It’s bugging me. I’m going to have to go and sit in a witness box for the second time in my life and although it’s an extremely different situation this time around, I can feel it stirring everything up from decades ago.
Is it really decades ago?
Sometimes it seems ancient. Other times I can still smell my fear and relief.
Mostly I just remember the world being grey for that entire year leading up to the preliminary hearing and then the court date.
Like that movie, Schindler’s List, where the little girl’s red coat was the only colour in the bleakness.
Except there were no colours in my situation. My eyes were seeing the world like it was one of the crappy black and white TVs my parents still insisted on buying in the early 1990s.
The world had no flavour either; no scent, no feeling. It was just standing next to me, cold and dull.
That was the time in my life where I’d return to my empty family home each winter night: parents off in the former eastern bloc practically uncontactable, sister off who knows where, coming back only to try to bully me into writing her cheques to cash on our parents’ account.
I drew myself lots of hot hot hot baths that year. Because the house was cold and I thought it might bring some feeling back into my skin. I soaked for ages, too afraid to go to sleep in that house on my own; suddenly, sadly aware that the world had monsters in it.
And wondering how to bring the feeling back into my heart, my body, my eyes.
1000 days 