Once, I met a woman who used to be just like me. She was always calm and put together, the respectable wife of a businessman. Until I met her, I never thought a girl like me could be loved. Not with my background. When I asked how she made it out, she told me she waited for a miracle. I’d never thought of it that way. I’d always just believed that girls like us had to fight to free ourselves from this life. At the time I guessed I must’ve been wrong. So, for years I waited for a miracle, just as my kindred spirit had told me to. 

Constellations of bruises formed on my pale skin. They reminded me of the purplish clouds that darken the sky right before a thunderstorm. When I was bored, I’d connect my scars with the capless blue ballpoint pen I stole from the front desk of one of the hotels I was ushered into at 3am on a weeknight. I grew fond of the slightly wilted daffodil on my right thigh, but it faded as my pen ran out of ink. I promised myself that when the miracle got here, I’d get it tattooed so that I’d never forgotten the sole object of beauty to emerge from my pain. 

When I was thirteen I made my first and only friend. We’d tell each other stories and make up secret handshakes in the back of the van between appointments. She always claimed that she was envious of my blonde hair, but I liked hers. It had the same rich color of the chocolate that coated the maraschino cherries my mom used to buy me every Valentine's Day. I said she should wait for a miracle with me. One day, she gained the courage to confess to me that she was born into this life. I told her I envied her. Of course, she got mad and tried to yell at me, but her voice was still only half there and raspy, so it didn’t make a difference. We were lucky, had they heard us, we surely would’ve been beaten. 

I tried to explain to her that she didn’t understand, that she had it better because she’d never had to worry about trying to remember her father’s kind smile or her little brother's birthday. That she’d never wake up in cold sweat with her mother’s phantom hands combing through her hair, or come to face the realization that she could no longer remember their voices. She never spoke to me again after that incident. Looking back, I deserved it. Those memories of who I used to be and the baseless hope of a miracle were the only things that kept me going. I wonder where she is now. 

For the longest time, I believed that my miracle would come in the form of a boy, someone like that woman's businessman, who would sweep me off my feet and take me far away from here, but it soon became evident that it was a baseless and unhealthy dream. None of them ever stayed, they simply got what they paid for and left. I couldn’t blame them. I was always told that I’d only ever been good for one thing. I wasn’t the type of girl who someone would marry; I was the type of girl who someone would use. 

Eventually, I learned to stop idolizing that woman I met all those years ago. She wasn’t all that different from me, she wasn’t any less used, she just got lucky, and if she really cared, she would have tried to help me. Miracles only happen once in a blue moon, if everyone had one waiting for them, they wouldn’t call them miracles. I doubt my friend with the dark chocolate hair from when I was thirteen ever got her miracle. I just wish I had realized that sooner. From that moment onward, I gave up on waiting for a miracle and accepted my fate. 

In my years of captivity, I never did get past that sixth-grade reading level, but my art improved leaps and bounds. While I waited in the hotel rooms I would etch out drawings of flowers, and other foliage and greenery. Too often, would I catch myself lost in a painful yet soothing fantasy in which I was free. I would always be perched upon a bench made of unpolished marble amongst endless fields of daffodils, completely alone. It was silent and felt pure. That imaginary field of daffodils became my safe place. I would visit every day, and it soon became the subject of my drawings. At each hotel, I visited I would attempt to leave a picture of my fictional heaven. At the bottom, I would write the word “someday,” simple and bold.

Little did I know, that in doing that, I was creating my own miracle. An employee at one of the hotels found my drawing and posted it online. It went viral almost instantly. Soon employees of other hotels began to post pictures of the “somedays” they found at their work too. The sheer number posted in such a short period of time caught the attention of an investigator searching for a young girl who’d recently gone missing. Those “somedays” were the final puzzle piece, my ticket out, my miracle. They matched the fingerprints on the drawings to that of an eleven-year-old girl from a small town in Maine who had disappeared nearly ten years ago, a case that had gone cold. 

I’d like to be able to say that I’d never forgotten the day that I was rescued, but that would be a lie. It was overwhelming, filled with flashing lights and shouting and doctors with lab coats in the most brilliant white imaginable. The one thing I wouldn’t forget, however, was the looks on my family's faces when their little girl finally returned home, and the garden, entirely filled with daffodils, that they set up in the backyard.