When the world around me is quiet and I am alone, this is where my words begin.
I get tired of telling the same stories about myself over and over. After awhile, you can feel like you’re reading a script about a person who is no longer you–someone who is a stranger. One day you may even realize that it’s not worth telling that story anymore because you’ve outgrown it.
There’s one big ugly story that I can’t highlight in my narrative and control-v forever.
How many days can one night eight years ago claim? For how long can a brief version of myself continue to be transposed over the 2,994 days of myself since? I hear a poignant riddle or physics problem forming.
A four-and-a-half-year relationship is popped straight up into the air and has a hang-time of 6.25 seconds. Determine the height to which the relationship rises before it reaches its peak. What will be its final velocity and how far will it fall? Who were the male and the female when they left the thrower’s hand, and who are they now?
A girl traveling through life skids to a stop one night on a bed in a robin’s egg blue room. Assuming uniform acceleration, determine the skidding distance of the girl’s reality. How long does it take her to realize that he’s escalating dangerously? What is the velocity of her tears hitting the quilt? And the volume of his laughter and insults?
Her notion of what he is capable of doing is dropped into a deep well. Determine the depth of her disbelief. Who is this person–in this moment a stranger– whom she’s loved and defended for years who is now blocking the door and holding her keys? Now gripping her arm. Now holding her mace. And how did she become the person trapped in this room?
After he finished, what was the distance between the two backs in the bed as she stared at the wall and listened to her pounding heart? How quickly could he turn and grab her arm if he awoke? Her thoughts darted from one escape plan to another as her eyes tracked the distance between the bed and her car keys.
The sun was low when she left quietly for class in the morning as if nothing had happened. Gravity slowly pulled her numbness and disbelief into action. That week she spent several shaky hours in her philosophy professor’s office finding the least unbearable of words to use and letting him guide her through an exit strategy. She felt disoriented the whole time, like a blindfolded person in complete trust of someone who calmly talked her through each step she needed to make. For days she returned to her boyfriend’s house and fake smiled and listened to guitar music and slept on the edge of the bed facing the wall, moving through the stale motions of normalcy while everything under her skin picked up terrifying momentum for the breakaway. It was so piercingly loud in her body that glass could have shattered.
Call it what it is
Rape. It’s not an easy word to use. I can’t imagine it ever being easy, but it sure gets caught in a lump in your throat when it’s in the same vicinity as “boyfriend,” “love,” “the one I lost my virginity to,” “my first relationship”. So here’s how it came out for the first few years: “It ended violently.” “It ended with the ultimate betrayal.” “He did one thing that I finally could not make up excuses for or look past.” Eventually and more accurately, “I was sexually assaulted.”
Those are the ways I chose to describe it when I thought that rape might be a misrepresentation of events. I wasn’t pulled into a dark alley by a stubbled, crazy-eyed stranger. I wasn’t drunk at a frat party with a fuzzy memory and a sloppy “no”. No hand was put over my mouth. I never screamed. There were people on the other side of the house. It wasn’t rape like you see on TV.
I won’t describe it to you. I can, but I’ve become comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to. I don’t have to qualify it or give disclaimers or tell the whole story in case I’m afraid rape sends a message that’s stronger than what happened. I’ll tell you whatever truth I hold, and I won’t apologize for it.
After watching hundreds of Law and Order: SVU episodes of rape victims in courtrooms use calmly rehearsed anatomical words, I still stumble over the words sent so freely over the television waves. It’s difficult to not create a mental image when the event is being described, and this is not an image I want to plant in the minds of my friends or family members or husband. This is not a vision of myself I want to keep nourishing and giving life to and tucking into bed at night.
The body parts. The sequence of events. Everyone knows a penis was there, and yet the word becomes so scary to say in this context. When you say that word, it becomes real. It pulls the curtain on an abstract rape you’re envisioning from a TV screen–all shadows and obscurations. This is a part of someone’s body that still exists on this earth. It’s still sticking to sweaty summer legs. And where were my fingers, my lips, the waves of my hair, parts of me you are imagining now?
I’ve played the whole thing through my mind in fast forward and re-wind, freeze-frame and jilting flashes, a side view as if I were standing in the room watching it as an outside observer. It’s like a child’s game–where is the image going to pop up and how quickly can I whack it down with my hand or a plastic gavel? And yet I keep vigilant waiting for it to pop up, lingering on the memory, not even sure of what really happened and what my mind is filling in at this point. And that scares me, too. How can something so horrible and huge from my past now be brushed in such broad, vague strokes? It’s become an impressionist watercolor–dabbles of fluid edges, bleeding lines, corners of deep color and puddles of dilution. How could I forget the look in his eyes, the words that we spat at each other?
