A Survivor's Choice

Author: Domino.

Title: A Survivor’s Choice

Summary: This is not really fiction, but more of an essay to vent my feelings after a traumatic event, and help me get to terms with what was a life changing event in my life.

I have always had a problem with real life, the real deal. To me it always seemed that life would be so much simpler if it was like the movies, like a book, where you could only read those with happy endings, where you got to choose. Choice, free will - its all an illusion, one of those things no one ever tells you, one of those life objects you get to learn all on your own.

I guess the reason is easy - Life (with a capital letter) – it isn’t that simple. Sometimes stuff happens. Things you have no control over, and when they are over, when that life changing event that you had no choices in is over, life goes on. There are consequence, results to the things that as humans we shouldn’t have to deal with. And unlike the movies, credits don’t roll and the characters don’t live happily ever after, no trauma evident, no having to continue living everyday life.

Still, in a way, that I can deal with that – its common sense after all. Something happens, and if you survive, the rules are, your choices return, and you decide whether you get to fall apart or go on. Easy – right? What I can't deal with, is the easy acceptance our lives have become to these events. When did it become acceptable? When did armed robbery in your own home become a norm? When did babies being raped become an indignation for a day and forgotten the next? When did having a gun held to your head and your life threatened become an event that sooner or later everyone has to go through?

And here in South Africa, where we live in a ‘peaceful’ society. It isn’t Palestine or Afghanistan where wars are fought and living is an accomplishment, its South Africa, the country that defied the odds, and avoided bloodshed, that avoided a civil war, and achieved peacefully what should have been impossible to achieve – here in our country, the one we all love despite our complaints to contrary, the one where things that should have never happened are now something we deal with daily and then move on.

In theory, of course. We move on – what a joke? Do you really think that being held up, armed robbery, a gun pointed to your head is something you get to forget – something that doesn’t affect you. Your life changes. It isn’t facing your mortality, or even the event that affects you – no, its losing that little voice inside, the innocent one, the one that tells you always ‘It won't happen to you.’ The lie that we all live by. The one that lets us move through life in denial, and avoid seeing what we don’t want to see – our own defense, our human mind shield. What do you when your protection is ripped off.

Start to rebuild? Lose faith? Repress the event? Our minds are powerful, our instinct to recover is strong, and our ability to block or deny what we aren’t prepared to deal with is stronger. What do you do? Your ability to choose is returned, albeit the choices are now some that you shouldn’t have had to make. You cling to that little control that you gain.

My story began on a Wednesday morning in November. Two days before my exams were to start, that Friday. And in recall it begins, the ‘what if’ game you constantly play. What if you decided to study at the library instead of at home? What if your sister hadn’t left a minute before? What if she watched the gate close properly before leaving? What if…

They can be the worst part of everything. The after…the little mind games you play with yourself. All to deal with that, the loss of your choices for that minute in time, an event that relatively is so little of your life but changes it for ever. People don’t just suffer from the fear, and the realizations that you might die. The thing that most people don’t realize is, in that second the epiphany which comes to you, is a conscious or unconscious recognition that for the first time in your life all the control you had, the illusion that we all believe containing our lives , its lost to you, forever.

Forever – its a long time to rebuild.

I was doing what I always do when I study. I had music playing softly in the background – Savage Garden was my choice for the year. Every year a new CD would be chosen and I would play that over and over, 100 times, 200 times, as long as I studied, as long as I wrote exams. It was my security blanket. I would study and lightly sing the songs, the words almost unconscious as I read, or learnt. My second year in varsity, and starting Friday I was writing the first three papers in a period of 4 days.

What really gets me is, that as a girl I should have known better. As a girl, its natural I am more security conscious than a guy. Of course its worse now, if I am out the house, even when relaxed, a part of me is always aware of my immediate bubble. My personal space, the one that if someone enters you immediately check for a threat. Its an unconscious thing, like having your car keys ready as you head to your car. You can't afford, as a girl, to be caught totally unaware. The possibility of threat is always there in the back of your mind.

What’s bad is now I tense at red robots waiting to accelerate, watching my mirrors to see for any advances that could construe an attack. Because in the deep recesses of your brain there is this argument raging - the ‘if it happened once, it could happen again’ versus ‘lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place’ argument. My outlook on life has changed. I hold my bag tightly as I walk in the streets, expecting to be robbed. I freak out if I find the back door opened, little things that shouldn’t matter become big. All because one day at 11 o’clock in the morning in my own home, I was held up at gun point.

People always say things like ‘I'll never forget his face’, and I always thought it must be true. I mean how can you forget something like that? The man held a gun to your head, but it been three years and I can honestly say, that if I ran into the two men that invaded my house, that caught me unaware in my own home, a place I never thought to be wary in, I would have to say I wouldn’t recognize them. That was my defense. Their faces are a blur – and really speaking can you blame me, who would want to give a face to your nightmare. Some say blocking it out is unhealthy, but think about it, they were never caught, another accepted norm, and remembering helps who? Certainly not me.

