Please Don't Forgive Me

What Garrett didn’t know was what I saw when I fell asleep. What he didn’t know was that I had to live through it all again. He didn’t know that I had to feel Dane touch me and tell me that I was a cheating slut every time I closed my eyes.

The memory was torture and no one else knew. No one could truly understand what I felt like then and how horrible it was to have to live through over and over in my subconscious.

Garrett knew I had nightmares. He knew that I had trouble sleeping. But he didn’t know how real the nightmares seemed. He didn’t see the blue green eyes that I saw hovering above me. He didn’t see the almost-black hair that Dane sported. He didn’t have new nightmares about a child being forced out of his body and looking up with those same eyes.

I knew that if I kept the baby it would have that hair and those eyes and Dane’s perfectly chiseled jaw. I knew that and it was my worst fear. Everything, well almost everything, about me—my auburn hair, my light green eyes that turned dark when I was mad, and my fair, easily tanned skin—was recessive. I knew that it would look like him and I couldn’t deal with that. I couldn’t take care of someone who was going to make me angry and haunt me whenever I looked at them. I wouldn’t.

I felt like a bitch and knew that my reason for wanting the abortion should be a simple ‘I’m not ready to have a baby,’ or an ‘I don’t want his child,’ which it was. But it was also more than that. I was afraid of this baby. Any other child wouldn’t scare me the way this one did.

I also thought that if I got rid of it, the nightmares might stop. I wouldn’t be secretly terrified of so many of the everyday things around me. I wouldn’t wish that I had died.

I knew that when I had the abortion I would be free; relieved. I would get to start over and be me again. I would be a survivor; not a victim.