Will They Take Your Baby in the Hospital if It Tests Positive for Meth in Texas

The offset matter I can call up clearly was sitting in a hospital room in the dark.

I knew something was incorrect — that there was something wrong with me — and notwithstanding, I couldn't tell exactly what. I realized the left side of my face was numb. Hanging on the wall in front of me was a telly, but at that place was something wrong with information technology too. A ghostly copy was superimposed over the standard set; it was rotated at roughly a 15-degree bending and faded away into the burnt cream walls. Is the TV the trouble, or is it me?

My mother and a nurse wearing scrubs entered from the left, a disorienting identify outside of my field of vision.

"That's our girl," my mom said, approaching my bed. "How are you doing today?"

Why was she and so nonchalant? Why wasn't she worried? Considering the haphazard inventory I had merely taken, I probably should take demanded answers or cursed a bit. Raised some hell. Instead, I replied with an uncertain "… practiced," slightly alarmed that she, too, possessed a ghostly, tilted imprint. When I was young, my mother always went on, at length, about the difficulties of raising my prone-to-tantrums, blindside-his-head-on-the-concrete-when-angry older blood brother. Then, turning to me, she'd say, "But you, you lot're so easy. And calm. And y'all never complain." I estimate that hadn't changed. I wanted to ask her what was happening — and where I was. Instead, I swept my arm in forepart of me and, trying to observe out what would happen next, said, "And now?"

Before she answered, another character entered from the hallway, but this one I couldn't identify. Fairly immature — my age, past the look of him — his youth was accentuated by a clean-shaven mentum under full, feminine lips and a baseball cap perched precariously on his head, above his adolescent face. He had the look of a perpetually surprised toddler, lips slightly parted in wonder and curiosity.

"Now you have concrete therapy," he commented.

The physical therapist, a blonde woman with mentum-length pilus, stepped in from stage right, clipboard in paw and a laminated badge dangling from a lanyard effectually her neck. When she entered, the nurse left, not wanting to crowd the room.

The physical therapist pushed a rolling walker to the border of my bed and beckoned me to rise. My initial movements were the stop-motion stutter of a crude blitheness. I reached for one of the walker's handles. And missed. The double image layered on top of what I thought was the actual walker jutted out awkwardly in a direction that led me to believe it couldn't be the real one — was I wrong? I tried again. Yeah, I was wrong.

"Are yous OK? Ready to stand up?" the physical therapist asked.

Planting my anxiety shoulder-width apart, clinging to my walker, I clambered to a continuing position — I'm generous when I apply that phrase. Between my shaking limbs, bent knees and outstretched arms, I must've looked more similar a fellow member of a seniors' Pilates course than the 25-year-old adult female I presumed myself to still be. Everything, including myself, felt familiar yet foreign, an already-read book revisited accidentally. An eerie sense of déjà vu — my own personal uncanny valley, so familiar but not the same.

"OK, Brooke." The physical therapist then addressed my mother and her companion. "We'll be back in 45 minutes."

The therapist led me down a long hallway lined with other rooms and other patients. Every few feet, the therapist paused and waited for me to inch toward her, patiently watching with a fixed smiling for the stop-move hermit crab to scuttle closer.

"Now just a piddling farther to the elevator," the therapist said, pulling me back to the job at mitt. I had just discovered I was having bug multitasking: Whenever I started thinking too much, I couldn't walk.

My god, I thought, I am exhausted and nosotros're not even where we're going yet.

When we finally reached the elevator, I stepped within, at the therapist's behest.

"I feel like I know y'all," my voice hissed out of my rima oris like a barely audible stream of gas. A death rattle that made syllables and managed to form words.

At offset, I wasn't sure she had heard whatever had escaped my throat. Her dorsum, still facing me, seemed crystallized in position. Finally, she turned and looked at me for a long moment. When the elevator doors dinged close, she took a deep breath and sighed.

"I'm Linda."

"My grandpa'south girlfriend has your name."

Linda'south mouth tightened, simply her eyes softened.

"I know. I've introduced myself to you nearly every 24-hour interval for the past two weeks."

Luckily, my memories started to stick after that disconcerting moment with the Idiot box. Unluckily, weeks had already elapsed since I had been admitted to the hospital, some of which time I'd been asleep. I started receiving various stories about what had happened. Some truthful, some, I would eventually come to realize, fiction.

