Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as I could. I counted off each minute, each hour, each day: silent, steadfast. Holding my hopes, my dreams, close to my chest. I didn’t dare reveal what I wanted to anyone else, terrified they would take it away from me. But I knew that if I didn’t leave, I’d die there. In between the cracks and fractures I’d fall, into nothingness.

The same focus propelled me through university, then down to London. By the time I arrived, just weeks after my final exam, to start my job as a magazine PA, the determination was being replaced by anger. I was, to my surprise, perpetually furious. I was consumed by an anger that made me pink, made me tremble. Why me? I raged. Of course, the real question was: why not me? But I imagined my life otherwise: I saw the woman I could have become, if I hadn’t been changed, marked forever. Nothing could ever make me clean, make me like new. He – the first of the two of my mum’s boyfriends to sexually abuse me – had broken me, right there under the light of the moon, and every night when I saw it rise and set, I saw once more what and who I was, irrevocably. What and who those hands, in those hours, had shaped me into. And I hated him for all of it. I hated the moon for all of it. And more than either, I hated myself for every last tiny bit of it.

The men who came after broke me in different ways – with their fists, with their words. They called me stupid, pathetic, nobody. I willed myself into invisibility, kept silent, kept still, tried to be the nothing that they were so sure I was. But inside, the voices were loud. My fight was simply being stored for a safer time. It looked like I’d shrunk, curled up inside myself, but I hadn’t done it with passivity and compliance. I’d done it with patient fury – a coiled spring, waiting for release.

That fury became something I couldn’t control. I persuaded myself that I had a handle on it. I called it strength. I called it fortitude. But it circulated throughout my body, making me not just hard, but brittle. In the end I decided that there was only one way to sate the rage fizzing against my gums. To fix what the man who had stolen me from myself had done.

As I worked for a media company, I now had access to the electoral roll. All I had to do was send a name and a town to the woman who ran the library and I had an address in return. She had no idea that I was going to use that address to find and kill him.

He lived just six miles away from our village, in the centre of town. I memorised the address, could see his road, house, the street light outside. I planned what I was going to do. What would happen when I visited him. I would arrive in his town, wait until the sky blackened, the street quietened, night fell. I would walk down the street, slowly, arrive at this gate, lift the latch, walk through, close it and – quietly yet firmly – let the latch lock.

I would knock on his door; he’d open it, look at me and know who and what I was. My body, my brain dug up from beneath the soil he’d thrown and patted down over my head. He thought I was buried. He thought I was dead. He thought he’d been the end of me: his cock, his fingers, the whispers in his mouth murdering me. I’d lain dead and buried for twenty years, but now I’d come to find him, to get my revenge. To watch him twist and turn and break. In that moment, he’d know why I was there, why I’d come looking for him. That he was the one about to die, about to be buried, my name escaping his bleeding lips as brown soil filled his mouth and choked my name out of him.

We’d go inside, and I’d tell him: nothing you did touched me; your attempts to destroy my life, at the age of five, were for nothing. I’ve always been stronger, harder, braver than you. He would gasp and panic for breath, for the words to make it all OK. He’d try to work out what could possibly save him in the coming seconds, minutes. And while his mind raced, his fingers jerked and retracted, I’d pick up the bat and swing it at his head.

The first thwack would be the single most satisfying, pleasing sound I’d ever have heard. The sound of wood meeting bone, specifically skull. It would crack on impact, fracturing and piercing his brain. Blood, brain, leaking out into the space between his mind and his head, sloshing around like a baby in a bath. He’d be on his knees as I took the bat to both arms, his hips, the ribs. I’d take a knife and stick it into the white expanse of his throat. It’d lodge and stick and I’d pull with both hands: down, across, blood spurting, gushing out as he tried to scream, tried to stop the wound, but could only mouth silently while his flapping hands jammed inside his open throat and he impaled himself on his own fist, his body jerking and bucking under the weight.

I’d stand over him, watching the last twitches and spasms of his body in his final moments, as he clasped and grabbed at my feet and ankles, smearing blood all over me. I would look deep into his eyes as he died, the light fading from his big brown eyes until they were empty and flat. I would step over him and leave his house exactly as I entered, the blood under my feet creating a trail