The Dank

In my own “Me Too Movement”, today was a 20 x 20 kind of day. $20,000 was the amount the civil litigation netted for me after nearly 20 years of deciding if revealing my abuser was worth the effort.

I’m here to tell you, in this case, it was not.

Struggling with the heavy rain pelting my half-opened umbrella, I entered the bank. With the check in hand, I decided to make it worth something to me. As the cashier ran the bills through the automatic counter, my mind knew this cash needed to be tangible to me. Merely depositing it would not have been enough. The teller handed my license back and I quickly tucked the two thick white envelopes filled with cash into the book I kept religiously in my purse. The short trial was not worth all the years of heavy-handed scribbles, many tearstained, written sometimes illegibly even to the writer and certainly not worth the public reliving of the events that lead up to today. Yet personally, I was never sure writing the memories down would result in anything except a much-needed release.

You see much of my history is buried forever in the folds of my mind and occasionally I’ll get a graphic memory that tugs on my last brain cell and sometimes my heart. Yet the memories are indelibly written into the ruled pages of the little black book. The moment I arrive home I head for the utility closet no one ever uses which houses the safe and an odd assortment of housekeeping and gardening tools. The day remains gloomy, rainy and is filled with smells and events of the day both of which are sending me triggers, tugging on my brain. As I place the envelopes on the gray, felted bottom of the safe, my mind wanders to a different closet.

There’s no other word for this particular closet. It was dark. It was musty. It smelled of earth yet not in a good way. Dank is a strange word and perhaps not used often today yet remains a vivid memory of the dark, musty and dank corner of the basement that served as storage for all kinds of unused, non-vital items in my uncle’s home. It was in this corner where I was once used like these various tools. And rendered somewhat equally useless in everyday life.

Dank will do that to you. Put you in a bind. Make you uncomfortable. The dank will make you cold. It definitively makes you cold and perhaps a bit non-vital, just like the items in that cramped corner of the basement. Somehow the dank got on you and stayed. And when you smell or feel the dank, you freeze up. Unsure of what to do next. Unclear on where or how you should move. Or not move. The dank creeps up on you. It can show up when you’re doing something fun, like fishing. Suddenly you can smell the earthworms when you open the bait container. And just as suddenly you’re not thinking of fishing. Or your friend on the bank with you. You pause and look a little weird for a minute or what seems like hours. You use every tool you’ve ever learned to lean back into the conversation. Every tool you’ve ever seen or heard of to get into the moment. The dank can steal the sunshine on a bright clear sunny day, easily. That’s when you know your little tool kit is simply useless against the dank. Useless—that is the place where your brain whirs in its recesses and folds to find a way out of the dank. Scared to stay. Scared to leave. Just like when you’d listen for the TV in the basement to make a weird crackling sound and when you peeked you saw sleeping people and bars of color on the TV where an old movie just ended. Then and only then did you dare muster up the courage to leave and walk the half mile to the tiny house just up the road and to the even tinier itty-bitty bathroom with a rusted tub.

I always needed a bath after being in the dank. So, I’d make a beeline to the bathroom and on most days, I was successful navigating through my parents’ bedroom to get to the single bathroom in the tiny house. The warmth of the water brought you back to the moment and served a useful purpose to hide your sins. The rusted tub was a place where the blood couldn’t be discerned from the rust seeping into the water. More smells for your senses swirling together in the pinky orange colored and ever cooling water ensuring yet another place you didn’t want to stay in for very long.

If I was lucky enough to get home before my Dad blustered in drunk, demanding fried eggs and toast for him and his new best friend, yet another drunk stranger who only wanted “one” more beer, my Mom would warm up a blanket on the wood stove for me. She’d wrap me tightly and warm me from the outside in literally. Deep down, after many years of reflection and turning this over and over in my brain, she had to know. She had to know and that is why she warmed me. Even when I was only 6 or 7 years old, she knew that the dank had its claws in me too.

As a clap of thunder and bright bolt of lightning struck outside the utility room, my wandering mind jolted back to today. A little startled by the loud clap and the intense memory, I was slow and careful to lock the safe, closing the door on both closets for this evening. Dutifully I returned the little black book to my purse before I ran a warm, wonderful bath for myself.