CHAPTER ONE – HERE
The Ignition
If you’d handed me a looking glass when I was a child, maybe I would’ve seen the future coming—seen how the fractures in my life would widen until they swallowed me whole. But childhood doesn’t offer that kind of clarity. I grew up inside a familiar dysfunction, a predictable chaos. It sounds strange, I know, but there was comfort in the consistency. I always knew who would hurt me and how. There were no surprises—just a practiced cycle of harm followed by an eerie calm, as if nothing had ever happened.
No one wondered what the blows, the insults, the dismissals did to my spirit. No one paused to think about how their brokenness was poisoning mine. That was life inside the gates of normalized chaos.
And now here I am—sitting in a gray, sterile room on the fifth floor of Balboa Naval Hospital, surrounded by people the Navy has labelled “severely damaged.” This wasn’t the future I dreamed of. I wanted to serve my country, to be the first woman in my family to wear the uniform with pride. I wanted honor. Purpose. A chance to prove myself.
Instead, I’m here—broken, ashamed, stripped of the identity I worked so hard to build. And seven months pregnant on top of it.
I hate that I let my life fold into this. I hate that I allowed myself to be pulled into this circle of haunted strangers. But I didn’t have many choices left. It was either die at the hands of my Hospital Corpsman husband or go AWOL and destroy everything I’d sacrificed to achieve. Neither option offered any real escape. So I landed here, in the one place I never imagined I’d be.
The damaged among the damaged.
The room is filled with vacant stares—eyes dulled by trauma, by secrets, by ghosts that refuse to let go. I know what it is to be damaged, but sitting here, surrounded by these silent, broken sailors and soldiers, I realize there are levels to this I haven’t yet understood. Their stillness unnerves me. I feel guilty, as if my suffering somehow doesn’t measure up—though I know nothing about their stories. Soon, I will. We all will. We’re required to sit in this battleship-gray room until each of us exposes our deepest wounds.
I’m a stubborn woman. I’ve survived too much to willingly hand over the pieces of my soul. I don’t want to share. I won’t share. The last time I trusted someone with my truth, I ended up here.
The fifth floor.
The place where the broken are stored.
The place where I now wait—angry, exhausted, and desperate for a way out that may not exist.
I close my eyes, inhaling the cold, antiseptic air.
This is my battlefield now. And I’m not sure I’m ready for the war.
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The Damaged by Clarissa Burton, Queen of the Pen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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