The Dream That Haunts Me

Because it's October and people seem love spooky things, here's a post about a haunting of mine. But it's not a supernatural type of haunting; it's the kind of memory that is so deeply embedded in my subconscious that it has become trapped. Every couple of weeks it clangs around, ghost-like, in the attic of my brain to remind me of its presence. It goes like this:

I am at the bakery I worked at in Central Florida during my late teens. The setting is the same—a small, rustic-looking shop with wooden floors and counters and metal baking racks for displaying freshly baked loaves of bread. The walls are pale yellow, a part of the ambiance I helped create one night after the bakery had closed and a painting party ensued. The staff shift between old and familiar to new and unknown, except for the owners, who are always there in some form. Most often they aren't physically present but they are the reason I'm there, to talk to them, to receive affirmation from them. And it never happens by the time I wake up.

Two brothers, probably in their early 30s, owned the bakery and worked there every day alongside all the staff, and I'd become fond of and close to them. They were cool, but they were also real adults, so I looked up to them (in fact, I was so heavily influenced by them that I voted for Bush in my very first election, something I'll always judge myself for).

In the dream I've come to work a shift, to help out, and I've usually driven all the way from Tampa just to work this shift. But in every dream, I don't know how to use the cash register anymore; either I don't remember how to use it or it's a new system that I haven't been trained on. I also don't have the correct attire—the cream-colored t-shirt, hat, and apron with the circular logo made of wheat shafts. I'm aware of certain real-life circumstances—I am my real age, I live in Tampa, I have a full-time job. These facts are relevant in the dream because they limit the amount of time I can stay to work; I feel pressure to do a good job, fear because I don't know how to do it anymore, and guilt because I might never make amends for the way I left, which seems to be the reason I'm there. Like a lifetime sentence of community service, but for this one very specific community I had wronged. These are the basic circumstances of every dream.

Donning the proper t-shirt after coming home from a shift at the bakery. May 1999.

After I graduated high school, I started college at the University of Central Florida in the fall of 1999. I continued to work part-time at the bakery. But my first college year was a false start; I withdrew from that semester because I began to relapse into anorexia and depression—two things that had developed just prior my senior year of high school. I had barely begun treatment for these struggles before leaving home and living in a dorm—a freedom I wanted and thought I could handle.

I moved back home just before the end-of-year holidays, living with my mother and then stepfather, and soon with my twin sister who came home after a semester at Flagler College. My older sister was gone; she'd fled from an undesirable home environment, a result of the alien-like stepfather (who was really just French-Canadian, but out of a kindness to French-Canadians, it's more fitting to think of him as an alien), after she turned 18 and went back to our home state of Ohio. She had escaped.

My twin sister decided to stay local and transferred to the university I'd just left. We got an apartment together, and she continued going to school while I worked full time at the bakery. I earned a made-up title: Assistant Retail Manager. I enjoyed it for a little while, feeling part of a little work family, learning to do the account books, being physical in my day, and even serving customers I found enjoyable, except for the ones I didn't like. But being around food constantly was difficult, especially with baked goods coming out of the industrial-sized oven all morning long, the yeasty scent wafting in the air. I smelled them, I touched them, I tasted them. Sometimes I took them home, sometimes I ate them in a corner.

I began to feel excessive guilt about my eating habits, which would cause me to refuse food for much of the day, and then give in at night and binge on a loaf of bread or a bag of jelly beans or a box of cereal. I would wake up on the sofa with the television still on, comatose from the calorie overload, drag myself into bed and try to sleep away the shame of knowing what I'd done. Sleep was the best part of my day because I didn't have to be aware of how wrong everything was, how imperfect I was. The cycle would repeat: guilt, starve, binge, coma.

This is how my days went, and the longer they went on, the more I would oversleep just a little bit. Then a little bit more. Until one day I walked in for my 9:00am shift at 10:00am, rather nonchalantly, and the younger brother looked at me from baker's table behind the register and, after glancing up at the clock on the wall, said, "Really, Lee? An hour?" I knew it was coming; they'd been generous to let me slip as much, and for as long, as I had. So I said, "Should I just leave?" with a bit of attitude that was my only defense but that he didn't deserve. And he said, "Yes. As a matter of fact, you should." So I turned around and walked out the door, not looking back.

I cried on my way home, not necessarily because I'd lost my job but because each time I replayed the scene I could hear the sheer irritation in that brother's voice, and I had to live with the fact that my actions had hurt a person and a place I cared a lot about.