Ane twenty-four hour period, shortly after I'd started to call up Linda the therapist, the boy with the artless confront and childlike lid — I'll call him Stanley here — slipped into the hospital bed with me. Alarmed, but oddly complacent, I said nothing, even as he leaned close to me and whispered into my ear, "I've been telling everyone that I'm your boyfriend."

"Yeah, OK."

Hadn't this happened before? Him divulging he was my boyfriend … information technology felt familiar. How many times had this happened?

"OK," he parroted and turned to Naked and Agape on the TV.

"My face is numb."

"Aye, you lot've been saying that."

"That screen is double."

"Yep, you lot've been saying that too."

"What happened?"

Stanley cocked his head to the side like a dislocated dog and considered my question — or at least, I figured he was because it. Maybe he was worried almost me. Maybe my well-beingness concerned him.

"What do you remember?" he asked me.

"You moved your stuff into my room." I knew this had happened, even though I hadn't realized it a moment before. Only I remembered that detail and I knew I knew him. In what capacity? His claim to be my beau didn't feel right — it couldn't have been romantic. Wasn't I only doing him a favor?

His already circular, broad eyes widened farther. He pursed his lips and diverted his gaze.

"You allowed me to move into your apartment temporarily." Stanley paused. "That'due south the concluding affair yous recall? And yous don't remember what y'all had been doing that day?"

"What day?"

Stanley allow out a huff of air in exasperation. He shook his head in exaggerated impatience, rolling his optics.

"The day you and Cassie climbed a redwood near the trailer park and you vicious 25 anxiety out of information technology."

According to my mother, in the early days of my hospitalization, every time Stanley entered my hospital room and announced himself to the doctors and nurses as my swain, I threw out an arm in a warped imitation of Vanna White and exclaimed, "I gauge I have a fellow now." Cue Pat Sajak chortling skillful-naturedly.

It came back to me early on, distinctly, that he had never wanted to be my beau before this.

But whenever I broached the subject field, Stanley told me he hadn't known what he wanted earlier, but uncertain of whether I would live or dice, he became aware of how he felt. My skepticism remained even every bit my memory wavered.

Yet, he showed up each day, and I began to believe him when he said his feelings had inverse. Trapped in my bed and visited by therapists I only partially knew and family unit members I merely vaguely recognized, information technology was nice to have someone else come up run across me and do word puzzles in bed with me, even if I didn't ever remember who he was correct away.

Other friends of mine who came to run into me in the hospital were wary of Stanley, but his insistence on his right to be there and his role in my life stifled whatever objections that even my best friend, Sam, thought to make. My mother and I had always communicated infrequently about my romantic endeavors. Coping as all-time she could, she remained intoxicated most of the time I was in the hospital and didn't question Stanley'south version of events. Subsequently, she said I seemed like I wanted him there.

When I was released from the hospital, I couldn't walk without an arm crutch, and my memory was still far from intact. Santa Clara Medical Center insisted I leave in a wheelchair, and I was wheeled out to Stanley's auto. He said we'd decided together that he'd move to San Diego with me. With no memory of the original conversation, I believed him, simply I felt overwhelmed.

Post-obit the vii-60 minutes drive to North Canton San Diego, I told my mom I didn't want to alive with him. And although Stanley repeatedly hinted he should stay at my parents' home, my mom put her foot downwards and said Stanley couldn't live with us.

So he got a recruiting task and a room nearby. On weekdays after getting off work, he'd walk through the side gate without announcing he was coming. On ane particular day in belatedly fall, ii months subsequently my infirmary stay, he came into the backyard while I skimmed messages on Facebook that I'd received as an inpatient.

I had been talking to our mutual friend, Cassie (I've inverse her name hither, as well as Stanley's), from higher. We'd been exchanging messages on Facebook, and while looking at our chat, I saw an older message she'd sent me, while I was in the infirmary, which I had no retention of.

"Cassie messaged me while I was in Santa Clara," I mentioned to Stanley, my center yet fixed on the screen. "I said you joked around, saying you hoped my retentivity stayed impaired, and she replied, 'Is at that place something he doesn't desire you to recall?'"

I laughed. Stanley didn't.

"Why practise you think that'southward funny?" he demanded, pulling the laptop toward him. He didn't sit down. "Why would you tell her that?" He shoved the laptop abroad and placed his hands on either side of his head. "Why would you say that to her?"

"Hey, relax," I grunted while using both the table and chair to pull myself to a standing position. Once facing him, I added, "I don't see what the problem is."

