Four Fucking Years
By Deirdre Heavey, Spring 2021
Fuckfuckfuckfuck. I reached into the pocket of my vintage fur coat to grab my wallet only to discover a vacancy that spread through my body like a virus.
Anthony, Anthony, look around. Something is lost that must be found. As I searched through my backpack for my little black wallet, I obnoxiously threw every sock and shoe onto the floor next to the hostel’s front desk. Tears streamed down my face as I hyperventilated in the corner of the too-well-lit lobby, the bass from the bar next door scorching through my eardrums, and unattractive men staring at the sad girl in the corner as their opportunity to get laid that night.
I was o’er in Paris when I almost ran away. I had my phone, my passport, a few shiny coins worth 2 Euros each, and 6 Lucky Strike cigarettes to my name. With a pit in my stomach the size of my denial, I confronted the very feelings I had suppressed for the past four years.
He raped me.
I wasn’t pinned down against my will and told to shut up. It happened in the most subtle, did his dick just go inside of me? type of way that I didn’t know how to define what happened to me for four fucking years. What began as a fog gradually became a haze–beginning in my uterus working its way from my stomach in and around my heart to the perimeter of my brain–until one day a dark cloud hanging over my chest shielded me from feeling anything at all.
***
1 Pack of Marlboro Reds
1 Pack of Lucky Strike Menthol Switches
1 Bottle of Rosé
1 Bottle of Pinot Grigio
2 Baguettes
2 Packs of Proscuitto
2 Orange Zest Chocolate Bars
1 Block of Brie Cheese
1 International Edition of The New York Times
1 Afternoon of Crying Under the Eiffel Tower
***
Two times round the block before I decided to stay. Maggie and I walked by the decrepit Notre-Dame–still destroyed from the fire a year prior yet reenvisioned with protective gallery walls shielding it from passerbys. As we stopped for a quintessential street crepe on that gloomy Saturday morning, the virus of vacancy returned to my body, and I could no longer stomach more than a bite. That all too familiar feeling of failure–which I had been able to hold at bay when gallivanting through the Louvre–was back. I let this happen. This is my fault.
Puffed along a cigarette that went and made me sick. Looking out onto the Seine River from one of the several bridges coated with locks–sealed by Parisian lovers as the ultimate symbol of consent–the haze filled my eyelids with a foreign tar of tears.
We turned a corner and discovered the Bouquinistes, riddled with vintage Vogue magazines, first edition Jane Austen novels, and quaint pins as the tears that were streaming down my face began to disintegrate into the current of the Seine. My Euros had since run out, leaving no coins or cash to purchase the prized possessions of the river. But as my fingers fiddled through the stacks of Parisian postcards blanketed with calligraphy and fumbled over the line sketches of Mimes Des Courtisanes, the fog began to clear from my vision.
Spent another day thinking I was over it. With one last stop at Shakespeare & Co—the English literature bookstore, café, and socialist utopia—I picked up a journal that read, “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” I looked around at the strangers of my shared space and read the words of Mary McCarthy as “waves of shame ran through her, like savage internal blushes.” Deeply, darkly, the haze subsided to a low smoke somewhere in the back of my brain, making room for the words and wisdom of strangers in Shakespeare & Co and beyond.
***
Back in my body. As Maggie Rogers played in my head on repeat, I kissed a cute boy outside of a laundromat speakeasy because I wanted to. When he asked me to come back to his room that night, I said no–a word buried beneath the weight of my chest for four years, only now with the courage to muster.
This was originally published in Manhattan Magazine, Spring 2021 issue.
