Here We Go Again
"UUUUUUUHHHHH" I sit up straight in bed, gasping for air. I can't catch my breath. It is as if I swallowed my tongue. I have my hands clawing at my chest trying my hardest to get the air into my lungs. I am desperate to get the phantom hands dislodged so I can breath.
Finally the air enters my lungs and so starts the coughing. After I drawl in a few more breaths my heart rate starts to return to normal. The coughing does not subside and the tears have been running down my face for the last five minutes. I really hate when this happens. There is no use looking at the clock. I know what time it will display. I have been having this issue since my thirteenth birthday, which will be five years from today.
When I turned fourteen my mother took me to a specialist to figure out why I was being so dramatic and why she was being woken up by my hysterics. Every sleep test always came out normal but when I explained what was happening I was diagnosed (aren't we all diagnosed with some problem or another) with sleep apnea. Of course a medication can always fix an issue right.
I tried to beg my mom to seek a second opinion. Even at fourteen I knew this diagnosis could not be accurate. These 'episodes' only happen once a month and it was always at 3:00 am. But no matter what I did my mother believed the doctors over me. Of course she did, it was the sane choice, it was the easy choice, it was the choice that made her have to do the least amount of work. Because why would my mother actually want to know the truth? She just needed the easiest solution.
I showed her the bruising on my neck after each incident. The bruises that looked exactly like strangulation marks. That just ended up getting me therapy three times a week where I was asked over and over again why I was choking myself or why I was causing myself harm. So of course I did the only thing a sane person would do. I stopped asking for help. I hid the bruises and I acted like everything was normal.
Who cares that the marks on my neck were much bigger than my own hands or like I mentioned before, it only happens once a month and at the same time every month all I know is no one is going to help, it is too easy to be logical and a girl claiming someone is trying to kill her in her sleep is not logical.
The one thing therapy did achieve was having my mom move us. My therapist suggested that maybe my self harm was coming from my fear of location. Maybe it was bullying at school or some incident happened that made me fear my surroundings. Obviously my mom believed that it had to do with my father leaving us when I was five. The house was obviously making me "unwell". I was hopeful too at first. Maybe once we moved these 3:00 am wake up calls would end.
So we packed all of our belongs and left our small town in Bisbee, Arizona and hit the road to Townsend, Tennessee. Mom thought the weather change and the great outdoors would do me well. I was sad because I left my lifelong (9 years) school friends. It was awkward going to a new school at fourteen. It was my last year in middle school and I was the new kid. I stayed hopeful but like a clock my 3:00 am wake up call happened on time every month.
So for the next four years we moved from town to town. No longer for my sake, since I stopped bringing up my condition to my mother, but for the sake of her running from bad relationships and debts. Two week ago I landed in my new home to be of New Orleans, Louisiana. So far I am enjoying the feeling of something I can not describe, but I knew it wouldn't be long lived, it was only a matter of time. Today on my birthday none the less, 3:00 am wake up call and the first day back to school.
Throwing the covers off I finally get out of bed and look at my neck in the mirror. Same as each time, my face is still splotchy and fingerprints showing around my neck. I take out a vintage Polaroid camera that I found in a thrift shop in Tennessee when I was fourteen I take a picture of myself and once it develops I put todays date on it and I put that it is my eighteenth birthday. I open up my bottom desk drawer and use the fingernail file on my desk to pry off the faulty bottom. Below it are about fifty other polaroids with dates leading back to the first incident after my camera purchase.
I remember back to when I first noticed the pattern of dates, thirty days, every thirty days and I decided to try and stay awake all night to see if I could pass over a month. Since it only happened once a month how hard would it be to stay awake for one whole night once a month. Well it was impossible. I have never successfully done it. I always wake at 3:00 am in the same situation sometimes with no memory of having ever fallen asleep.
My first day of school starts in five hours, there is no chance I will be able to get back to sleep so I might as well start the day off right. This is the first time I am starting a new school on the first day of school and it is also my last year of school. I already know I will be older than most of the kids since I was held back for all my "health issue".
"Ok Rowan, today is your day. It is the last time your mom will be able to move you, you are of legal age, make some friends, start off on the right foot. This place does feel right," I say aloud while looking at myself in the mirror. Best thing to do is hop in the shower and start my day early.