I left the bakery in the summer of 2000, when I was 19. This dream has haunted me ever since. I'd gone back to visit on occasion, and at least one time I apologized to the brother who'd fired me, or who'd helped me quit—I was never really sure which had happened. He forgave me with his words, but it was never enough. I wanted him to know and to understand that I wasn't really that person who could be so flippant, so disrespectful. But I couldn't explain my depression to him—partly because I didn't have enough understanding myself, let alone adequate language to explain it, but also because I didn't know whether he'd believe me. Both brothers seemed like the type of person who would think depression is something a person could conquer with enough will.

Over the time I'd worked at the bakery, my weight shifted from normal thin to a bit unsightly thin and back again. In the more severely skinny time, I remember the easy comments from the older brother about how I should just eat more. It was so simple for him; why wasn't it as simple for me? I berated myself for not being strong enough to change.

Sometimes I wish they'd cared more. I wish they'd wondered why my behavior had changed from sweet and attentive and considerate to grumpy and agitated and irresponsible. I say we were close, but in a fair-weather kind of way. If my car needed minor fixing or I needed help moving things, they were there. But when it came to emotional challenges, they didn't have a toolbox for that. Of course it wasn't their job to fix me, but I was really just a kid—a kid in pain who didn't know how to help herself, and they were around me more than anyone else was.

During the months in which I'd been slipping away into a lethargic, apathetic hologram of the real me, my twin had left Orlando to move in with her boyfriend a couple hours away in St. Petersburg. Having no real reason to stay myself, I left too, following her; perhaps even chasing her, as I look back now.

Through a friend of a friend, I'd secured a temporary, hourly job working at the University of South Florida's College of Medicine, doing light administrative work. That position eventually ended but led to a full-time staff position, with educational benefits, in the English Department at USF. I would stay there for more than 12 years, earning my degree, trying to work out my demons, picking up some more along the way, eventually leaving for the job I currently have.

These days, I try to get to work just a little bit early. I don't need to; nobody is watching. But I think that in a way, I might always be trying to prove to those brothers who I really am—and who I am not.

We aren't in touch anymore and haven't been for many years. I looked them both up on Facebook once; the younger one was married with a kid, still Republican, and the other had no visible profile. Any forgiveness that occurs now will have to take place within me. I have to rattle out the ghosts and tell them I know they aren't real. They don't need to occupy anymore space in my mind. Their haunting can cease now.

I Was Seven

I haven't shared my story publicly, but anyone close to me knows it. However, on the heels of Christine Blasey Ford's recent testimony about the sexual assault she endured by then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, I feel I should. Not because I want pity or sympathy or even empathy, but because when someone opens the door to a difficult and important conversation, you don't slam it back in their face. So while yesterday's sad confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court attempted to close that door, I'm sticking my foot in the door frame.

Talking about sexual violence doesn't feel comfortable—and it never should; it should always disturb us—but speaking about it feels safer than it ever has before, thanks to Dr. Ford and the brave women who came before her, including Anita Hill, who brought her allegations against Clarence Thomas at an even more hostile time in America. This post is meant to keep the conversation open and to help others feel as though they're not alone.

The Incident

I was seven. I lived in a house on a corner lot in a subdivision of Altamonte Springs, Florida. We were recent Ohio transplants, settling into our new life in this hot land of dry brown grass and palm trees and lizards whose tales came off a little too easily. My mom was a nurse who at the time worked the midnight shift at the hospital. My dad was in sales, delivering live fish from wholesalers to retailers. He sometimes left the house very early in the morning, and I sometimes feared their absences would overlap, but I don't think that ever happened. My two sisters and I each had our own bedroom, which felt like a luxury compared to the attic space we all had shared in our quaint Ohio home. Whether by choice or lack thereof, my bedroom was the first one on the hallway off of the living room.

Late one September night in 1988, when my mom was at work and the rest of us were home sleeping, a man broke into our house through the back porch and entered through the kitchen window. He took a kitchen knife from a drawer and walked down the hallway that led to our bedrooms, which was opposite my parents' room. Probably because my room was the first one he encountered, he came in and sat on the edge of my bed while I slept and used the kitchen knife to cut the crotch of my underwear, which is how I woke. I was more confused than I was alarmed. He wasn't aggressive initially. When I started to ask questions—who are you, what are you doing; questions to which I expected rational replies—he shushed me and told me to be quiet. Ever the rule follower, I did. He told me to follow him and then led me out of my room, exiting the hallway into the main living area and out the front door of the house.

Me at age seven.

He continued around the side of the house until we were in the backyard. By then I was scared, and his tone had changed. He continually told me to shut up, and when I didn't he placed his hands around my neck while pushing me against the exterior wall of the house. I tried to scream, but his chokehold didn't allow my voice to come out, or much air. I started to fight with everything my small body could muster, which was no match for his adult frame. Next he had me on the ground and pressed the full weight of his body on top of mine. I was kicking and squirming while he pinned me down and placed his mouth on mine. That struggle is the last I remember before coming to by myself, still lying on the dewy grass.