My sisters are scared, or at least cautious of leaving the house at night. For some reason, for most people the dark represents the worst. Its easy to believe something that uncomplicated, the simplicity of the believe if something bad is going to happen, it will happen at night. Not for me though. I love the dark, going out at night is somewhat reassuring like an old friend, a comfort. The fear of the night, a normal enough one at that, was totally erased on that Wednesday morning. After all, if someone could attack in the bright light of day, in your OWN home, the place you should feel the safest, how scary can the dark be?

Another one of those little effect, those changes you barely notice about yourself, until a long time later when it finally occurs to you that you have changed. That you tense up everytime someone gets too close, and invades your personal bubble. You wear a mask, a protection, walls around yourself, walls that are almost impossible to scale, walls that protect the control you once lost…or maybe, they were always there and you never noticed how high they became after. AFTER. That’s the word the defines you. Before it happened and after.

Before, I got to walk alone in my home, secure, safe in my belief that nothing could touch me there. After, the second I was alone I switched on the alarm. I made sure that the TV wasn’t too loud so I could hear anything that was even remotely out of place or could be construed a threat. I used to plan escape routes in my head, little subconscious little stories I made up in my mind…because at the end of the day sometimes the scars of an event aren’t visible, but they are there. In your thinking, in your actions, in your newly modified behavior.

Mine changed when two men, walked in my home through the back door, into my house, into the dining room where I was studying totally oblivious to what was going to happen. They grabbed me by the neck and dragged me to my parents room and tried to get me to unlock the dressing room. There’s where things get interesting. I am nothing if not stubborn, and being a person with generally delayed reactions…at the point in time, it was like I was observing the event, not a part of it. I wasn’t scared at that moment. I was furious. How dare they come into my home and try to rob it? How dare they drag me? How dare they expect me to help them?

And so I didn’t. I refused to help. I wouldn’t tell them where the keys were, even though I knew. I lied when they threatened to ransom me and call my father and insisted my father was out of town. I didn’t even blink when one of the man whipped out an axe from a duffel bag they carried in. I refused to give into fear when he threatened to shoot me or when he yelled he was going to cut my fingers off with the axe. It may have all been stupid to be so stubborn, but at the time, I had two options…get scared or get mad. And I chose the anger. Its the only choice I had left and I held on to that. Choices – they define us, after all.

The used the axe to break the door down, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things we got lucky. No one’s lives were lost. They tied us up, with those black plastic things where the more you try to escape the harder they tighten, and locked us in the room while they used stolen suitcases from us to fill up with whatever valuables we had, and the video machine and hi-fi set. I remember one of them taking my watch of my hand as he tied me up, and it was those personal infractions that made me feel so out of control.

It took us at least 15 minutes to find something to cut those black wires that had our hands restrained behind our backs. Its not as easy as it looks in the movies to maneuver with your hands behind you. Its a lot more painful and by the end of it our hands were bleeding with small cuts in our wrists. The phone lines had all been cut, and we were locked in, with no hope of escape until someone came home, and no one was expected for at least a few hours.

I took the useless phone and wrapped it in a couple of towels before using it to break the windows where there were no burglar guards. I cleaned up the broken glass and climbed out. The ground was a little way off, and by the time I got to the bottom and ran around the side of the house to the still open back door, another 10 minutes had passed. In the house again I unlocked the door and let out Elizabeth and used the cell phone that was charging in one of the bedrooms to phone my parents.

I don’t think I had one actual thought of death throughout the entire thing. Its like to even admit the possibility would render me useless, and I needed to be able to act or at least appear to act rational. Within minutes people were arriving - the police, my panicked family, friends. I didn’t have a chance to breathe or dwell, or even compute what happened with everyone surrounding me. I think that was good. To think too much about what happened, allows you recreate the what-if scenarios in your mind over and over again. I didn’t, not for at least a week. I insisted on writing my exams, despite various protests from my family and friends, and the distraction got me through.

Today, I still don’t study in the dining room. I wait for the gate to completely close before leaving the house, no matter how late I am. I close the back door constantly, but despite all of that, I am better off. I may be a lot more security conscious, and have more walls than I did before, but a part of me feels like a stronger person for having survived the event. For not freaking out when a man yelled he was going to chop of my fingers, for the fact that I got out of an impossible situation. A part of me is even grateful that it was me that had to go through all that, and not my mother or sisters. I may live in denial some of the time, but I still deal. And even though a psychiatrist would say differently I do believe that I made it through.

I got my choices back, and I survived. And some days that’s enough.

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