"You don't — you lot don't — " Livid, Stanley couldn't seem to express himself through his rage.

Instead of walking away or going inside, I just stood and watched him stutter as his face up flushed until he finally formulated words. And boy, what words they were.

"What is wrong with you lot?" he started. "Here I am, doing everything I can to help you — sticking effectually when we idea you were going to die, staying when you were r*tarded, not leaving when nosotros weren't sure if you'd get ameliorate. And I'grand here now even though — look at you." He paused to moving ridge a hand from my short hair to my bare anxiety.

Incapable of speaking, I retreated through the sliding glass door into the kitchen. All of the words I wanted to say slithered through my listen, broken, disconnected. But zip came from me.

"And you might be like this forever! And instead of telling Cassie how supportive I've been, you say that to her? Why couldn't you have told her how good I've been to you lot — trying to make y'all expect like less of a mess, getting your pilus cutting, taking yous to get your face up waxed because information technology was disgusting."

As he spoke, he encroached on my space, stepping forward until his face up was less than a few inches from mine. His hands still flapped in the air to either side; I recollect he may have wanted to grab me past the shoulders but refrained. Information technology wasn't until he vibrated each hand on the left and right side of my face up that I realized I was shaking as well.

Stanley pulled his easily back, made a noise that sounded like a mixture of an exasperated moan and a frustrated yelp. Finally, he stomped out of my parents' kitchen like a schoolboy suffering a tantrum. All I heard side by side was the gate slamming behind him.

Later, he pretended we'd never had that interaction — I simply brought information technology upward once in the following days, and he insisted he didn't know what I was referring to.

More than two years before I woke up disoriented in the hospital, it was the beginning of my "junior" school year at the Academy of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). All of the out-of-boondocks transfer students over the age of 22 were corralled on the first floor of the transfer dorm. That dorm became a haven for all of us who had spent our post-high school years non attending college. But we had finally pulled together those community college units to gain admittance to a four-year school. And by God, we were celebrating.

Cue the nighttime after nosotros all moved in: Anybody left their dorm doors propped open and flitted from room to room, taking a shot here, nabbing a plastic loving cup of our hallmate Cassie'south homemade vino there. Everyone except me. Stationed at the school-supplied prefab wooden desk underneath my bunk bed sans bottom bunk, I was drinking whiskey and playing music from a USB-connected speaker.

"Anyone dislike Tom Waits?" I shouted in the general direction of the bodies clustered in my room. "All correct, well, that's what we're gonna listen to now."

Among the gyrating bodies, a short guy in a blue baseball cap, brim pushed up jauntily, slid forward with an elbow pointing at me. He looked too immature to be drinking.

"I like Tom Waits," he offered. "I'thou Stanley."

"Let me approximate," I snapped, "y'all like Rain Dogs. That's fine 'northward all, simply we're going to listen to some real sad shit right now."

Later, Stanley would divulge his starting time impression of me: feet upwards on my desk-bound, pugging whiskey direct from the bottle and ranting to him about Tom Waits. He idea I was a bitch. And I would tell him that I thought he was a disrespectful asshole. That didn't stop him, after our initial coming together, from tapping on my dorm door every day, asking if I wanted to go walk in the woods or mountain biking. And information technology didn't stop me from taking a swig of my e'er-present whiskey and replying, "Sure."

We weren't together, but we weren't non together. Earlier we slept together, Stanley spent all of his time with me and stopped seeing all of the other women he had been involved with. By the cease of that first semester, nosotros had slept together multiple times, met each other's family at Thanksgiving, and still non talked about what, exactly, we were doing. At the time, I didn't think a chat was necessary; I figured we had a gentleman'southward agreement and were on the same page: exclusive but unserious.

Although we lived on the same hallway, Cassie and I weren't particularly shut outside of the companionship provided by a common pastime: drinking. At the cease of that year in the transfer dorm together, we all dispersed. Cassie moved into UC Santa Cruz's on-campus trailer park — the one I'd fall out of a tree next to, a twelvemonth later — and I found a room in an onetime Victorian on Mission, not far from Laurel Street and downtown.

Part of me figured Stanley wouldn't skulk around my door anymore, since we no longer lived a few anxiety away from each other. Only certain plenty, he ended up in a sublet off of Laurel Street and would rap on my window from the front end porch, softening his big brown eyes when I pulled back the blinds to meet who it could be.

