After Escape
by Gaia Rajan
Finally I was free to love anything I wanted. Instead I spent weeks charting each year of my history — I was beautiful, I was good, all my friends were beautiful and good, I lived in a narrow house where every night the ceiling closed on me like a lid. I hid knives in my textbooks, dreamt each night of a white table in a muddy field, a gun on the table, a woman holding the gun. I practiced answering her, rehearsed my own name, still bruised, so believe me, it wasn’t a surprise to hear them years later with floodlights, shouting my name. They said it wrong, they always did, and on every missing poster they’d painted my old face, so what was I to do, in the city they made evidence? I ran, and cab drivers wouldn’t look at me. I ran, and felt for a fingerhold, left nail marks on the interrogation table’s wood belly. I entered through the keyhole to a houseparty full of strangers. Racketed through the house’s narrow corridors, a pile of knees. And every time I woke up from the white table I woke without pain, remembering nothing, my own name on my lips. For months, I watched them grieve me — now it’s finally summer, my friend names her goldfish after me, the locusts come down on the hills, turning everything bone-white, there’s an ad in the newspaper for my body and then it’s over. I am free to love anything I want. And still I hate the black car down the road. Still I check every bathroom for cameras.
