Sitting in class should be easy enough; even if the teacher’s tumbling over words with caffeine-sprung jitters or it’s winter and a snow day prayer is lining everyone’s lips. Under a light blanket of December’s pale finest, with a low drone of heat billowing somewhere in the background, ninth grade history goes on. I, sandwiched in a middle row, keep my eyes so focused on Mr. C’s sloshing coffee mug that, even amidst an apocalypse, I’d know which drop was spilled when. Focus is important when there’s buzzing in your skull, but I’m not thinking about the mosquito flitting through brain tissue and slurping up mementos to spit them onto my eyelids. I begin to think about my blinking, and that’s always perturbing, but it can’t be helped—every single shut of my eyes comes with a smackdown flashback to a class that is far less easily acknowledged. And because I’ve admitted to it, the memory comes in ripples first, then waves. This must be drowning: falling face first into depths of inky-
Hands.
Hands on my thighs pressing in with their yellowed nails and prying for something that isn’t theirs.
Hands leaving an eternal ache everywhere they drag themselves.
Hands scratching at my skin because it’s blocking them off from tearing me to shreds.
Hands.
I squeeze my knee and turn back to counting coffee drops.
Emmanuel Eneh writes: “I’ve spent my entire college career trying to figure out how to tell my own story. I avoided non-fiction my whole life, but now I’m using this genre to give life to little, fragmented memories that I set aside a long time ago. My hobbies include gaming when I should probably be asleep, scrolling through fanfiction, and wishing that the bending from Avatar: The Last Airbender existed.”