It is a hard thing to be a woman. Sienna dreams of the man who raped her when she was 18 and still a virgin. Every few months he returns to her—this time he is outright holding her prisoner. There is no furniture in the room he keeps her in, but the walls are brick that has been painted a tacky bright white. She tries to run, but he grabs her by her long red hair. She is so much stronger than she expected. Feral. She claws at him as he moves to strike her, and, as though her brain wants to protect her, she cannot feel the blow that lands on her stomach. She startles awake, surprised by the cruelty of her subconscious. The gray hush of dawn spreads across the tops of the trees outside her kitchen window. Sienna stands there for a long time. Her neighbor leaves a bird feeder full of seed on a low table. Most mornings she stands at the window peeling fruit and watching birds she can’t identify pick and hop and flit away. It doesn’t matter what kind of birds they are—something about their movement calms her. Reminds her that all creatures go on moment by moment. 

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Sienna has not told her husband that she doesn’t want to be a mother. She would never feel comfortable enough to have a whole universe burst forth from her like that. She is tired of the vulnerabilities that womanhood requires: the tearing, the bleeding, the pain, always the pain. When she does tell her husband, he smiles and puts on a pot of tea. He had assumed as much. He has known who she is and has no interest in looking away. It is a strange thing to realize that all your problems come from inside of you. At a certain point there is no one left to blame for the unhappiness, the nightmares, the gnawing anxiety that means she can’t breathe some nights, that her chest won’t expand as it should. She must convince herself again and again that she is not dying, as she stares at the ceiling fan, a part of her wanting it all to come crashing down. She knows this isn’t true, of course. What was done to her was his fault and not hers. But she can’t seem to heal, can’t seem to move on, no matter the new techniques her therapist tries. This lack of healing seems to be the only part of it under her control—and she has failed. For Siena it all circles back around to guilt and she can’t seem to stop feeling it. 

We all tell ourselves stories to survive and Sienna is no different. As she wraps her hair into a loose bun at the base of her long neck, she repeats the mantra her therapist has given her: I am safe. I am loved. I am safe. I am loved. But can a woman ever really be safe in this world? She knows her husband loves her and would never hurt her. He is patient during the years where she can’t bear to be touched, and attentive during the years when desire flows through her like lava burning bright. They were friends first, and she knows that is why they are successful. But her mind feels like an enemy, bringing her dreams and thoughts of that terrible night when the thing she cannot name happened to her, and even dreams of men she doesn’t know who could hurt her at any moment. So Sienna creates a new mantra for her morning ritual: I am not afraid. If anyone tried to hurt me, I’d simply kill them. I wouldn’t even feel bad. For a few weeks she says it and feels like a fraud. Her face is rather sweet-looking. She has round features and eyes a light green like young leaves just before they unfurl. She starts wearing makeup for the first time in her life—not much—just a little dark black eyeliner and a bright crimson for her lips. She’s not sure the makeup suits her, but she needs some kind of edge. Something to show the world that she doesn’t care, she is unafraid, she is free. It is still a lie. 

There is no resolution. Some stories don’t end. You just have to go on. Sienna tries to make herself a harder kind of person, though she still cries at proposal scenes in movies; even if the proposal is rather boring or commonplace, it’s the idea of a new life that moves her. She still laughs when her husband makes a ridiculous pun while watering the plants. She wears her eyeliner and starts carrying a pocketknife with a sharp blade. At night, she slides the knife out of her purse and slips it under her pillow. Its handle is a burgundy so deep it looks almost purple, different from the lipstick she wears, but bold all the same. She turns the knife over and over in her hands as she drifts off to sleep, a different kind of mantra. The nightmares come and go as they always have, but when she wakes in the darkness, her chest hollow of breath and hope, she closes her hand around the knife and feels just a little more prepared for whatever her life might hold. She knows the feeling won’t last, but it gets her out of bed in the mornings and she focuses on the clarity of that feeling, the surety of it that recedes right out of her as the sun rises each day.