The Burden of Truth.

Trigger Warning: Substances, SA, Suicidal Ideation

“This is so fucking stupid!” She screams as she begins to rip everything off her walls. Partially not what I expected but at the same time it’s everything I expected when I got the call from my girlfriend in tears saying “nothing matters anymore it was all for nothing”.

“Hope…” I rush to her catching her as she collapses into an ocean of herself on the ground surrounded by her mental carnage. “God… Holy fuck.” The only thing I could manage as I looked around at her room. 

She’s been my friend for over ten years, I met her when she walked into my fathers bar and grill, sat right at the bar and ordered a rum and coke. I laughed and told her there was no way she was old enough to be drinking legally. She cracked a grin and slid me a twenty, with the worst wink ever. I slid it back to her and said you’re like thirteen she scoffed and said she was sixteen just got her license and then she sighed. “You tricked me!” She muttered. I laughed again and offered her a Dr pepper on the rocks telling her she looked like a Dr pepper girl. I was right and she was smitten. We both were though neither of us would admit it. 

I was quicker to admit the fall, she was buried in the fallout of things that weren’t hers to carry. But we were inseparable from that day on. She was a highschool drop out with health problems and day dreams of escaping while I was a straight a student with a full scholarship ride to Florida State. My family took her in as one of ours. Even when I left for school she was with my parents most the week. My mother a former internal medicine doctor opted to help Hope and her family with lots of things involving her medical situation. My first semester of college she was hospitalized for an infection I was with her as much as I could be. Her brother and I butt heads sometimes but for the most part he likes me better than the guys she dated. He asked me numerous times while she was dating why I tolerated it. I would laugh it off but the truth was. I loved her and if she had to date and figure things out, I would wait a lifetime. Plus, I was dating too, how could I judge. 

She would always say I should have met her before everything. Before the church shut down, before her dad started drinking again. Before the family really fell apart. Before she cracked her halo. I never understood that, I thought her halo was just fine. Perfect even the way it gleamed in the moonlight. It fit her just right. 

“What happened?” I ask sliding down the wall to sit next to her, looking at the room in shambles taking the bottle from her hand – her worst enemy and her best friend is a bottle of liquor. It’s the thing that understands her the most is what she says. Next to me – she’d correct adding that if I knew what that bottle held for secrets then I’d run as far and as fast as I could.

“I lied.” Her eyes are dead as she stares ahead and I watch her closely. The silence lingering a bit longer in an attempt for me to process what she was saying. Taking a sip of her Jack Daniel’s as she turns to look at me. Tears staining her cheeks. “I lied you know. All those years ago. I said I didn’t know what happened but I did. I only fessed up to the texts I read but I said I didn’t know and then when the memories started coming back I lied to everyone. I wouldn’t talk to them about it. About that night.”

“That’s not lying.”

“It’s not being honest.”

“You were a kid…”

“I was terrified.” She whispers, taking the bottle back and taking a drink. “If I tell you, you wouldn’t believe me. No one does.” 

“Try me?” I challenge her taking the bottle back as her hand falls slack, she was drunk again.

This wasn’t like her, though lately it’d become her new normal. She had such a complex relationship with alcohol, she and her brother both. I knew a little of why she was so uneasy around it and why she felt such messy feelings about the bottle. But never had the full story. But that was all about to change. We sat quietly with the air in the room growing heavier by the second before she finally broke the silence. Her lip quivering as she uttered a few lifeless words that changed my reality forever. 

I’d known her father for a decade. The man I met was a drunk, abrasive but he donated on his daughter. He was far from the pastor she’d described growing up with. Racist but not, a cheater but still a husband. Everything that I know about the man contradicts what she was raised with. But it was all what she told me, yet she would defend him to an extent. Though after a while she gave up. That must have been when the realization sunk in. 

She explained to me her father had touched her. It took a sexual assault to dredge up the memories. She fought for ages to deny what deep down she knew. She wanted so often to tell her brother, to scream to her mother. But her voice felt like nothing in the grand scheme of it all. It felt like lies. Like no one would believe her. Like her world was upside-down. That’s why she drank. Yet drinking reminded her of how she even remembered these events… because yes it wasn’t just once – it had happened many times. She’d only truly notice that night though. The night that no one talks about, the one that every one makes her feel guilty for wanting to talk about, for needing too. Yet everyone thought they knew. But it was only those three there. She says “Only us three. I was the most sober of the three of us, I snitched but then I didn’t fully. It’s my fault.” She carries too much guilt for a child who was set up for failure.

Hope ripped the bottle from my hand, or maybe I let her have it back. There wasn’t much left anyway, it wasn’t the most responsible choice I could make, but it was the only one I could think of in that moment. To let her numb that pain for a moment longer before I told her what I was planning to tell her.

Amidst her confession she slipped up and told me the only reason she even called me was to tell me goodbye and that she couldn’t take it anymore, she needed an out and her life was a dead end. It wasn’t. It was far from a dead end but I needed her to see that, and for her to see that she needed help. The help she’d been quietly begging for all along. The only difference? I heard her pleas… for once she wasn’t the one doing the reading. It was someone else.

The steps that followed were some of the hardest. Everyone says the truth will set you free, but no one talks about how the truth breaks you first. How much of a burden that it is to carry, to know those things and then have to speak them… if you ever utter those words.