One day, Stanley, at present sitting past that window at the computer chair and desk my sublet provided, broached a conversation we had never touched upon before, ane I always avoided with everyone: acquaintances, bar patrons, friends — whatever Stanley was.

"How did y'all lose your virginity? I recollect when I lost mine … "

For the life of me, if you asked me how Stanley lost his virginity, I wouldn't be able to tell y'all anything about it. I stopped listening after his initial question.

"Are y'all OK?"

Stanley's genial curiosity caught me off guard.

"Yep, I was just … thinking."

"You don't await OK." He came over and saturday side by side to me on the sublet'due south twin bed. A wood frame painted white housed a run-of-the-mill mattress, neither soft nor hard. Stanley peered into my eyes incredulously, daring me to confirm what I could see him working out in his heed. So I did.

"It, uh, wasn't my choice."

"Do you remember his proper name?"

And I said it for the first time in near ten years. I don't know how I wanted Stanley to react. I don't know what I wanted him to do — maybe nod? Peradventure ask if I wanted a drink? Oh, God, I wanted a drink. The previous night, I had polished off my bedside whiskey and hadn't had the chance to walk to the liquor store earlier Stanley popped over. But I know I didn't want him to practise what he did.

Immediately, he divisional to the calculator and opened Facebook.

"And this was in San Diego? OK, let me run into."

And and so he began clicking on profiles and muttering to himself, "No, besides young. Couldn't exist this one. Hmm, new to the area — no. Yous don't know his last name?" Stanley glanced over at me and then stopped touching the computer.

At the fourth dimension, I didn't take the vocabulary, but now I can describe how I felt — confused, disoriented, overwhelmed. I heard the words, I understood them, but none of them stuck with me. Information technology's almost like tunnel vision, only the reverse seems to happen — everything expands and your field of vision contains too much and none of it makes sense. Your eyes water because everything feels overexposed and lacks detail.

I didn't observe him rejoin me on the bed or when he took my limp manus from my lap and held it. But I did hear him when he said, "I retrieve people identify too much weight on a person's sexual history."

And then he kissed me gently and we had sexual activity, on a mattress that could accept been hard or soft or but fine. Just it hadn't been love — he felt lamentable for me. He insisted, afterwards, that he cared about me, but he didn't want to be together, couldn't exist in a human relationship. And I understood because, I felt, who would want to exist with me?

No ane knew about this interaction, just I'm certain the leeway I gave Stanley despite the boundaries he crossed — because of his reaction to a truth I hated so much — looked like love.

In the months after I left the infirmary, my memory slowly but surely came back to me. I remembered all of this, nearly how I met Stanley and what our human relationship was like before the accident. But I still had some questions. Some missing pieces — like how I could take let any of this happen.

"Icouldn't tell you before," said Cassie. "Because I thought you were in dearest with him. How could I tell y'all what Stanley had done?"

This conversation with Cassie took place before I fell out of the tree, and it came back to me as I gradually regained my retentiveness. Nearly 7 months after leaving the dorms, we were sitting at an outdoor tabular array on the patio of UCSC'southward Kresge Café, where we ofttimes met to talk virtually the likes of Amiri Baraka or Jean Toomer for our poetry class. It was well into our second year at UCSC, our "senior year," that Cassie and I began hanging out consistently and (relatively) sober; Cassie had an elective slot open, and I suggested she take a poetry class with me.

Cassie rubbed her left arm with her correct mitt but kept her eyes on mine.

It happened on Memorial Twenty-four hour period Weekend when we all still lived in the transfer dorms, she said. Only a little over half of a year before our meeting at the Kresge Café. Memorial Day had been a transfer dorm hallmate's altogether and anybody had gone to Cowell's Beach to celebrate — everyone except me. They left before I returned from — where had I been? I don't know. Drunk somewhere. Like always.

Cassie described a beach bonfire. But then she and Stanley had run into the woods to find firewood. She described Stanley slinging his arm around her neck, the same style he did to me. Cassie hadn't found this strange, and I didn't recollect she would — when he did this to me, I felt more than like a "bro" than a romantic partner. It was when she savage down that things inverse.

She described them losing balance and toppling over a log. And so she told me Stanley started ripping down her pants and putting his mouth on her … I can't go at that place once again.

"I told him to terminate and he did." Her vox trailed off as if, maybe, she should alibi him for the initial violation since he was then good at following instructions later on.

"I am … and then fucking angry — "

"This is why I didn't want to tell you," Cassie whispered. "I didn't want you to hate me."

