid air that swarmed around me as I laughed among the floating toys, sand castle molds, and bubble machines. As a child, I suppose I thought that because the problem was not at the forefront of my mind that I was safe. I always felt guilty for moving on, for being happier without his weight, although his absence became heavier as I grew. Those memories of his helplessness—feeding him his prescribed pills in his chair, watching him smile thankfully, and saying goodbye to him, my small body pressed against the metal bar of the hospital bed in his bedroom—compounded on the present moment when I felt sick myself. The powerlessness is something I let in the door reluctantly, an unwelcome friend who wields my secrets. 

No longer a child, I once again contemplated a way to escape within the water. When the tub drained, I still heard distant voices beneath the door. The air, heavy and full, the condensation sticking to the wall. I sat in the tub for a few more minutes while it drained. 

There was a knock at the door, bones rapping on wood.

“Are you almost done in there?” It was Elouise, her voice heavy and drunk. 

“I’ll be out in a minute.” I grabbed a towel from the yellow-tinted sink, and wrapped it around my body as I unfolded myself from a half-fetal position. 

After I had dressed myself, I exited the bathroom and walked to the front of the apartment where Elouise was sitting with a steaming mug of tea. As I entered the room, she turned to look at me, smiling as if she expected that we would gossip and laugh about the regulars at the bar.

“What’s up girl?” Elouise said this in a friendly tone.

“I need to take a walk.” I took my coat from the hook on the apartment door and pulled its sleeves over my arms. Elouise winced as if my raspy voice were an indicator of pain.

Downstairs, on the sidewalk, I hovered over Hayden’s name in my address book and pressed the call button. The phone rang until it mocked me. The voicemail picked up and I ended the call. I called again, only to hear that ringing echo, the name I had called and lost. The voicemail picked up. I ended the call and started a new one. The ringing continued, a lullaby for the wounded. The sound we hear when we anticipate an answer or, sometimes, the news that a life has ended. The call ended. I pressed the call button again. The phone didn’t ring as long this time. He answered quickly and his words were immediate: “Stop calling me. I’m trying to sleep!” He screamed and then ended the call.

I stood on the sidewalk, the gum and dirt and cigarette butts beneath my feet. Tears began to roll down my cheeks before I could stop them. There was a howl deep in my throat. I pressed my hand over my mouth to stifle my moaning, the wetness falling over my fingertips. I had been here for a while, in this fallen state. I did not find this place on my own.

I felt the door behind me, a long glass pane. I leaned against it and let my body drop slowly to the ground, my knees bending as I let myself fall. He has been inside me for too long, eating away the life I was building. I had been a student when I met him. I had wanted things—real things—other than booze and drugs and obsession to fill the hole in my chest. 

I wiped a tear from my cheek, my gaze shifting to the busy coffee shop window across the street. There were people in line, money in their palms, waiting for change. They seemed content, smiling. They were at least able to afford a cup of coffee. For the first time in a long time, it occurred to me that anything could be better than this. Slowly, I picked myself up and turned into the vestibule that led to the stairs. I made my way up the familiar place where my demons had begun to nest.

When I entered the apartment, Elouise was scrolling through her phone. I didn’t take off my coat.

“I am lost,” I told her. 

She looked at me, her head tilted, as if confused by this sudden proclamation. 

“I’m lost, like you said.” I turned away and began to pack my belongings. “That’s why I have to leave.”

She looked at me intently for a moment and then nodded. “I knew you would.” She stood up and began to fold the blanket she had been resting under. “Where are you going to go?” 

I thought for a moment. There was a swelling in my chest, the pounding within me so erratic that I began to shake. I had existed in this perpetual nightmare, drifting through the modes of waking like one of the objects on Elouise’s wall—a collector’s item and an object for those who visited. 

“To a place where I exist.” I considered my words as I said them, their weight wrapped in the heaviness of stifled tears, because they had only been brought to fruition the moment before. I had been arranged in this apartment as a permanent fixture, absorbing Elouise’s jokes and ideas. I did not consider that if someone who passed through tried to use me, I would not be protected. There was no warranty—what was used would be thrown away. Although my father had been sick when I was young, if I had called out in pain from the other room, he would have hobbled to the place where I sat, my arms wrapped around my bent knees, and scooped me up. He would have stood in the place of my shadow self and pushed the abusers out the door. He would have asked my mother to help me if he could not have done so himself. He would not have pretended to sleep as I was prepped for an intended slaughter. 

I wasn’t sure what was beyond the stairs that had kept me safe. It had been a long time since I had used anything else as a security from the present moment, but the memory that I was once loved somewhere in the world offered more protection than a place where only roaches prospered.  

Upon moving through the threshold of that doorway, I would exist as someone more than a shadow—I would be somebody who was going somewhere—and, at that moment in particular, that was enough for me.

Thanks to Linnie and Beth for reading and your notes.