The poem must be significant or she wouldn’t have taken the time to write it out by hand, let alone keep it. In fact, I was guessing she recognized herself in all of it, that every word seemed to point like a burning arrow to who she was on the inside, and what she carried.

What I’d said to Will earlier, about not being able to imagine Cameron suppressing memories of her abuse, had been a lie. In fact, it’s a common response, even endemic. The experience of being violated is often so overwhelming and annihilating, particularly for children, that the only way to survive it is for victims to leave their bodies. Not fight or flight, but complete dissociation. If the abuser happens to be a caregiver, someone who is supposed to be safe and loving, the experience of shutdown can be even more dramatic and far-reaching. What we can’t bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.

At whatever age Cameron was when the abuse happened, either once or repeatedly, her mind had likely stepped in to protect her. It wouldn’t have been a choice she made, but something closer to basic animal instinct, the only way to get out of a thing too terrible to name or feel. She might not have remembered any of it until the free-clinic visit, a fluke occurrence, called it out of the dark.

I can barely stand to think about what Cameron must have felt that day, lying flat out on the exam table, already compromised and vulnerable, her feet in metal stirrups while the nurse practitioner donned latex gloves, unaware that she was about to detonate a lifetime’s worth of secret pain. A tale Cameron’s memory had swallowed but not her body. It was all right there inside her, written out in scar tissue.

Even if Cameron’s memories hadn’t been forced to the surface like this, the damage has been simmering for years and has no doubt found other ways to erupt, in feelings of shame or hopelessness, drawing her unconsciously to people and situations that echo or approximate the original pain. I’ve seen it over and over, how a trauma survivor’s story finds a way to tell her instead of the other way around.

It makes me hurt for her, this girl I’ve never met but know. She survived violence, betrayal, and terror, the theft of her soul. She survived the smoking, buried shame and the silence, and years of forced amnesia. But can she survive what’s happening now, inside and out? Can she survive the remembering?

—

Feeling overwhelmed, I shove the book and poem away from me on the bar top and order a quick shot of whiskey. The second it’s gone, I push my glass forward, signaling one more.

The barmaid looks at me; her drawn-in brows shoot up. “You driving?”

“I’m fine.”