Turn The Page: Chapter Four, Withdrawals and Flashbacks

    Terry wasn’t sleeping. Beads of sweat coated her bare body beneath the dampened sheets. And tremors throughout her body twitching her arms and legs at their joints.
      Terry was mostly awake when an eyelid creaked open and a blurred crucifix on the wall came into focus. Then the extraordinary happened, an hallucination, the cross was on fire. The flames licking and blackening the yellow wallpaper around it.
     Terry squeezed her eyes shut as she remembered past hallucinations when she was withdrawing. Never like the euphoric psychedelic mushrooms she had taken in the past where she smiled the whole trip. Here, heroine, cocaine, meth have withdrawals one cannot tolerate but go back to the habit. Terry didn’t know if she could survive within the sanctity of the church. So she pulled out her diary and with what little light she had to illumine the pages, Terry wrote,
      
     Alive. But for how long? Memories. Awful memories! I cannot shun them. If in fact there is a god then may he have mercy on my poor soul. I cannot go on like this. Just last week on the island, familiar faces from high school rolled down their windows and shouted vile shit to me. I cried. And then needed another fix. I stepped between traffic off the island and went under the Union st. bridge to score whatever I could. Lucky is his name. Tall, robust and always angry. I approached with twenty dollars from the last car date and wanted two bags. I remember his eyes rolled from my feet up to my eyes. “This way, Terry, I got you girl!” I followed. We walked around a dark corner where the overhead lamp had been vandalized and the soles of my boots crunched the glass that spread all around. Then the cold, metallic tip of a knife’s point into my belly button. “GIRL you give what I want first, then maybe, we could talk business.” What could I have done! I had to go down on him and it paralyzes me to think of it now but truth is I have thought about it every other moment of everyday since it happened. And up until today have been across the intersection from where it happened, on the island! Maybe it was a first step to turn the page, to sell my body since my rape, for food to keep myself alive!

     Terry awoke with the merciful warmth of the sun shining in through her bedside window. It’s God’s hand on my forehead, Terry thought.
     But it was not sunlight nor the hand of God, it was the palm of the sister’s hand resting on her forehead. “Awake my child. Today is a new day.”
     Terry rose her head and smiled at the sister, saying, “and today I pray more!”
     To this the sister nodded and invited Terry to shower and then breakfast, where she will meet father Long. Then to figure out what program she should consider entering.
      Remembering the flashback from lastnight of her rapist, Terry had to turn the page and know for the first time since childhood, what the quality of a good life feels like.