I picked myself up off the ground, ran back into the house where the front door was left wide open, and went down the hallway where my sisters' rooms were. In a state of panic, I wasn't sure where to go, thinking my dad might have left for work already, so I stopped first in my older sister's room and, blinded by my fear, didn't see her there. So I went farther down the hall to my twin sister's room gathered her and came back to my older sister's room, where this time I saw her soundly asleep. We roused her and three of us ran across the house to our parents' room, where my dad lay sleeping. I shook him awake and said that a man broke in. He startled to action and called the police.

The Aftermath

My memory of what happened afterward is a jumbled scene of police officers wandering around the house dusting surfaces with a black substance and collecting some of our belongings, a police dog outside the house, a helicopter up above. My sisters and me watching TV and playing board games in the living room for distraction. My mom finally coming home from the hospital, walking into the living room with a look on her face I couldn't quite place—one that was trying to be comforting to me but that I now know was barely covering her anguish. Her hug. My conversation with a female police officer, the details of which are missing. Driving in a police cruiser around the neighborhood to look for the attacker. Going to some cold and sterile facility to have what I later learned was a rape kit conducted (the man did not succeed in raping me). Spending the rest of the night in the living room with the whole family around me, all of us close together on the floor, in sight, real, barriers around me to the now scary outside world.

In the following days, we had more interactions with the police. We learned of other incidents that occurred that same night in our neighborhood, and with all of the testimonies together, the police had an idea of the suspect—a man who'd been imprisoned on a previous charge and was out on a work-release program. An officer brought over a book of mugshots to our house one day and asked me if I could identify the man who'd attacked me. I pointed to someone, but I can't tell you whether I'd chosen the right guy. My testimony was the least reliable of the three victims that night; thankfully the other two—a middle-aged man and an older woman (both of whom escaped serious harm)—gave clearer descriptions.

I never had to go to court; my testimony was recorded on tape, a courtesy extended to me because of my age, I think. A man was eventually charged. We'll call him W. As much as I'd love to blast his name and image publicly, I realize there could be repercussions, even if unlikely.

The attacker. 

W was charged with burglary and assault and sentenced to 15 years in prison, a little more than eight of which he served before being released. He was incarcerated again one year later, for a year. He appears to have stayed out since 1999. Most of his crimes were burglaries. I don't know why he veered into different criminal territory that night. I remember hearing that he might have been on drugs...

Immediately following the assault, I was afraid of all men—neighbors, uncles, even my own father for a short time. It's hard to say when the general fear of men changed, or whether it ever completely did. For a while I slept in my parents' room, having repeated nightmares of running barefoot on the wet grass in the dark, not able to get anywhere, hearing my heart pounding through my chest. Then I eventually shared a room with my twin sister but always slept with the lights on. I must have been 10 or 11 years old before I began sleeping through the nights, with the lights off.

Gradually, as the years passed, our lives became normal again, and we didn't talk about what happened when I was seven.

The Healing

Although I'd made attempts beginning in my twenties to address the trauma through therapy and (pretty bad) creative writing, none really stuck. But this year, a mere 30 years after the assault, I decided to deal with the trauma head-on in a special type of therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). This type of therapy is often used on patients with PTSD, which I'd been told I had by a couple of different therapists but doubted the diagnosis until recently. During my visits, I would vividly relive each moment of the trauma, following the pathways in my brain that the memories led me down, week after week until, several months later, the memory of the assault became less powerful over me.

I won't say the trauma doesn't affect me anymore, but I am more aware of the ways in which it has impacted my life, and simply having that awareness has helped me understand myself and my particular relationship to the world around me. That, to me, is progress.

One of the best things that has happened, however, is that I've had open conversations with my immediate family about the event; after all, it happened to them, too. I think we all sort of carried pieces of this burden throughout our lives but didn't quite know how to lay those pieces down. We don't need to talk about it on any regular basis, but just knowing that we can, that I can, talk about it if I want to without feeling like I'm disrupting the ordinary flow of everyone's lives is a relief.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like to talk to him, to W. I wonder if he feels remorse. I wonder if he cares. I wonder if he'd recognize me. He has an address listed in an area very close to where my family moved after the assault. I can picture it. I think about knocking on his door, seeing him face to face, and telling him ... I don't know what. I run through different scenarios. I wouldn't say, "You ruined my life," because that's not true, even though I've had more challenges than I probably would have otherwise. I wouldn't tell him I hated him and wished him harm, because that's not who I am. Maybe I would tell him, "Despite you, I am a strong person. Despite you, I have love in my life and I love who I am." Maybe he would care, maybe he wouldn't. That's not the point.