I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom Read Free Book Online Page A

house, not caring for anything decorative—just walls, a place to sleep, doors.
    No one is setting me free. The men don’t like it when I scream. One man says, “I can’t come while she’s crying.” So my mouth is covered, my face, and pressure is applied. They suffocate me until it’s quiet.
    In the beginning, when I fight, it’s like being underwater after a big wave, unable to find which way is up, holding my breath. I push as hard as I can, but the weight is like rocks, heavy furniture, unmoving, as though I’m buried in the lock. I push again, from some other place, as if I’m pushing to be born, shocked it’s not enough. The dark the dark of underground. I stop pushing.
    My body’s empty, lungs like handkerchiefs flat inside my chest. I breathe something that’s not air, not struggling. My eyes work. I might be inside the earth or slightly above it—it’s a cave, spacious. I can imagine my girl body on the floor of the house, shoulders tight. In the cave a light appears at the edge of my vision, like birds in flight. With a current that pulls me, promising everything, except my body. The need to give in to the pull of the lightreminds me of the overwhelming need to push when Tommy was born. For the first time, I’m not hard on the girl body that I see, admiring how she’s knit together, torso tanned, white where the bikini top cups her like hands, a string of unsunned skin white around her neck glowing.
    Once that body fit in a single gold chair with her brother, white socks on their feet, chair so big it is like a throne. She has a pink coat with gold buttons, and her father had wanted to name her Aurora, the name of the sun rising, so that she would always know how happy he was the day she was born. This is the opposite of dawn. This girl, in this room, could be leaves in the woods, an arm poking out. Grass growing out of her mouth.
    Once in a story, a girl was shot, through a door—she’d been dancing outside, announcing a child. In a year, someone in a recovery meeting will say, “I think you would like this story,” and hand me a copy of the Paris Review . In the story, if you want to live, if you wish it before dying, you can come back. Before she hit the ground, a girl had wanted to live, and so she came back, in another state. When, earlier in the story, the narrator finds the girl in an empty room, cutting herself—blood on her arms, I feel as though I am the girl and the narrator. After the girl in the story dies, it’s years before she comes back. When she does, she’s a child, and the narrator is still an adult. But they recognize each other, and nothing—not the self-mutilation, or death, or geographical distance, or age—keeps them from being able to see. I know my son isn’t lost to me. I know no one is ever lost. But this story is someone else believing that and telling me so. I want to be able to write like this. I’ll read the story sitting cross-legged on my canopy bed, weeping, near hysterical, as if I could finally see a world I knew existed. Reading it, I’ll start to spin—unable to face any one direction for more than a few moments. Maybe as in the story, when I’m dying, my love for my girl body counts as a wish.
    In the house, the three men, unaware that the girl they raped and suffocated has died, are sleeping when I come back from the cave. I died and came back to life. I don’t know how long they continued to suffocate me after I lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. How many more minutes it would have taken before I was gone for good. I don’t remember coming back. Suddenly it’s morning. As if some angel had put his mouth to mine and breathed, like radar echo from birds or rain. Brought my soul back, a blue shadow, into my body. But the girl I’d been is gone.
    In meetings, people would talk about the terrible things that haven’t happened yet, but can if an alcoholic keeps drinking. I’d thought I would always be able to save myself. I remember a man