My resurrection

I lay in the hammock for what was probably four hours, but what felt more like minutes, yet also like days. We were going around adding songs to listen to. Songs to help us make sense of the moment, to make sense of what we were feeling. My husband, J, was sitting to my right on a white plastic chair. My brother, G, and his wife, H, were across from J. I have been experiencing on-and-off panic attacks. Shifting from dissociation to feeling to distress to panic, and back to calm. I decided we should create a playlist to memorialize this particular moment. For me to understand how they were making sense of my revelations, my painful discovery. We were all sitting around in the dark of our Airbnb in San Sebastian. It was a rainy Puerto Rican summer night. The power had gone out, and we had no running water, the typical and heartbreaking Puerto Rican reality. We had never been there. It was new for us all. The location and the predicament. The house was not particularly big or well taken care of, but we were there for the grounds, to be outdoors, to be in the wilderness. The nature of Puerto Rico has a way of holding me as if it were my mother’s embrace. It had chickens everywhere, an above-ground pool for the kids, and access to the lake. Which was not one we could swim in because it's too deep, too dangerous to enjoy, but more to heal our energy, absorb our grief. Water cleanses all. What I didn’t know then, but now know, is that the creation of this playlist and listening to those songs was my resurrection. These three humans were rallying around me, performing a ceremony, a ritual, to hold me, to guide me. To bring me back to life. We were forever bonded as four in that space, in that moment in history. We named the playlist “J Can’t Drive to Palmas.” Palmas is where my dad lives, and my husband wanted to get in the car to confront him. I don’t think to kill him, but definitely to threaten him. This was the first time I realized when and where my dad would rape me when I was teen. He would get me blackout drunk when we would travel, force me to go to bars, and bribe the bouncers to let me in the strip club. I was 16 years old, and then I have no memory of being in the hotel room at the end of the night, alone with my dad. Just an ominous darkness. And then it's morning; I feel awful. A sense of deep shame washing over me, enough that I couldn’t look at myself in the eyes in the mirror. Needing sunglasses and a hat to hide my face from strangers, because they, of course, could see what an awful human being I am. I realized this sitting on this rooftop terrace in San Sebastian with my brother and husband by my side. These two men, the two people I trust the most in this world. These three humans are my safety. I didn’t know then that this was the ceremony I needed to see what I was holding on to for so long in my life. To confront the facts. To come face to face with the devil. With myself. With my shadows. This was the first day of the rest of my life. My resurrection.