Can you tell I’m dying inside? Or do I hide it much too well? This false smile of mine has been plastered on my face for as long as I can remember. And remember I do, even though I try so hard to forget. Isn’t it cruel how the memories that we desperately want to erase are the ones that we can never shake?

These memories haunt me every waking moment of my life…and sometimes follow me into the land of dreams. As if watching them constantly replay in my head during the day isn’t enough! Sometimes they are nothing more than a fragment; a single word, hateful eyes boring holes into the back of my head, mouths moving languidly behind flattened palms. And other times, I replay entire scenes in my head, reliving those moments that still, after all this time, bring me to my knees.

One such memory, that I remember vividly, is what I have labeled in my mind as The Incident.

That dreadful day was the chilliest we had seen for quite awhile. The frigid wind shook the trees bare, howling and moaning, sending snow flying through the air. By the time I had walked ten feet I was chilled to the bone. My breath came in short puffs as I watched parents pick up their kids. My eyes lingered on the beautiful smiles lighting up their faces, smiles so genuine they hurt.

I willed one of my parents to come get me, but knew that my mom was busy and my dad was out of town.

Finally, everyone had been picked up but me and a couple of others; all of us freezing our sorry butts off. Hearing raucous laughter I glanced back over my shoulder and got a glimpse of the people I least wanted to see. “S***, s***, S***!” I thought to myself, furtively wishing that I could disappear, “Why of all days did Jess have to be sick today?!” I walked even faster, hoping against hope that they couldn’t tell who I was, through all of my layers. A thought in vain.

“Hey, it’s the FREAK!” yelled the nastiest of the three boys, “Hey freak, why don’t you come over here!” I hung my head and kept walking, trying to ignore their ridicule. “I said I’m talking to you, you…FREAK! What? Are you deaf now??” He yelled at me, becoming angry, “Well then, I guess we’ll just have to make the b**** hear us.”

“Oooh, you’re in for it now!” cried his friend. I hurried along, trying to pretend that I couldn’t hear them, knowing that I was only a block away from my house; one block from safety. One block too far.

All of a sudden someone grabbed my hood from behind and shoved ice down the back of my coat. I gasped in shock as the freezing slush dripped down my neck, chilling my back to the point of numbness, yet lighting my face ablaze with anger and shame.

I clenched my fists and trembled with rage as they taunted me, calling me a s***, a lesbo, a freak, a lard. My mind shut down and I could no longer think straight. I’d absolutely had it with those guys! I stopped trying to ignore them and whirled around, completely furious.

I shoved him in the chest and screamed, “Leave me alone you assholes!” He fell back on the concrete with a stunned expression, which soon turned to white hot fury.

He jumped up and hit me. Hard.(Yes, guys do hit girls) I took a giant step back, and saw the anger contorting his face. At that moment I realized I was going to get it; I had just humiliated the biggest bully in our school. Not good.

I turned and ran, no longer caring about dignity. They took chase, like a pack of wolves on a blood trail.
I had a head start, but it was quickly lost. They are athletes after all. But obviously not dumb jocks, because they had just cut off all my chances for escape. Glancing back quickly, I became frantic, and in that brief second managed to trip, clutse that I am.

The second I hit the ground, he jumped on me, and started to pummel me. I bucked up and tried to jerk away from him, but his accompliances grabbed my arms and held me down. I started to scream, but one of them clamped down on my mouth, only tightening his grip when I bit him. They kicked and punched me repeatedly until all the fight had left my body.

Smiling like a predator, he knelt down over me, looming threateningly. He slipped his hands down my shirt, sending tremors of disgust down my body like an earthquake.

“Let’s take a looksie!” he whispered menacingly into my ear. My scream was muffled by the suffocating grasp of the thug that covered my mouth. “You like that b****, don’t you!” he snarled, as he destroyed my innocence.

I tried to retreat into my mind, to block out what he was doing to me, as he started to tear off my jeans.

Just at that moment, one of them heard a noise and got spooked. He stood up, kicked me one last time for good measure, and sauntered away, leaving me with my shredded innocence. The silent smirks of his friends cut me to the bone, as they followed his lead.

As soon as they let go of me, I sprang up like a frightened hare and ran away, down the hill, like the pathetic coward that I am. They screamed profanities after me, as they watched their b**** run quickly away, tears streaming down her blazing face. Their very own freak.

The last words I heard, as I ungracefully retreated, were “Yeah, that’s right! You run away b****, and you don’t ever come back! JUST GO F***ING KILL YOURSELF! Then we’d all be happy!”

Once home, I ran to the bathroom and cleaned myself up. Bruises were already starting to form; all strategically placed where my clothing would hide them, of course. I started sobbing; hiccupping with grief and shame, and knew that this experience had changed me in immeasurable ways.

I gazed intensely in the mirror, looking at my reflection and trying to figure out why I was a freak. Was I that ugly, that hideous, for my own classmates to want to beat me up? Was it because my hair was annoyingly frizzy and short or because my clothes weren’t stylish enough? Could it have even been just the simple fact that I was totally unathletic? To this day I still don’t completely understand why I was singled out.

Without warning, my emotions suddenly transformed into a raging inferno and I let out a scream that felt almost animal, hitting the mirror as hard as I could, wanting to break something. Anything. Maybe even someone.

Unfortunately, they don’t shatter as easily as they do in the movies where everything is so warped and glorified.

Though I had been bullied all throughout middle school, that night changed it all.

It was the first time I had been physically and sexually harassed.

It was the first time that I ran that knife over my wrists, like a bow across a violin, creating hauntingly beautiful melodies.

It was the first time that I realized lying to my parents was easier. I didn’t want them to look at me the same way some of my classmates did…like I was a total freak.

