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Blood will be dripping down your fingers, pooling in the palms of your hands.  It will be the blood of your captors, of the woman with the cattle prod.  You didn’t think so much blood could come from such a tiny series of holes, but it did.  She screamed so much.  It was surprising.  She seemed to like giving pain so much, it seemed like she should be accustomed to it, willing to endure it.

The blood will make your hands slick, so slick that it will take you three tries to lift the latch locking the cargo container from the inside.  You’ll ram your shoulder into the door three, four, five times before it pops open a little with an audible creak.  Then you’ll tumble out, palms slapping the ground.  You’ll fall into the open air and gulp breath into your lungs.   The air will smell salty, filthy.  It will be cold, colder than you remember from your time outside of the container.

As your eyes remember how to see, how to make sense of light and lack, you’ll understand where you are, what’s happened to you.  The cargo yard will come into focus, and as you move through the stacks, as if in a daze, you’ll understand for a furtive moment that you are free, or close to free.  When the security guard spots you, covered in blood, dressed in tattered rags, that freedom will become real.  The furtive moment will collapse into reality, full on reality.

You’ll drop to your knees and vomit.

After the police, after a night of processing and an escort posted inside of your home, you’ll sit down blankly in front of your computer.  You’ll consider, for a moment, logging on to your email, learning about the personal messages you’ve missed over the last three months.  But instead you’ll log on to Facebook.  The ambient noise of it all will make you feel like you were never gone.  You’ll quietly soak in the bustle of life that is Facebook.  Pictures of kids put up by people you barely know.  Exes who are doing quite well.  Political tirades from people who should not be making political statements of any kind.

You’ll scroll through them all and then, with a smirk, click on your status box.  The cursor will change and you’ll begin to type:

just got out of a cargo container where i was tortured for 6 mo.  yolo/lol/g2g

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