Throne
Mirror
Tyrion: What is it you want exactly?
Varys: Peace, prosperity, a land where the powerful do not prey on the powerless.
Tyrian: And the castles are made of gingerbread, and the moats are filled with blackberry wine. The powerful have always preyed on the powerless. That’s how they became powerful in the first place.
Varys: Perhaps we’ve grown so used to horror, we assume there is no other way.
-- Game of Thrones, Season 5, Episode 1
Another day, and the world spins round. I turn the knob on the radio and avoid news. I don’t want to know. What he said. What she said. The racket and the noise and the lies and the propaganda. It has nothing to do with me and never has. Not my game. I’m sick of knowing and have nothing to say about a world where I will always skirt the perimeter. This world of power play is not the world I choose. I was born into this life to survive this life, and I have survived so much. In the end, I will be gone. There will be more elections. More crimes. More cannibalization. Economic. Sexual. Other. They are not mine.
I have survived more in my lifetime than anyone in this political circus has survived. I believe that and know that. Recently there was an outcry about politicians and their whores. People love to bring on the whores to incite condemnation. Did anyone ever consider who those whores are? Under which circumstances they became whores? What it is like to be one of them? What are their names? What are/were their dreams? How does someone stand up and say, “I survived being a politician’s whore?" Make that politicians’ whore?
It is okay to launch the word whore as a term of political condemnation, but is anyone really giving a fuck about what is going on behind those headlines or the toll it takes on being the powerless who are preyed upon by those in power? To be their whore.
I was barely sixteen years old when I was sold to politicians who defiled me in ways that are unmentionable. They did things to my young body that I have never spoken out loud to a living person, even to myself. Nor will I say them here. They humiliated me and treated me like a disposable piece of garbage. I survived. Because I had to. That’s enough for now.
I am a living person. And when everyone is bantering about the politicians and their whores, I feel like the big elephant in the room that no one wants to look at. What am I supposed to do? Speak up? I was barely a child then. There was no fucking village saving me. The feminists were stroking their armpit hair while men threw dollar bills on a hotel bed and kicked my head to the floor before they went back to City Hall to legislate whatever it was they were passing as law.
Power. Money. It’s not even just about men. It’s about willful ignorance. Privilege. Blindness.
I know what it feels like to be used by men with power who feel entitled to use their power to justify defiling lesser humans. I know what it feels like to have educated women of privilege turn their back on me because I was the whore.
People who have survived what I survived don’t live to tell the story. And if they do live and do tell it, they will be taught to regret it. Power breeds shame. Shame feeds power. I shouldn’t be telling this story. Let’s forget it. The politician’s whore is a myth propagated by the media. This is not even a story. A day from now, I will redact it.
There comes a time in life when telling the truth becomes a liability. Those of us who have survived the unmentionable are liabilities to society and to ourselves. Why should I be the one shamed and punished for surviving the crimes committed against my body?
But this is reality.
So I have shut up. Shut down. Found the off knob in my head.
I get on with life. Quiet. My history tucked away to be turned to dust when my body expires from this world.
I sometimes wonder what is harder: living through the hell I survived as a young girl, or spending a lifetime bearing its legacy. It never goes away. I am forever marked and shamed. Just carve a fucking letter A in my chest and be done with it.
So I immerse myself in fictional replications of my world. Sometimes I binge on stories of serial killers who kill innocent women and children in the ultimate act of sexual violation. These days, I watch Game of Thrones as if I’m looking at a mirror of my world while I pound my body into shape on the elliptical at the gym, dripping history in puddles of stinking sweat on the floor around me. I watch injustice unfold in spilled entrails and severed heads. I watch religious fanaticism self-righteously condemn the innocent. I know this world more than my own world.
I attach myself to a young girl, Arya Stark. She’s tough as she watches her world crumble with open eyes. She clamps down her feelings and perseveres in a violent and unjust world. She realizes she must fight for herself because no one else is going to fight for her.
I sometimes look at her and see myself. I recognize every expression on her face. I know what she feels. Through her, my reality becomes more manageable.
Imagine I didn’t spend my young life on the streets. But rather I was a girl with a sword and a kill list. Imagine I have that kill list in my pocket now.
Imagine that someday I will finally reach the end of my road. I will have been walking for over half a century across hostile landscapes. Dodging daggers and fists. Batting off a thousand men coming at me.
Imagine I take the throne. Not to rule a kingdom, but a throne where I am the ruler of my own landscape, and freedom means that I can stand proud with my battle wounds, and I will not be shamed but honored. That I will honor myself.
As wrote out those words, I sat taller in my chair. I will honor myself.
At the end of the day, I must live and die with myself.
So give me a sword. Give me a needle. Give me a dragon. Give me my life. And whatever you do, please do not tell me a goddamn thing about democracy, and do not tell me about politicians and their whores.