"No, no, no, no, no." The word tumbled out of my oral cavity and wouldn't stop. "No, no, no." Maybe if I said it enough, she'd know. "Not with you — you did nix incorrect — with him. With him. He's a fucking monster."

And I hated myself. Because I had been awake, drunk but awake, when they returned. Everyone else clambered upstairs to continue the party, merely Stanley pulled me into his room and into his bed. After what he had done.

When Cassie told me all of this, Stanley had been studying abroad for months. Neither of us had heard from him in that fourth dimension. I heard from other mutual friends he had a girlfriend of sorts.

A month after Cassie's revelation, Stanley commented on the UCSC trailer park'south public page, a customs Cassie was a office of, and received a harrowing response from a friend of Cassie's: We'd rather not take whatsoever sexual assaulters in our community, thanks.

Which, of course, acquired Stanley to telephone call me — the starting time time in nine months we'd had any contact.

"What is she saying about me?" he shrieked.

"Not actually certain who or what you're talking near."

"Don't play fucking dumb: Cassie. It was an blow. I stopped. What is she telling people?"

I sighed and tried to keep an even tone. "Whatever happened, information technology obviously acquired her more harm than you idea."

"You lot were raped," Stanley responded. Information technology sounded more like an accusation than a comment; it felt more than like an accusation.

I didn't answer, and he continued. "You know what real set on is like. You need to tell her. Call her right now and make sure you tell her. Yous accept to tell her what information technology's really like — that, what was his name? That the construction worker came into your room and held you down and told you not to scream and forced his fucking — "

"Hey, hey, hey now." I didn't need the play-by-play. "I become information technology, I go it. Jesus."

And because it's easier to shove your hurt onto someone else than addressing the haemorrhage parts inside yourself, I called Cassie and did the worst matter I've ever done in my life: I told her information technology could have been worse.

"Cassie," my voice cracked as I told her everything and then said, "What Stanley did was inappropriate, but he stopped."

I northward the months following my blackout, these memories returned to me in desultory waves. I remembered, and so I convinced myself I must be misremembering, I must be wrong. Stanley would storm out whenever I brought up the by, only to render the following day like zip had happened, which fabricated things even more confusing.

But I finally chosen Cassie toward the finish of January 2016, five months later on I had moved back to San Diego. I wish I could say I had mustered the courage a calendar month before, as shortly as I realized there was something Stanley didn't desire me to call back, simply how could I possibly tell her I remembered, that it had come back to me, and Stanley was still hither?

"Cassie?" I asked quietly when a voice answered the phone. I stood in the backyard of my parents' house, the just place I could be solitary.

"Brooke! It's so good to talk to you. How take you been? What happened?"

I told her everything: Santa Clara, Stanley, non knowing exactly what had happened.

"I chosen Stanley as soon equally the ambulance took you away," Cassie said slowly, "I figured he would take contacted your family unit. The hospital had to notice your parents' information? Why didn't Stanley call your parents?"

A foreboding awareness crept into my gut and my skin became cold and clammy. It was overcast, typical January weather in San Diego, but far from common cold.

"That night," she said, "we had fabricated it to the elevation, at least 85 feet up, and you were really confident — nosotros were joking around — and then all of a sudden you lot looked at me and told me, 'I have to get down. Now.' Then you sped down, and I recollect climbing to a lower co-operative before you fell is what saved your life."

"And," I started and then stopped to moisten my rima oris — it had gone dry — and eased myself down to sit down on the concrete patio. "That's all that happened?"

"Well," Cassie added, "I did call up it was weird when I heard Stanley was even so with you in San Diego. Earlier we climbed the tree that night, you were telling me how much you hated him. Y'all had him buy a airplane ticket back home in front of you to be sure he was really leaving. He had just moved all of his shit into your room after his lease ended, and you wanted him gone."

"Cassie," I replied weakly.

"Well, it's good the two of you have worked things out. Information technology was just, y'know, weird."

It was true; my misgivings hadn't been unwarranted.

Stanley and I had been involved, but it was long over, and — as usual — Stanley used me right when I thought I was rid of him. When he came dorsum from studying abroad, he stayed with me for most a calendar week and insisted I mediate a conversation between him and Cassie. (I did, and she said she wasn't going to press charges.) He found his own identify, but then when the spring quarter concluded and his sublease was upward, he moved all his shit into my room; I protested only he insisted. I kept telling him that he needed to only go home, merely he continued to insist, over and once more, that he needed to stay to make sure "Cassie wasn't going to practice anything."

