Adam Keane is running a half marathon to raise money for SurvivorsUK. Here, he writes to capture the emotion of his experience – to reframe and remember it from where he stands now in the present.

Please support Adam’s half marathon here.

Tribulation; Endured – Adam Keane

Here in the toilets of the slaughterhouse.

I do not run.

Nor do I fight.

I am as a lamb under the slaughterman’s knife.

It rises and it falls.

On the surface I am without mark or blemish.

But look deeper in and there is a boy whose

worth bled, dignity broken, their Guest House left a ruin.

For rape is butchery of the innate immaterial.

Knife sheathed, mouth sown tight.

With a needle and thread, made of malice and of spite.

Getting up is hard now.

For I am burdened by weight wrought of weakness.

And I wonder will these raiments of shame be a lasting legacy?

From floor to toilet stall.

There, both silence and time dilate.

Mind wandering far and deeply,

arriving at a prison of solitude,

where there is no solace.

Only a mind that is full of accusation.

For it is wounded and vengeful.

Why didn’t you run?

Why didn’t you fight?

Why would anyone love you now?

Why live?

Solitude breaks, bells ring as if in mourning.

Fundamental truth dawning.

I’m late for lesson.

And from somewhere, who knows where,

a future self or God maybe.

I hear a whisper, a promise of future tranquillity,

that comes with a memory of a primrose.

…

In this moment, here and now, today!

Tranquility has been found.

No longer do my accusers haunt me.

Solitude’s queries no longer in any doubt.

I have lived and I am loved.

I have survived the slaughterhouse.

Writing becoming an essential act of recovery.

For the immaterial within cannot be slain,

but endures like the rising and setting of countless suns.