brigits_flame entry: September Week 4
Author's Note: This piece deals directly with sexual violence. I know that this is a tough theme for some folks. It is for me. Please, if this is something you have a hard time reading, don't feel obligated. I am struggling to get comfortable with this theme since my own story is my master's thesis. I know it keeps appearing in my writing. This is why.
Amber
March 1998
After what seems like forever I say, “Why didn’t you stop when I asked you to?” My voice is low, detached, small, coming from outside of me. And he tells me I need to leave. My insides collapse. How is this my fault? He keeps insisting that I leave. And then I panic and think, oh, no, it’s happening again. It’s because I won’t have sex like a normal twenty year-old. And then I’m trying to salvage the situation. I can’t have him leave me. I don’t want to be a freak. I don’t want him to not love me because I can’t have sex. So I beg him to let me stay. He says, “That was rape” and then, he’s a horrible person; how could he do such a thing? And I insist that it wasn’t because I didn’t want him to think he raped me. I didn’t want to believe I was just raped. And so I stayed.
aged
millions
of years
Summer 1999
“You should have seen how skinny those kids were,” his aunt says to me, “When social services came to the house, they found them sitting in diapers full of their own shit. When they pulled off the diapers, their skin came off with them.”
transmutes physical vitality
toward the activation
of un-
conditional love
September 29, 2008
I pulled the 110 pages out of the ripped, dog-eared, wrinkled envelope and read. I hadn’t touched these words in two and a half years. I had needed a break from it for that long to get to know myself again as a person apart from the wreckage of a relationship that had lasted from February 1998 through July 2000 and the accumulated rubble of the years since. I moved across the country. I stopped reading about it, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it.
The memories on these pages should have been fossils encapsulated safely in ink-jet cartridge produced letters and spaces on a recycled white background. They should have been memories to recall from a safe and objective distance. They should have belonged to the woman I used to be.
The words are thick.
The words are sticky.
The resin has not yet hardened.
It flows slowly over my wrists, my arms, my chest. It fills my mouth. I cannot breathe.
associated with the
universal life-force-
essentially
life has been
trapped inside
A Masters Program in Sociology at this school takes about two years to complete. It has been five. I began the program in 2003 after meeting with my therapist at the time and trying to explain to her that I really felt that we hadn’t addressed the rage that kept cropping up in my life at inopportune moments, which had been the purpose of my initial visit. A delivery man had come into the kitchen of the restaurant where I had been working and leered at my legs saying something like, “Man, I’d love to find myself between those.” I had left the kitchen shaking because in response I had imagined grabbing the back of his head and smashing his brains all over the stainless steel counter-top.
What am I fussing over anyway? It wasn’t that bad really. I have to remind myself over and over again, that if it wasn’t that bad, why did I shake uncontrollably when he called me out-of-the-blue last fall after two-and-a-half years?
calms the nerves,
If it wasn’t that bad, why did I start having severe panic attacks after we’d been together a few months? If it wasn’t that bad, why was I having flashbacks that snapped me in half?
prevents memory
loss,
If it wasn’t that bad, why did I have nightmares of tornadoes, of infestation, of a man stabbing me again and again and I could not cry out?
impotence
If it wasn’t that bad, why was I unable to sleep soundly beside any man who lay with me for years to come?
My therapist and I talked about my concerns with my two jobs I’d held over the course of that year. We’d talked about relationships. She loved hearing about my “fascinating” dreams of following a river to find Golgotha, of trying to help a mentally-impaired girl find her way up some stairs, of being contaminated.
It isn’t long before the men start to act strangely and then sick. They need help. Then they are all lying in this bin, their bodies mud-covered and tangled with each other. They are calling to me to help them in feeble voices. I cannot hear what they are saying so I move closer and one of them smears my face with mud and pulls me in with them. The only other man who didn’t go in the mud to rescue the geese hears me screaming and comes to help. I tell him to stay back, to not come closer, to go find help. He doesn’t listen. He wants to help me. I’m screaming for him to stay back. He doesn’t. They pull him in too.
Last night, in that twilight stage of sleep, I heard trucks go by. They sounded like screaming children.
In August of 2003, I challenged her to address my relationship with my ex-fiance, Scott, about which I’d told her on day one.
I’d awaken to find my panties being yanked down
or
I’d awaken to him pushing his way in. Dry. When I told him that I hated it and that it hurt, he would cry and say I was making him feel bad. I’d picture him breaking his own switch off the tree and bringing it to his grandfather so he could whip his bare ass until he bled. He had broken his glasses.
She touched upon it. I insisted upon addressing it in depth. She seemed surprised at my determination and wondered if there wasn’t more happening there. My voice rose up and out of me, “You aren’t hearing me! Of course there is more there! You haven’t been hearing me! I need you to hear me!”
April 1998
“No, no. Thanks, Doctor, but I don’t need it.”
“You just said you’ve been sexually active.”
“Well, I-I was,” I stammered, “but I’m not anymore.”
“But you have a boyfriend.”