It was the first time that I realized how simple it was to lie. How natural it felt. How easy it was to fool my parents; “Oh, this bruise? I ran into a pole. You know how clumsy I am!” It made me sad how easily they bought my lies. Sometimes I just wanted them to see though my mask of upturned lips, so I could stop the pretense of being ok.‘Cause I wasn’t. I was never ok.

That year, seventh grade, I fell into a vortex of sorrow and emptiness, a chasm that I have been trying to climb out of for over two years. In an attempt to distance myself from the daily harassment, I built up walls of my insecurities, but all that succeeded in doing was isolating me from the friends I had left, and sending me even deeper into the bleak maze of helplessness that surrounds me now.

As time went by I began to grow even more restless and anxious. Dragging myself out of bed in the morning was almost impossible, knowing that I had to go back to that terrible place that I know call Hell; the place where I was kept prisoner by my fear and tormented daily by things as simple as a friend grabbing my arm or a hostile glare. As often as I could, without raising suspicion, I would pretend to be sick so I wouldn’t have to face my tormentors.

School wasn’t the only part of my life that was affected. At home, my anxiety began to show. Since I would not give my harassers the pleasure of seeing me break down at school, I wore a mask of numbness. When other people were around, I would sit there and flip the pages of a book, or bob my head to the time of an imaginary beat, using my ear buds as a defense against the world. I pretended that I couldn’t hear the barbed words that their tongues lashed me with, but in truth I heard every one.

And when I got home, the mask would be bursting, trying to quell my rebelling emotions. I would turn the setting to happy, until I was in the safety of my room, where I could cast it off and cry, using my tears to put out the fire that reigned within me.

The pain from The Incident and the many years of harassment follows me everywhere, my very own personal storm cloud. It rules my life. There was that time I was getting my teeth cleaned when the male dentist leaned over me, smiled, and murmured, “Let’s take a look here,” I almost jumped up and punched him in the face. It took every little ounce of will in my body to stay in that chair for the rest of the appointment.

Then— just when I thought I had hit rock bottom—things took a turn for the worse. More complications developed in my life and cutting became an addiction, a drug. It was both a reward and a punishment, a relief and a cause of my anxiety. Although cutting only relieved my stress for mere minutes, and would cause endless stressful weeks of trying to hide the bandages and scars; I always went running back into its arms in the end. The physical pain just felt much better than its emotional counterpart.

I would try to fight it; listening to Evanescence and writing dark poems in an attempt to relieve my anxiety, but it would always overcome me in the end; a monster with unquenchable thirst; and sorrow would flow from my veins, until I would stop struggling and embrace the pain. Even when I had a few rare moments of feeling hopeful, I could still feel its intense gaze, as it slept with one eye open, awaiting my next moment of weakness in which to pounce.

That year, I pondered suicide daily. Cutting was never enough, not even when my arms and legs were covered with the story of my existence. I knew the only way to escape the emotional pain was to kill myself. I argued with myself each day, each sleepless night, as I listened to the soundtrack that was my self-hatred, “Nobody likes you! You’re a freak! Everything they say is true! Why can’t you just be normal?!! You’re a failure in life! You deserve to die!! Just go KILL YOURSELF!!!!”

My tirade would get louder and louder inside my head, until I picked up the knife once more, and began to cut the very devil out of me, trying to silence his words.

But yet, no matter how bad I wanted to kill myself, I was always too much of a coward. I knew in my heart that there was no afterlife, no heaven or hell, no god; and I did not want to face an eternity of nothingness. Surely even a life of continuous pain and sorrow was better than that.

Eighth grade was slightly better than the rest of middle school. The harassment lessened, as I no longer had every class with my tormentors and one of the major bullies moved away, but even though I was able to smile sometimes, I was only fooling myself. I still continued to wallow in the thick mud and filth of self hatred.

And when I looked into the eyes of my classmates, I saw myself reflected there, but in a state of distortion. Paranoia set in, and I interpreted every laugh, every look, every whispered word, to be an insult. I saw disappointment and disgust on everyone’s’ faces, even my parents. And although I couldn’t tell when it was real or imagined, it felt like a cold knife was slowly being twisted into my screaming heart.

I could no longer trust those around me. For how does one learn to trust again, when the raw pain of betrayal and agony still throbs in their chest? When anxiety constricts their lungs so much they can hardly breathe? When every time they have bared their heart, it has been trampled on? When all those around them, even adults, have failed them, hurt them?

To this day, I am still in the grip of the depression, anxiety, and shame. They overtook my life, leaving naught but an empty shell. Now I am in the process of trying to coax the turtle back out of its shell, bit by bit, but it can be very frustrating. Any minor mishap sends me running right back to my old pals, and then I’m right back at square one, peeking out of my shell and staring fearfully at the outside world.

I want so badly to feel better again, but at the same time there is a part of me still trying to cling to the hopelessness that binds me. Even when the sun is shining and the birds are singing, I still can’t force myself to be happy. When I have a reason to be sad it’s almost easier. That way I don’t have to fake a billion smiles, while silently writhing inside, trying so hard not to break down until I am alone again. That way I don’t have to make my own misery.

And a part of me screams that I don’t deserve to feel better, that I should live a miserable life. And sometimes I believe it, when the feelings overtake me.

It is difficult beyond words to tell people how I am feeling, because throughout middle school I fell into the desperate habit of concealing my pain. And it turns that out my mask worked too well. Even now, when I am seeing a psychologist, my parents cannot seem to grasp how desperate my situation has become, how hard it is for me to go about my daily life. But then, I guess that is my own fault. There are so many things that I have never told my parents. And until I work up the courage to stop downplaying my pain and finally put all the pieces together for them, I will be stuck in this hole that I dug for myself. A hole that even as I write this, I am still digging.