Helpless Again

NOTE: The name of “D” has been abbreviated for her privacy.

Sometimes, when everything is quiet, and the fire extinguisher catches my eye—all bruised, beaten, dented—I think of D. I hear Snooze by SZA, and I see the opening clips of Moana or Encanto, and I feel her fingers on my scalp, braiding hair. I see the way she walked, fliting around like a fairy, and hear how she laughed like bells. And then I see the love letters she gave me, handwritten and colored and nearly nonsensical, and the bashful look she gave me when I read them. I remember how I was speechless.

She was like a sister to me, a child, but I understood that she wanted me to see her as beautiful.

So when she punched the fire extinguisher, screaming at the top of her lungs, I felt responsible. Because I didn’t see her as beautiful the way that she wanted me to. And then, when she tried to hang herself the next night, screaming and banging and thrashing as they gave her the shot and put her in seclusion, I couldn’t handle it. I sobbed for hours.

All I could think about was the five-year-old boy at the children’s psych ward, screaming as he was sedated over and over, and the dirty girl trapped in the crate, naked and in pain, crying, “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

And I was once again helpless.