I still have no memory of the night I savage out of the tree, but Cassie told me I had made him buy a plane ticket in front of me to exist sure that he would leave.

After concluding our phone phone call, I remained seated on the ground exterior. I felt stupid; I was stupid. Stanley had been convincing me he was doing me a favor, that I needed him. When really, he needed me. Still paranoid about what had happened with Cassie and his reputation, he had been using me to convince everyone he was a good person.

Aweek later my telephone call with Cassie, I was baking cookies. Remembering the recipe, the measurements, the order I needed to mix the ingredients, exercising my fine-motor skills to mix them — it was all practiced practise. It was all rehabilitating, my occupational therapist told me.

Adjacent to the kitchen sink, my mom swirled a glass of champagne and said, almost as if she were channeling it from another plane, "Three days into your coma, Stanley told me we should pull the plug on you."

Above the bowl of sugar and butter, my hands held a jar of peanut butter and an overlarge spoon, motionless. I stopped to expect at her, endmost 1 heart to combat the double vision the impairment to my occipital lobe had caused.

My mom averted her eyes as she added, "And he would sit forever and try to guess the code to your phone — he was desperate to go into information technology." Then she shrugged. "Simply you seemed similar y'all wanted him around …"

"When I was in a coma?" I asked.

My mom ignored this and said, "Stanley told me he knew you and knew what you'd desire."

Even knowing this, knowing my life had been disposable to him, I was likewise weak of a person to make him leave. Stanley kept coming past my parents' house every solar day, telling me I should end focusing on rehabilitating my mind and should instead make my physical appearance more appealing. Often, he'd drop me off at walk-in waxing salons, instructing them to make my face smooth, "less disgusting."

"I just want to be able to think again," I'd whisper after.

"This is probably the best you're going to get," he'd reply. "You demand to take better intendance of yourself. You lot take a lot of contest."

This obsession with outward aesthetics culminated in him taking me to Calaveras Mount, a minor mountain in east Carlsbad, and bidding me to run to the top.

"My physical therapist said I shouldn't practice whatsoever strenuous exercise without her … my torso however can't regulate temperature."

Stanley shot me a await of disdain and hissed, "My stepdad is a physiatrist — I know what I'm talking nigh. I gauge you don't actually want to get better."

Halfway upwards Calaveras, my double vision divide fifty-fifty further — something I didn't retrieve was possible — and I felt bile rise in my esophagus. Taking a human knee, I put both hands onto the clay-covered path and threw upwardly.

"My dad was never easy on me," Stanley solemnly whispered, a baroque explanation for his actions.

We walked the rest of the way down.

"I think I need to go," Stanley finally said ane mean solar day.

"Practice whatever you need to exercise," I responded.

We were sitting at a Thai restaurant in a strip mall. Across the manner, I had briefly worked as a hostess in a eating place when I was newly 18; they tore it down and congenital a Crimson Lobster in its place.

"Yous're not upset?" He searched my confront. "Would you want to stay together? You'd miss me."

I wondered who he was trying to convince.

"Yeah, we can stay together … even though you lot tried to kill me."

Stanley reeled back every bit if he had just been slapped. His feminine lips parted and his bottom jaw hung open, aghast.

Stanley, enraged, knocked over his tea. It had been almost empty. The outrage felt performative; the spill theatrical. I was beginning to get a headache; I just wished someone would exist honest with me — my mom, Stanley, anyone who had been at that place. Anybody wanted to protect themselves at my expense. I felt like a kid every time the thought "But what near me?" sprang into my head.

"I simply meant if information technology got to that point — if you were going to exist encephalon expressionless." His hands flailed and his lips flapped as they ever did when he tried to make a betoken. I'd finally settled on Beaker — he looked like Beaker from the Muppets. "If you were brain expressionless, your mom would just go along yous forever in a back room drooling all over yourself! Look at you now — you don't even have your own bed and they've been taking your disability coin for months."

That was sort of truthful; one time I had been established as disabled by Social Security, they started dispensing $775 a month to me, an corporeality based on my previous West-2s and work history. But I chose to give it to my parents — the insurance had covered the majority of the medical costs, but my female parent had racked up hotel bills staying in San Jose. I handed the provided debit menu for my inability benefits to my father and said, "For everything I've done."

