Healing Small Bones

There are no ends to which this Earth and this life has shown me love and warmth. I have known kindness and have experienced humanity the majority of my life. However, growing up can be scary. Personal is always universal, and unfortunately for us, reader, I am often shown a reflection of this pain in the strangers I face in everyday life. So, hold this piece. Drink it in, know you are seen, and you have full permission to take it with you when you go your own way. 

I am 21 almost 22 years old now, sitting outside a bar I have just ransacked for any kind of male attention or affection or anything that has to do with a man looking at me and deciding I will be good enough for the next twelve hours or twenty minutes. I’m sitting outside this bar in my adult bones, adorned with adult clothes and adult jewelry and adult skin that stretches extra long around my thighs and stomach. Down the way, there’s a man about fifteen years older than me. He’s smoking a cigarette that taints the air, creating a sort of bridge between him and myself. I approach, clutching my bag in one hand and squeezing my nails into my palm with the other. 

“Can I have one?” I point to his pack of Camels. He looks at me suggestively, a brow raised and the left side of his lips pulled up into pure deviance. He shrugs and offers me a reach inside the crushed box.  I say nothing as I use his blue cheap lighter to provoke a burn, and I turn and walk away. My perogative was not to have a man turn his affections towards me anymore, because I was an adult with an adult cigarette, feeling five years old. It burns, it burns so bad I begin to cry and huff and tug on the ends of my hair. I feel nothing but everything as I become five; seven; thirteen again, the smoke enveloping me and dragging me back into my childhood. Both of my parents were smokers. 

It is not a brag when I say I have done fairly well for myself since high school. I acknowledge I did not fully over-excel, nor did I stray to under-excelling, but I was the perfect medium child. I made good grades, I applied to the schools and the scholarships and I landed myself in a studio apartment in a downtown somewhere with a dog and a writing position and an internship and all the things to keep me shiny. I suppose that’s why medical professionals and friends and family members gawk when I try to articulate the way my ribs crush into one another and my head squeezes so hard I see black when I see my dad in strange, dark men or there’s yelling two streets down or something like a plate falls and shatters on the floor, leaving shards and mess for someone to clean up. Trauma, such an ugly word, stores itself in strange places of the body. Violence never leaves once it has arrived, and I wake up to the company of old violence every day. Sometimes, there is no use running from something so nasty it scares you, because behind scarring your heart and your mind, the second best thing it does is follow you. 

If life wrapped up as nicely as a piece of writing did, with a definite beginning and end, I may be able to give you comfort in the idea that things do get better. Being that I am still myself and am still that girl who runs to anything that looks even a little close to the comfortable chaos that screamed from the crevices of my loud, bright childhood- I cannot stand on high ground and tell you to keep fighting the water that is flooding over you. As an amateur, I believe the greatest strength we have over our trauma is recognizing that it’s real, and that it bruises us. If I’ve learned anything from being a fierce young girl in the face of danger and terror- small shoes dug into the floor and fists curled in bravery- it is that the closer we get to the things that scare us, the more say we have about where and how hard it will inevitably break us.

So, stare your trauma down. Grit your teeth until they threaten to crack and demand to be seen when the trauma tries to wrap itself around you. Get a therapist. Write down all of your secrets. Tell strangers how you cry when you smell hazelnut or burn the tips of your fingers. Tell them why. Call helplines and hang up on the third “You can do this” they offer you. Sing loud and talk slow and take up the space you fought so hard to keep. Do what needs to be done to keep those small bones soft and warm, and you might just be okay.

Strike Out,

Written by: Hanna Bradford

Edited by: Jane Dodge

Graphic by: CJ Barney