Finding the Ground Beneath the Feet

I suddenly realized that I was alive and opened my eyes. Something was beeping to my left. It meant I was back in intensive care. I was breathing easily, and the oxygen was slightly buzzing in my mask. I thought it meant something too, but I wasn’t sure what exactly. The mask suggested that I was dead. I knew I was going to die soon, I had known that for a long time, and… I didn’t care, I just wanted it to be quick because I was tired. I remembered that my name was Mariana. It was the name that my parents had given me… Tears came to my eyes, and I felt like crying.

There was some time left before the doctors arrived and learned everything from the monitors. Katya’s dad used to tell me that monitors can tell you about everything. When someone dies, everyone starts to fuss around, I remembered… But there were no doctors yet, so… I didn’t know what that meant. Could it be that I just died for a while? Then they were going to come now. If I died… Why did they bring me back? What for? I felt like crying again, so I went on remembering how it all had started.

I was about five years old when we noticed that I got bruises out of nowhere. Then, suddenly my fingers started hurting. They would bend backward and hurt for some reason. I was a little girl then and didn’t understand that it was better to hide that, so I complained to my mother. Mother got worried and took me to the doctor. He examined my arms, looked into my tear-filled eyes indifferently, and said that it couldn’t hurt like that and that I made it up to ask for something. Mum got very angry and brought me home, where she took off my… well… everything to hurt me with some kind of stick. I bled because my skin was very thin: you could see all the veins through it, especially on my chest. It hurt a lot, and of course, I screamed. But after the stick, it hurt less where it always used to hurt, for a brief period, of course, so I realized it was the right thing to do. If I had known how it would all end…

Before I went to school, I did everything to keep myself from crying out in pain. Later on, they started punishing me with a wide belt that didn’t make me bleed, but it also hurt a lot. On the other hand, it didn’t hurt so much to pee afterward. I’d always been small – even now I look eight years old, although I am thirteen, so I guess they didn’t hit me too often, just a little, so I wouldn’t make anything up. When I was eight, I even started to like being punished because it was easier to breathe after that. I no longer resisted and willingly came when they wanted to discipline me.

There was a girl called Katya in our class, her dad saved my life. I never understood why, though. Katya also had thin skin and bent fingers, but they believed her, and when I complained about my pain, they sent me to… a psychiatrist. Of course, now I know that it was a psychiatrist. But back then, I was excited about the doctor, and I told him everything, and he… He lied to me. The doctor said that I would get better and wrote in his papers that I imagined things and that I was to be treated with injections. The injections were very painful, even more painful than a belt. But after the injections, it was easier to breathe, and my fingers didn’t hurt so much, so I cheered up. Katya told her dad about me. He talked to my parents, and they got angry. So I didn’t go to school for a week because the belt broke something, I had a fever and… I don’t remember. I asked Katya to tell her dad not to talk to my parents because it hurt a lot. My friend cried. She asked me to show her the… result, so I did it. Why not? That’s when she started to cry. She’s lucky to have such a dad, and I’m…