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Date Posted: July 20, 03:29:pm GMT-5
Author: Xanthe
Subject: Near Death

Have you ever been absolutely certain you were about to die?

Few people have. I've been in more than my fair share of car accidents, and am very familiar with that slow moment just before one car smashes into another when you know it's unavoidable and it's going to be very, very bad. But never in that moment of clarity did I utterly believe that I was going to die.


When I was in junior high, a girl in my neighborhood went on vacation for a week, and I received rare astounding permission from my parents to take care of her two gerbils while she was gone. Their cage sat on the dresser in the spare bedroom, and I would sneak in and watch them, sometimes even take one out and hold it for a while, feeling the tiny claws scratching at my palm, petting the small head with one fingertip. One night as I was holding one of them it suddenly turned and (without provocation, so far as I know) bit me — hard, long rodent teeth sinking sharp into my finger.
I didn't just drop the gerbil, I flung it away from me as violently as I could, utterly furious. Not from shock, the way you pull your hand back from a hot oven, but in rage and hatred and betrayal, wanting to hurt the thing that had hurt me. The gerbil slammed into the floor and twitched a little. And then, suddenly fearful of what I had done, I lifted it up as gently as I could. It lay in my hands, small and fragile, limp and still.

I didn't mean to kill it. I didn't mean to. One uncontrolled moment, and no way to take it back.

I replaced the dead gerbil in the cage and pretended, with convincing distress, to have just discovered it there. No one questioned this, and I never told my parents, or the girl whose gerbils they were, what had really happened. It was my greatest secret shame: not only that I had killed it, but that I could be that cruel. That deep down I was no better than my parents, who visited so much pain and rage on one so small and helpless.



When I was a child and scared I would cry in huge gasping sobs, hyperventilating in my panic, and for some reason this particularly enraged my mother. Certain that I was faking it, she would tell me to stop and breathe normally. I did try, always, but it was never a phenomenon in my control, and when I failed to comply she would hit me again, which only served to make me sob harder.

Many nights — thousands of them, all run together now with no sense of order or time — ended with a punishment session many hours long. When my father was home, my mother used him as the enforcer, and so long as she was unhappy he would take it out on me. One night the three of us stood in my bedroom, well into the session and no end in sight. I was sobbing in that hysterical heaving sort of way; my mother told me to stop it, and of course I couldn't. My father watched this for a time and then took over. He stepped forward and clamped his hand across my mouth, screaming at me to stop the sobbing.

What I know he didn't realize was that, because I had been crying so much, my nose was completely stopped up. By covering my mouth he was keeping me from breathing at all.

I was not a fighter, growing up. I would flinch, I would cower, I would run away if I couldn't possibly help myself, I would beg and plead for it to stop, but between the age of about three and seventeen I didn't fight back.

This time I fought. I lived much of my life in utter terror, but this went far beyond that and into some kind of primal panic that overrode everything else. I twisted and struggled and clawed desperately at his implacable hand, and through all of this I had the clear thought: he's going to kill me and he doesn't know it. Oh, god, he's going to kill me and he doesn't even know it.

It was the last part that was the most terrifying, that made everything so certain. He had his hand over my mouth; I couldn't breathe and I couldn't speak, and I knew I was going to die. The moment stretched; I grew more and more dizzy, still prying ineffectually at his fingers, until at last I blacked out.



What happened then has always seemed rather darkly ironic: I lost consciousness and as a result, relaxed — probably went quite limp, in fact — and for the first and only time in my life, stopped the hyperventilate sobbing. I can only assume that at some point after I stopped struggling my father loosened his grip enough that my unconscious body could actually breathe again, thereby keeping me alive. I came to some time — probably only a couple of minutes — later, lying on the floor. I have no evidence that either of them ever realized how close they had come just then to murdering their only child.

And I can see the scene, as clearly as if it were real, where I didn't take that one unconscious breath. Where my parents looked at my crumpled body on the carpet and slowly realized that something was very wrong. My mother would scream accusations at my father, as she so often did over the bruises and welts that he inflicted under her manipulation and direction.

And my father would hold my small limp body in his arms and sob. I didn't mean to kill her. I didn't mean it. Oh, god, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it.

One moment, and no way to take it back.

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