01/17/01 - 02:44 AM

It's so stupid to get worked up over a TV show because it's completely unreal; life based on someone's fantasy or nightmare. The dramatic creative energy trying to put a more interesting and captivating spin on life as we know it, so that millions of people will sit down and watch enraptured for an hour's time.

But this time it seemed so unbelievably real that I felt almost violated just watching it. Staring at the TV screen on a Monday night while Boston Public blares in front of me as the girl stands in front of people and reads "Daddy No."

The tone, the tense, the imagery, the fragmented sentences, everything, seemed to be pulled from my life, from my head, from MY story. Something that I wrote, way before Boston Public captured an hour of Fox's Monday Night lineup. Way before that girl got her big acting break. Way before the writer's even dreamed of that episode.

MY story. I wrote it and there on my TV screen was a version so similar, so incredibly frightening in its likeness that I was thrown back into the memory of where mine came from. That I was again lying in that bed, feeling those same feelings, crying that same way, waiting, waiting, waiting.

The click of the door for her, the silhouette on the wall for me. We are the nearly same person; we breathed the same fear.

My Story:

Every night it's the same. She sleeps on her right side. She clutches her small doll to her chest. Her knees are slightly bent. She faces the wall. Her door is open an inch or two. The door is always open. The light from the bathroom, two doors down, casts a thin line of yellow light on the wall she faces. During the night she can hear her mother shuffle to the bathroom and close the door. In those moments the room is completely dark and safe. Then the door is reopened and her mother shuffles back to bed. The light is on the wall again. She hears her brother's wheezing breathing due to his broken nose from across the hall. And then it comes. The silhouette on the wall. The thing in the doorway that blocks the bathroom light.

He comes in quietly and tugs her arm just once and then leaves. Sometimes she's asleep and the tug on her arm wakes her. But most of the time she's awake when he comes. She always thinks about not following him. But she knows that if she doesn't he will just come again and tug her arm until she goes with him. So she follows him. Down the hall, to the farthest point away from her bedroom and from her sleeping mom and her sleeping brother. Far away so that if she does make any noises, they probably won't hear it. Unless she screamed, but she never screams. She cries and she prays, and she begs God to let it be over quickly. But she never screams.

Sometimes it only lasts for a few minutes. He just forces her to touch him or hug him. But sometimes it lasts for hours. It always feels like forever though, no matter how much time passes. When he talks it makes it worse. When he says that he is in love with her or that he needs her, it makes it worse. It makes her want to die. She begs to just die.

My story I never finished because I could not, would not face myself, my hatred of myself for letting this happen to me over and over again. For not stopping it. Why didn't I try harder to get people to believe me?

The girl in the show speaks out with her story and her videotape. Caught on tape. The horror, the violation, the wrong. Her proof is documented. Visual proof that blends with the sound of the creaking bed making it disgustingly real.

And I hate. I hate that girl and her story. I hate those writers and their script for that show. I hate that show and the rude mental imagery it forced me to relive. I hate it and I watched it anyway.

I know that if I were faced with another show of a similar context I would watch it again. Not saving myself, enduring it over and over just like I did then, in that room, with that silhouette on the wall.

And I wonder why I have nightmares.