Every Day Life
After the Attack
By
Jennifer Angelina Petro
The day after.
The slipping back
Into your body.
The stepping back
Into your life.
The sitting down
With your perpetrators
At the breakfast table,
In church, at Thanksgiving dinner,
The friends coming over
To play in a house
Where you were pinned down,
The getting up the next morning,
The shutting down
Of what happened,
The pushing it away,
The surviving by vanishing
In plain sight,
The slow forgetting
So that life can go on
Even though the innocence
Of running outside on a long, drifting
Summer’s evening, disappears
Like a firefly in the trees.
The terror burrowing
Into your body, into your spirit,
Into the fabric of your mind,
To be carried with you
The rest of your life, like
A railroad spike in your guts,
That stabs you again and again
When you least expect it—
When a smell, the sound
Of cicadas, the flashback,
The Thanksgiving dinner,
The priest holding up
The Eucharist, triggers it all again—
And you feel like
You’re going to vomit the horrible truth,
And you freeze as you’re walking
To the store, and you shimmer
Out of your body again,
And don’t come back
For hours, and yet, you go about
Your day, a living mist, a disappearing
Person made of sand,
And somehow you manage
To return to your life—
The stain on your soul
Visible in your eyes,
And yet, you move on, you make it,
You survive another wave,
You emerge from the dark waters,
And you stride towards the healing
Into freedom, into the reclaiming
Of your life—the fucking forgiveness
And twisted loyalties, the fucking
It’s a gift, the fucking it was meant
To be, the fucking you somehow
Made it happen or deserved it,
The fucking you will let it
Hold your life hostage anymore,
The wonder of who you are—
A warrior battling every moment
To live, to recover your innocence
From pain’s tangled trees,
Where fireflies still blink, like
Beacons in the night,
Reminding you that you still
Shine.
Me, 5th grade, dressed up for a class play.