She came to suddenly, shivering in the dark, her right foot icy and grass itching the back of her neck. Stumbling to her feet, she nearly pitched down the root-tangled cliffside that edged the burbling river. Her bracelet was dirty and mud-caked on her bruised forearm. One of her shoes was gone. What had happened? Across the water and high up on the facing bank spread some structures from which shone the meager illumination of a dozen scattered lit windows. Was she at school? A dorm then. Why wasn't she safe and warm inside, and why was her memory so foggy?
There had been an argument, she recalled, someone telling her that she'd been slipped angel dust, this said as she ran alongside someone, away from a house of angry men, strangers. Oh Christ, they'd drugged her, her life reduced to a Lifetime tv movie of the week in an instant. But why, why would some frat guys secretly give her drugs? Glancing down at herself in the moonlight, she took in the unfastened, muddy shorts, ripped blouse, and her naked right foot. And it clicked, clear as crystal: she'd been raped. She heard the wail before she realized she was crying, and she went to seek help.
Limping, she made her way to a paved asphalt path and figured it had to lead back to her dorm room. Up ahead in the distance, a car slowly cruised across the horizon, and from it a moving searchlight reached vaguely towards her in jerky movements but still came nowhere near lighting her up. Campus police! It hurt but she picked up her pace, jogging, now running and sobbing and waving her arms in the air and shouting out to them. "Help me! Oh God please help", she shrieked hoarsely, but they didn't seem to slow. Panicking, she saw a sherbet-orange street lamp off to the side and ran under it, hoping to make herself visible. Lit in sickly monochrome, she jumped up and down, shouting, then remembered her ripped shirt.
She clutched the fabric to her chest and felt- hair. And a complete absence of breasts. Puzzled, she looked at herself and tried to make sense of it. And then it hit me- I was on crystal meth, possibly pcp too. I had been awake far too long, several days, and was completely out of my mind. I wasn't some college coed, and I certainly hadn't been raped, but I had nearly been jumped by some tweakers who had burned me in a drug deal. How had I forgotten? And, crap, I was newly homeless. And so was my husband- where was my husband? I had left him sleeping by Dry Creek Park's riverbank under my peacoat! And I was standing there, clearly off my rocker, trying to get the attention of the police making their nightly sweep of the park. I jumped behind the nearest tree and prayed for them to pass me by, and then, when the coast was clear, I limped off to find my husband, and hopefully my boot.
Now, you'd think any sensible person would have woken up the next day and looked at this experience and said, "I obviously have a major problem. I surrender, Lord, I give up." But not me. I laughed about it. You have to laugh, it's so absurd. But it's sad, too. And I didn't see that. I saw a close call, a crisis averted. This was at the start of my year of homeless tweakerdom, and though I wish I could say that this terrifying ordeal had some sort of sobering impact on my life, it was all downhill from there. True story.
