Bronwen G. McCormick

They’re movie moments replaying, fragments of light illuminating hundreds of squares of film negatives, cut from what I remember, projected on the silver screen of my brain. Even before it happened, when I trace my history, even my earliest memories are dipped in a waxy sadness that was so beyond the single digits of my years, that it’s no wonder this ache has been buried inside me like a past life all these years. After it happened, I felt fragmented, the story ripped from me, taken forcibly. I had been made to repeat the chain of events so many times that it became a rote recitation: detached, unfeeling. It was easier that way. It was just a story I was telling. I could call on my stand-in again and read the script in Her voice. I could hide behind this character’s life and pretend that it wasn’t my experience; I could make myself believe that I couldn’t fathom what it was like to live through such things. I was just reading the script. I became a pull-string talking doll. Pull the string! I say six phrases! My box advertised in offensively bright colors, offsetting my gray depression, my face a painted-on grin. This phony mask of happiness was blending into my real face so well. The canned silence after those pull-string phrases fell from my mouth like iron. The way I always tried to fill the vacuum with my plastic smile and morbid jokes. My detachment unnerved people. They didn’t expect a twelve-year-old to talk about such a violent event as if delivering a monologue. People never seemed to understand that it’s the detachment from the horror that allows you to wake up every morning, fall asleep at night, keep one foot in front of the other, the days coming in one endless blurry stream. It’s the detachment that keeps you from thinking too much, keeps you from picturing the blood on the walls.

37