The door was always blocked. I vacuumed in straight lines, twice a day, and if I messed up, I vacuumed the whole carpet over again. It was the same tic from earlier in my childhood, that creeping perfectionism, each essay copied over and over for spelling mistakes; never crossed out, just crumpled up and started over, until it was right. I don’t know how many trees succumbed to inky insanity, but it was better at the time than spilling all the blood my anger could stand.

At night, the door was always blocked, and although my teenage years brought in friends and derision, the former linked solidly to the latter; there is still that agreement between the powerless to not ask questions. Meredith did not ask why I blocked my door, nor did Kim, or Simon who wore eyeliner, or any of the various male or female friends I had over: it was simply accepted that I had a reason to block the door.

I had a variety of statuettes and archaic clutter on my dresser top that was largely Egyptian themed. Each night before going to bed, I spent hours adjusting and cleaning these objects. One was a cat; another, a set of books by E. A. Wallis Budge that I used to teach myself how to write in hieroglyphs. Cleaning was like a prayer: if I did everything right, nothing horrible would happen. This is what an obsessive’s mind is like. Some comfort is stumbled upon at random that seems to coincide with an avoidance of harm, and the whole rest of one’s being is spent attempting to reproduce that effect. It is desperate nonsense: akin to bringing the severed foot of a rabbit to a roulette table. But in the world of a child visited on some nights but not others by a sexual predator who appears in the daylight as her father; it was saner to perceive some means of control, even an occult one, than none at all.

The door is blocked, always, and I vacuum in straight lines, and I adjust the knick-knacks on my dresser, trying to find the pattern that will engage the mystical tumblers and release me.

There were nights I was alone. My father would leave on some unspoken errand and be gone for days, granting me an uneasy peace that was greatest early on; when it was least likely he would return. I would sit on the back steps of the apartment complex and look at the moon and think about getting out, the future, hope. It was just me and the bright clean orb, mirror to all my fears and desires. There was no question that I would survive, but what would the consequence be? I wanted to run away into the forest and live like Diana, like a huntress untouched by any human, not just man. I wanted to stand at the edge of the sea and turn into a seal, to transform into something other than what I was. It was childhood dreaming, but I didn’t see how I could ever fit rightly into the world.

I went back inside, I went to sleep, I woke up, I put my feet down. There was nothing I knew how to do, so I just vacuumed my floors and stayed quiet while everyone around me talked about grades and boys and annoying parents. When I came home from school, I lifted up my covers and went back to sleep, because everything hurt so much.

Some evenings, after my father was safely passed out, I would slip out my narrow window and walk across town: Up the steep hill of High Street to Spring, which turned into Middle, and up Temple in front of the closed doors of Green Mountain Coffee, across Federal to Lincoln Park; the bum who lives on the black scratched bench staring at me as I cut across the park to Franklin Arterial. The ochre painted apartment building set back from the street, the one with the blanket covered windows because Chris slept in the living room: that was my destination.

Too much alcohol was consumed at that apartment for anyone to vacuum in straight lines or at all, and the jumbled collection of its inhabitants’ possessions were stacked unevenly on windowsills or shoved unceremoniously into closets. Dice’s room was crowded with milk crates full of records. These were assembled with some organization, but piles of clothes and blankets and flags littered his bed unevenly.

At the apartment on Franklin, I became myself. I drank and laughed and flirted and felt no desire to clean anything. At my own place, the floor was clean, the adornments were dusted, and the door was blocked, as always; but I was not waiting in fear behind it, knowing that blocking the door did no good.

When the sky turned plum-grey with the suspicion of light, I would walk back and get ready for class. But not yet, not yet.