It happened here, in me, between these bones. But those 20 minutes, that suspension of time and reality, I won’t talk about that. It’s what came next, those nights of blinking into nothingness and mornings dawning cold and rigid, that shines through. That capitalized After where so many of us live. For me, it was like being in a well if you didn’t know what a well was. All you know is the darkness, the suffocation, the aloneness of it. And for what felt like forever, I hung suspended in the viscous liquid of those 20 minutes, molasses time where his sneer took hours to grow on his face, puppet strings pulling up the corners of his mouth. It changed time for me, what should be past tense become present tense, future tense. I looked up, I look up, and I see light—dim and far, but light nonetheless. And slowly the words came unstitched and I let people see the red of me, though I cover it up sometimes with greys and yellows. Because you can’t be raw and hurt all the time. How do you tell a nice boy who lives in the present tense that it literally isn’t him, that it’s not his fault, but that for a blinding second as he kissed your neck, his skin and muscles rearranged, the soft spark in his eye became flinty and menacing, all because of the poison leftover in you? You can’t, you can only say sorry over and over again until it sounds wrong, like you’re misspelling it out loud. I may never reach that bright white, that clean. But it’s there, floating somewhere above me. I make myself look at it every day.