Still Missing

by Chevy Stevens

Spent most of the time wondering if I should kill him or myself.

Oh, and in case you were wondering? No, I wasn’t always such a bitch.

I looked for a support group. Turns out there’s no such thing as SAAMA, no Some Asshole Abducted Me Anonymous, online or off.

She’s still beautiful, but she seems, to me anyway, like a once-vibrant painting whose colors have bled into one another.

I was so pissed at her, and now I’d do anything to have that moment back.

I needed to prepare for the worst, but I didn’t even know what the worst might be.

Mr. Rogers telling you it’s a beautiful day to kill everyone in the neighborhood.

Avoiding this shit is like closing a door on a raging river. Little trickles of water start coming through the cracks, and next thing you know, the door blows off. Now that I’m letting some of the water through, will the door come crashing in? If I unleash everything that’s inside me, will I go floating down the river

with it?

If he was my guardian angel, like I told myself growing up, why the hell didn’t he make it stop?

When I wonder how I became the zombie I am now, how I could have gotten so lost, it always traces back to that moment—the moment I put my soul on the shelf to make room for the devil.

Actually, that’s what the jerk did. He stole Christmas from me. Along with a lot of other stuff, of course. You know, like pride, self-esteem, joy, security, the ability to sleep in a bed, but hey, who’s complaining?

I need to allow for the possibility I won’t always feel the way I do now, and it’s important to take note of small signs of progress, no matter how insignificant they may seem.

I hate them for not being in pain like me, hate them for being able to enjoy themselves. Hate myself for feeling that way.

What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I so fucking mad at everyone?

Nothing puts a skip in a freak’s step like telling a girl no one gives a shit about her.

“I keep telling myself it’s okay to talk about these things, I can still love my mom and not always like everything she does.”

I wondered why his skin didn’t reek of the rot in his soul.

think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.

For some strange reason, I have trust issues.

My grief is a windstorm. Sometimes I can stand straight up in it, and when I’m angry, I can lean into it and dare it to blow me over. But other times I need to hunker down, tuck around myself, and let it pummel my back. Lately, I’ve been in hunker-down mode.

Time only counts when you have a purpose.

Someone like him should have taken a silver bullet, a cross, and a stake through the heart to die.

but she just enjoyed twisting the knife so much, I didn’t have the heart to take it out of her hand.

Just thinking, Doc, every time I say something bad about Mom, I have this urge to list all her good qualities right after—my version of knocking on wood. And the thing is, Mom isn’t all bad, but that’s the problem. It would be easier if I could just hate her, because it’s the rare times when she’s loving that make the other times so much harder.

“I did feel safe with you, but now no one can make me feel safe. I have to get there on my own.”

He smelled like long dinners with friends, like too much wine and laughter, like happiness.

For once, a trip down memory lane wasn’t lined with screaming ghosts,

Only then did he lift one hand to cup the back of my head as he rocked me slightly in his arms. And then I cried.

It was so much the opposite of my experience with The Freak, total control versus no control, I’d actually been able to keep The Freak’s memory out of the room, out of the bed, out of my body.