“Well, I do, but um, I don’t like it…sex. I mean. It scares me.”
Her response shut me up for a year-and-a-half, “Sex is normal. This is just something you’re going to have to get over.”
stimulates happiness and
pleasure
She handed me the prescription.
I need to be heard.
I hadn’t realized until my voice erupted out of me that what I needed wasn’t therapy. What I needed was to finally tell my story: a story that I’d failed to find in the academic literature on sexual violence, that I’d failed to find in memoirs, that I’d failed to read in magazines, see in after-school specials, in films, in Take Back the Night speeches.
I don’t remember the second time we had sex. I remember two words: systematic desensitization
"I kept pushing you just a little past the point you were comfortable until you were over your fear of sex. See? You like it now, don’t you?"
aids in the making of correct
choices
I enrolled in the Graduate Program in Sociology in Fall of 2003 to begin this process. Five years later, after a two-year hiatus, I’m back again to finish this sociological memoir, to publish it, to put it out there in the hands of the people I’ve met who have said that they had never had a word for what had happened to them.
January 2005
“How long was it good before his true nature came out?”
“I hate that question.”
“Why?”
I propped myself up on my elbow so that I could deliver my answer straight to him. “Never, Ron. It was never good.”
Scott is nowhere near. I know that as I read through this he can’t physically touch me, but I have to remember to breathe. The paralysis is total. I don’t see the images. I feel them. It isn’t pain, but numbness. The numbness hardens all around me. It locks me in.
New Years Eve, 2005.
I’m outside on the patio smoking a cigarette. Everyone else, freezing, files inside. Ron and I are the only two that remain. His fingers close around my left wrist as he gently lifts it and points to a small round scar. His eyes search mine. “I extinguished a book of matches one-at-at-time, “ I explain.
carried by travelers
for protection
amber floats
and burns
My dentist prescribed me a guard for my mouth. I clench so hard I’m pulverizing my jawbone when I sleep. I notice I’m doing it now.
aids healing in the areas of the
stomach, gall bladder
and teeth
When I’m not working on research to back up my argument that coercive rape is a type of sexual violence that is largely unaddressed in the literature, that it is pervasive, that the trauma that results from it is equally as damaging as the more traditionally-defined forms of sexual violence, if not often more so because it tends to happen over extended periods of time and because it goes unnamed and unaddressed for so long, I’m a happy, high-functioning person. I laugh frequently. I’m silly. When I’m trying to clinch a game of darts with a double bulls-eye, for instance, I scrape my feet on the floor and snort before throwing. My mom says that I sound great when she talks to me. I do feel great. I’ve been avoiding really digging into this.
September 2005
I’m writing all this from a place that should be detached. I’m happy now. I enjoy my studies. I adore my students. I have wonderful friends and family. I’ve tied a piece of yarn around my finger to keep me connected to the present and these people that I love and cherish. It is so easy to get lost in here.
I don’t think people realize how easy it is -how much easier it is NOT to eat.
and
I’m angry again. Starving takes the edge off that anger.
and
It is about having control.
and
The temptation to go back there is unbelievable.
and
She “wrap[s her] fingers around [her] wrists as [she] walks down the hall, out the door, to feel the bones.”
Yes. I
do this too.
Sometimes I count the ribs that I can no longer see.
I do not want to do this to myself. I have come too far to go back there. I dismantled my bathroom scale and turned it into a sculpture of a woman. I stocked my fridge. I read through these pages and I run through the names of people I can call when I feel all this crystallizing around me.
Yesterday, I ate two pieces of bread; I had begun reading.
takes negative
energy and turns it positive
releasing a
bright and sunny feeling
It is so hard to eat with bile rising in your throat.
****************
A thank you is definitely owed to lacombe for providing the idea that the memories I was struggling to read through were preserved as though in amber and also for introducing me to Found Poetry. The qualities of amber listed were all found on a website about various stones. Who knew that was going to come in handy here?
Feedback and suggestions are welcome and encouraged.
Thank you!
innana88
Edited to add: No holds barred on this one. I know in this community I can trust the editors to be cognizant, but still critical. I do not want anyone to feel they have to be gentle with me because of the nature of this piece. That will only frustrate me and make me feel fragile and I am not. I'd really like to be able to do something with this one and I need your help making it solid enough for me to get it there. Thanks.
Also, if we could please keep comments here only to specifically address the craft of the piece and whether or not it was communicated successfully, I'd appreciate it. I know this is an emotionally charged piece and I know that this may bring up responses in others. It is precisely because it is an emotionally charged piece that I'm asking to please evaluate only the craft in the writing of it. If this critique of the writing includes discussion of the experiences, that is more than okay, but please refrain from posting primarily about the experiences about which I've written. It's kind of like being in one of those moments where you're trying your damnedest not to cry and you know if someone hugs you it will put you right over. I'm not trying not to cry, but sticking to the writing will make me feel a whole heck of a lot better about this. I'm a wee bit porcupine-esque right now. Here we go 'round the prickly pear....Thanks for understanding.