As I explained this, Stanley's mouth quivered in a dumbstruck "O." Merely his horror and defoliation only infuriated me; I had told him all of this before. He knew this — or should take. Did he always listen to me?

"And did you say that?" I shot back, restraining myself, merely barely.

"Say what?"

"'If it got to that point?'"

"I didn't demand to. That's obviously what I meant."

Stanley left the same calendar week.

He telephoned me in February 2017, more a year afterwards.

By this time, I had finished my available'south caste by taking my remaining classes at UC San Diego, and I'd started working seasonal shifts every bit a production assistant at an academic publishing company. I took the railroad train to piece of work by myself. An heart surgery had corrected my double vision, and I no longer needed to close i eye or wear a patch to see. On paper, I appeared to exist a legitimate, performance developed, and no i asked about my aberrant gait or inability to write by hand.

Uncertain if I should answer Stanley's phone call, I watched his name manifest on my cell telephone screen and blink away when I didn't touch information technology. A calendar month after — I don't know if curiosity gripped me or if I hoped for an explanation, or at least an apology — I chosen him back.

"I was surprised to see you calling," Stanley said by way of greeting. "I took mushrooms and went to a really night place and called you because I knew you'd make me experience better. Do you think I'm OK?"

"What practise you lot mean?"

"Cassie."

"For someone who didn't do annihilation wrong, you lot certainly are acting like you did something wrong."

"Fuck, Brooke, I didn't do anything!"

"You ripped her pants down — "

"I DIDN'T RIP HER PANTS Down. I PULLED THEM Down."

"Did y'all unbutton them?"

"What?"

"Did yous unbutton her pants?"

"I don't know. What the fuck does that matter?"

"It does matter. It all matters. Y'all've tortured me for over two years — do you realize that? Cassie told yous two months before my accident that what yous did was fucked up, but she wasn't going to do anything castigating. And then — and then — you lot lied to my family and friends, proverb yous were my boyfriend to paint some sort of sympathetic narrative for some made-up situation you lot idea you were in — something that wasn't real. But what happened to me was existent. Everything — my whole life — my whole life. And my whole life meant null to you … you lot — "

"Wow," Stanley interrupted in amazement. "Your speaking — your speech is really expert. You could barely string together a sentence before. You — "

"Yous!" I roared back. "You stressed me out all of the time. You lot interrupted me. You yelled at me until I shook. I — " My voice cracked. I felt — all at once — I felt pain. Regret. Shame. Remorse. "In the time you've been out of my life, I've made such improvements," I continued in a near whisper, "… amazing improvements … if you lot had never been around … if you hadn't forced your manner into my recovery … " I trailed off.

"You can't put that on me — I was going through something — "

"No." It was resolute plenty to make Stanley fall silent. "You went through zilch. You did something very wrong to Cassie. And me — y'all probably stunted the progress I could have fabricated. I'll never know. Goodbye, Stanley."

Cassie doesn't hate me, simply she should. At least that's how I feel about information technology.

We were able to come across each other in person in 2017, then we talked on the telephone in the summer of 2019. She'due south doing well, despite everything, and understands the emotional manipulation Stanley employed to go along me under his thumb. She'south given me grace I'm not withal ready to requite myself.

I don't know where Stanley is or what he's called to do with his life. I promise he'due south done some self-reflection, merely I doubt he has. The hold rape culture has on us all makes it nearly impossible for genuine self-reflection to occur in these types of men.

My physical deficits are still an everyday part of my life, only I've come to accept my disability. Ironically, the trauma of my accident, recovery, and new identity as a disabled person pales in comparing to the effects of Stanley'due south subversive presence. I'm suspicious of all romantic partners and don't trust the motives anyone purports to have. I'm distrustful and resentful. I go to therapy to discern which parts of my skepticism are warranted and which are pure paranoia. Fifty-fifty when I know, am painstakingly shown the truth, it doesn't feel existent or genuine.

Despite this, I've developed a tenuous romantic relationship — maybe the discussion "situation" is more authentic — with an erstwhile friend who lives on the other side of the country. I think this is all I'm capable of, and right now, information technology'south all I desire. Possibly that'll alter, but for at present, I'm grateful for my cognitive capabilities, the drive to stay sober, and the lack of responsibility for someone else'southward emotional stability — maintaining my own is quite enough.

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Source: https://narratively.com/i-went-to-the-hospital-to-give-birthand-tested-positive-for-meth/

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