No one would care if I decided not to turn around.

If I kept on biking down this pathway and accidentally veered too far right – if I ended up in the river. Or maybe if I just sat down and never stood up again, it wouldn’t really matter. It wouldn’t be any different than the past eight months.

Just to enhance the reality of the thought, I hopped off my bike and sat down in the dirty bank, looking across the river. The dry soil under my fingers shocked me – I honestly could not remember when June had come. Every day I wrote the date on my school assignments, but I never noticed when the 5 became a 6; and May became June; the wet dirt became parched; and my life had simply continued on with nothing to ground it or lift it up. Speedboats were in season, and I watched a few of them go by on the river. If I sat down and never stood up, I would never get a chance to ride on a speedboat. I would be at the bottom of the river, all of the speedboats riding above my head full of happy people who got a chance to do something I was never able to do.

I began to scrape my nails through the dirt. If I decided not to go home, I would never have to see him again. I would never have to see his face in the hall; never have to deal with the anticipation that he might look my way. I wrapped my arms around my chest, rocked back and forth. I’d never again, ever, in my life, my existence; have to relive what he did to me. My bike skidded on the gravel when I jumped back on, continuing south. Maybe if I kept biking down the road and never looked back, I would leave all of it behind me. It sometimes felt like there was a poison in my head, sloshing around and eating me from the inside out – desecrating and destroying everything that made me me. My optimism, my strength, my humor, my will, all of it dissipated until I was just the empty shell that I was now. The tires screeched as I rounded a corner too fast for anyone who valued her life. Maybe I didn't.

Maybe if I kept on riding and I left this place forever; once I crossed a boundary at the edge of the city, or state, or country, or dimension; the poison would just lift out of my head and I could go back to life the way it was before. Maybe the things that went through my mind, the addiction for substances that made the thoughts go away, the hate for everything I used to believe sacred, would simply disappear. My bike turned onto a different trail, and I imagined a new world coming into view from around the corner. A world where I could be normal again. A world where my mind fit inside of my body and I was allowed to live a life without pain like this.

Of course I would never act on these thoughts. Of course I knew that this new bike path led back to my house. I was never going to become one of those kids who ended up at the bottom of the river. He took away every thing about my life and myself that I valued, but he hadn’t taken everything. I still had the will to stop the poison in its tracks.

Within seconds of biking up to the front of my house, my mother descended on me. “Why didn’t you take your cell phone with you? You know I don’t like you out biking past twilight. It’s time that you started doing something productive,” she greeted.

“You said that you’d switch my laundry! What is your problem?” my older sister harped at me as I walked through the front door.

Hey Mom, I have something to tell you. Maybe your daughter isn’t as perfect as you thought she was. Maybe what I do to stay alive is more important than productive tasks. Maybe I’ve been suffering right under your nose this entire time and you were too wrapped up in your own world to notice. Without a word, I went up to my room, into my bed, and tucked myself under a sheet. Homework lay in heaps across my bedroom; three weeks of laundry were stacked not-too-subtly in a corner of my closet. It was all I could do to get myself into my own bed. Not for the first time, I considered that the first step to getting the poison out of my head was to tell someone what had happened… I rolled over and shut my eyes. I savored the moment of complete exhaustion. For the first time in a long time, I fell asleep with a sliver of hope. Maybe tomorrow could be different.