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Since the Alone Time, I’ve had trouble multitasking. A therapist might say it’s a residual effect of my trauma—of being stranded in the wilderness with my family. In reality, it’s emerging from the wild without all of them that continues to haunt me.
I survived a plane crash that took my parents’ lives, that left me and my younger sister, Violet, to fend for ourselves for months. When a rogue hiker finally spotted us and came to our rescue twelve weeks after the crash, we had become so accustomed to the world as we knew it, we didn’t want to leave. Well, I did. I wanted shelter and a hot shower as a thirteen-year-old girl.
So far the only productive thing Violet has accomplished is dropping out of college. Twice.
“Aren’t you afraid he might overpower you, living just the two of you? He’s such a big guy.” I touched my dog’s head. Patted the skull I know exactly how to crush, whose bony plates would collapse together like Styrofoam under the right weight and angle. “No,” I replied. “I’m not afraid of my dog at all.”
Isn't that kind of a weird thing to ask about someone's pet. Like "aren't you afraid your own dog might attack and overpower you?" Uh what?
the Alone Time, as my sister and I called the twelve weeks that we were stranded in the wild,
Although my sister has shunned most forms of nature since our return to civilization, I’ve never lost my appreciation for the outdoors.
I wanted to strangle him then and there. To suggest that we resume our picturesque family vacation—place our lives in his hands and his newly acquired private pilot’s license—felt like such a dismissal of the hurt he had caused us.
As a first-generation American and an Asian man, Henry was always going on about respect when we first met fifteen years ago. He wanted to prove to everyone that he deserved recognition and respect from all fifty states, not just the coasts.
One more day, one step forward. That’s my mantra. Just make it to one more day and the morning might look different.
The only thing certain is that before the plane ride that cost us our lives—all of them, not just my parents’—
The urban hum of conversations and car doors slamming is a soothing reminder that I am two miles away from a grocery store, the police, and a fire station just in case they’re needed—my lullaby.
I’m frequently ignored because I like it that way. Because, after years of trying to make friends and failing to keep them once they know what happened, I find it’s better to go about my business.
My sister, Fiona, and I deliberately stayed away from the media once we were rescued. We swore to never engage with the public about our ordeal—or rather, Fiona made me swear never to talk. And I agreed.
But if any police bothered to follow up with me now as an adult, to observe the compulsion I have of carrying a blade on me when walking alone, they would know. The stink of my lie would perfume any interrogation room.
I yearn for a better quality of life—I fear the cost of it in the same breath.
I switch off the radio, not desiring to die while screaming to an unknown person with bad hearing.
LOL this line unexpectedly made me laugh
“I said no!” she shouts, over my head. “Not my boy. You leave him alone.” My mother lowers her gaze to connect with mine. Chills undulate across my arms in my short-sleeved tee, like the caterpillar ride at the fair. She hisses, “You don’t belong here.”
the tangible manifestation of trauma using the very source of the trauma itself—nature.
Isn’t all art an exploitation of a hurt, a trauma, an unresolved fear?
I hope to meet a man one day who doesn’t think loving someone means having ownership over all her thoughts.
I’ll never be more than one of the girl-survivors, and I’ll never be allowed to work through my trauma on my own terms, via my sculptures. All they or I will ever be is an object of fascination and fear.
“He looked at me and did this.” She lifts one finger to her lips. “Then he got out of the plane.” Shock prickles my skin, hearing the summary of my husband’s betrayal. Another one.
nothing could take Henry Seng willingly from his kids, and I know exactly who would lure Henry from me.
it seems we’ve both done well the last five years that we haven’t talked. Better to let a good thing keep rolling, right?” “Are you serious? I’m your only sister. After all we went through—” She cut me off then. “Exactly. After all I know about you, all that I saw out there, it’s best if we don’t pretend.”
something else that stops my breath. Condoms. Five individually wrapped condoms.
Magnum size, because no man can resist impressing the store clerk with the accolade.
People say they want a family, but rarely are the real consequences for the woman part of that discussion.
After a certain level of trauma is reached, the only choice we have is to either feel the pain in all its depth and depravity or choose numbness—ice to assuage the heat.
The person leans backward until I can clearly make out features I only see in my nightmares these days. My younger sister, Violet.
“They’re doing a documentary on us, Fiona,” she whispers. “On the crash and what happened afterward. They’re going to find out everything.”
“That there was more to the story than what we discovered. That these kids should be carefully returned to their family—into the care of their aunt—until the time comes that they’re ready to share more.”
I count back the number of lies that I told to the detectives. Count them back so that if—if, if, if—the truth comes out, I’ll remember the ways I need to cover my ass.
“Violet, what do you even know about this guy?” “I googled him—” “Oh, thank God. A tried-and-true source.”
And then I couldn’t help myself. A strange desire to hide from my family, from my life and the world we just flew away from, crept over me like a spell.
Violet is both Janet’s and my favorite child. It can’t be helped. No matter the bull that’s fed to us by modern parenting magazines, every parent feels pulled one way or another.
With the strong spotlights facing me in the living room, shadows find the hollows of her cheeks, aging her beyond thirty-two years—appropriate, given the things she saw and did at a tender age that no grown adult would dream of enduring.
Did I overshare, more than I was supposed to? Terror trips down my body as I try to recount the words that just fell out of my mouth. Were they the right ones? Did I stick to the script?
Sometimes, I can be in the middle of speaking, or performing a mundane activity, and forget what I just said or did. I don’t black out exactly. More like, I lose track of a moment.
Strange contradiction, to acknowledge the people who made our success possible, while distancing ourselves from them and their sacrifices.
were you burning something else—evidence of some kind—when you realized people were coming?”
“And they didn’t both die that night. Did they?” His voice drops to a whisper. “That’s not all that happened.”
When she first called the house, it felt like the air had been punched from my torso. Like I’d been kicked in the belly—the place where I had grown his children, cared for our legacy every moment of every day for nine months. Twice.
“I do feel drawn to you, though,” Wes says, from beneath dark eyelashes. “You know what I mean? Like there’s this strange connection between us, without knowing anything about each other.” I want to laugh, to scoff and get up to leave. Instead, I hold his eye contact. Try to make sense of how his words could echo my own thoughts.
nothing in nature feels as divine as all that. It’s much more menacing.”
We experience terrible things, and in hindsight, our paths seem to drive us toward our individual narrow valleys, where we either push through to reach the open air of the other side or become stuck forever, pressed at all angles by our faults and sheer bad luck.
“Before the flight, you got in trouble, grounded by Dad for hanging up on some woman named Alicia.
“Not to mention what you did out there all those years ago. I didn’t keep in contact with you because I couldn’t. Because it was too painful on a lot of levels.
Violet was the one to show me the notebook filled with printed images from horror movies that Fiona had hidden under her bed.
