A Room Without Windows by Lily Beeson-Norwitz

I once counted my heartbeats and mistook them for yours. I sat up straight when you entered the room and offered you my body without opening my mouth. When your eyes glanced toward me, I looked down and obeyed. I was taught to be good. I knew my role: I was the balm to your scarred flesh. I stood there, a statue in a park of silent memories, as time moved through me, motionless. 

There is a list of predetermined ingredients: one is acceptance, and one is silence. 

I thought, I’m in love. 

This was my era of emptiness. 

… 

Tell the heart what it wants, and it will answer. My heart knows what it feels like to be a wounded animal. I remember it sitting in my chest like an empty casket. Black and blue. An unfillable cavity. A glass vase waiting to be filled. The image of you is an image of violence, and violence is how the body learns to fear itself. 

Why do I only understand violence as the shape of your hands reaching out to touch me in a darkened room? 

Why do love and violence bruise the heart the same way? 

To love is to remember how to put it back together after it shatters in your hands. To love you is to recall how my palms bled before they touched the shards.

… 

I once was a better version of myself. 

Stop hurting yourself, my friend said, he’s no good. 

No one taught my heart to say no and walk away. How to refuse temptation when you invited me to inherit your ghosts. 

…

I once knew to look both ways before entering a room where you stood.

There is no such thing as windows in a room where abuse lives. I had to get out because everyone saw that I lived in the shadows of black and blue. That shock of light, when someone opened the door to that room, petrified me. And the realization that someone saw me enter the room before I knew that my foot had already crossed the threshold, undressed me. And that shock rendered me silent once again. 

…

There are no clear stories from then except when we went on a roadtrip to Mount Rainier in August. We were by ourselves, and I began to believe that everything had happened out of love. We meandered around town looking for things to say but only saw our own separate reflections staring back at us in each shattered window we walked by. A hundred faces stared back at me. I didn’t recognize any one of them as myself. 

At dusk, the elk moved between blades of tall grass, fleeing across the open meadow into the spanning darkness of the night. Trees towered above us. Their branches wept pine needles as the wind shook their mighty branches. A constant downpour. There was a school in the town where the shadows of children played. Here, we talked about our future and why I had chosen to leave Oregon. We sat on the swing set, but the chains wouldn’t untangle themselves. Under the moonlight, your shadow swallowed mine whole. And I watched the sky in Washington turn as black and blue as my bruised heart—except there are stars in the sky. 

We were still in the room, just in a different state. 

I tried to open my mouth. 

Silence.

… 

The memory of you moves through my loneliest hours. 

The list of ingredients is preordained. One must have a trick to remembering or forgetting you. One is a bruised heart. One is a room without windows. One is acceptance. One is forgiveness. 

And I imagine the memories returning home to me. 

And I remember how my future looked without you in it. My list of ingredients unravels in front of me. And one is acceptance. And one is forgiveness. 

And one is forgiveness.

And I imagine I’m standing in the middle of a field of silence, waiting to leave rather than stay.

Lily Beeson-Norwitz was raised in Portland, Oregon, but is currently based out of Gambier, Ohio. Lily is studying English at Kenyon College, where they are student associate for the Kenyon Review.​