The facts: I think I even scoffed or laughed when he threatened me, questioning if this was really the position he was putting me in. So this is where we stand? This is where we are four and a half years later? Is this seriously how low he’s going to go? I never expected him to do THIS, so how do I know he won’t kill me? I decided that the safest thing would be to allow it to happen. I made a choice. I cried. I asked why. He laughed. As if it were a joke. And later in my voicemail he said I was making too big of a deal about it. He denied that it happened…or that it happened the way I was “framing” it. Just another day of gaslighting, of making me doubt my own reality and perception.
The facts: I didn’t want to do it. I was crying. He was laughing. He was holding my own police-grade mace that my father had attached to my keychain. He felt powerless in the crumbling of our relationship, so here’s how he asserted control. I made the choice to not struggle, but that doesn’t mean I consented. It was rape.
How much further was the word rape complicated when I later came to see that this was not a wholly isolated event but an escalation of a long-term sexually abusive relationship? Coercion. Prodding. Compromises. Bargains. Good riddance sex. Just-leave-me-alone sex. Stop-lecturing-me sex. You-deserve-it sex. Lonely sex. Guilty sex. Let-me-sleep sex. Many acts I didn’t want to do but was persuaded to do because they were “normal.” I was too young and inexperienced and desperate for love to know that “normal” is up to you. Sex is not one size fits all. You, the individual, get to decide what is normal for you every single time you consent to sex. Just because you do something one day does not mean you’re agreeing to do it again. And you can stop anything that feels uncomfortable to you at any moment. That is your right to consent. If someone is pushing you to do things they’ve seen in porn clips, you are not abnormal to not want to do them. You are not a prude. You are not selfish. You are healthy and normal.
Did I report it? No. A shaken and stirred cocktail of love, fear, confusion, and humiliation prompted me to keep it out of the legal system and just move on. Nothing new under the sun. What if he retaliated? Did a restraining order ever keep anyone from getting killed? Would my father and brother have to hear me say the words in a courtroom? What if he actually killed himself this time?
So he puts on a coffee shop apron and steams espressos for empowered women reading Sheryl Sandberg. He can pat our sweet dog on the head and follow him down Natchez Trace walking trails. He can get up on stage and play solos with musicians whom I respect. And I’ve avoided the concerts and the coffee shops and the beautiful park by his house. For years I’ve kept silent because I’ve thought, “What if he can change? Maybe the remorse he found is real.” I’ve kept silent because I hope I have become invisible in the shadows of his life, his wanting to forget me as much as I want to forget him.
The good memories
Let’s talk about memories. How he stole ours. The good ones. The ones that kept me in it. The afternoon drives when all lights turned green for us, and it didn’t matter that the A/C in his shitty car didn’t work because we would rather have the windows down anyways. Sweaty summer days of drum kits and harmonicas leading to the bed we tumbled into to trace each other’s freckles. How he helped me slowly forgive my dad because he lost his. Our conversations about Dave Brubeck, Abbey Road, and chord progressions. The art we made together. His intricate picking and my floating harmonies. The way the neighbors kept their door open to listen when we made music on the stoop.The homemade zombie movies and night shoots on remote train tracks with flood lights. The dogs whose warm bodies sidled over to us in our sleep. The baby ticks he picked off of me on the side of the road when I found dozens of them peeking out of my pocket after a hike. The unsteady walks over the trestle and who we were in the black and white photographs. The locked-eye, in-this-moment-with-you looks that only lovers and musicians exchange when souls are meeting. The way Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and Radiohead sometimes sang to us alone.
Do all those have to disappear because he became my rapist? Am I sick to honor those memories? Do I need to clear the hard drive of my first love? How can someone who once saw me so deeply and held me so gently then violate me so cruelly? How can something that once tasted so sweet spoil into this bitter, caustic substance?
I can still hear us singing “Harvest”, and it’s flying out the windows of his chipped black Sentra rolling down Fortification Street.
Will I see you give more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp
or fuse it in the sun?
…Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup
with the promise of a man.
I can’t just leave those years and that night in the past. Sometimes I think, “I’m married now. I’ve been with Lloyd almost twice as long I was with Sean. Shouldn’t I be over this?” But I feel like if I leave it, I waste it. I went through it for nothing. How many other women are trapped in this situation? I am a well-educated woman with a wide network of family, friends, and financial resources. I know powerful people. And I was scared to leave, felt paralyzed and powerless. I couldn’t have done it on my own. How do women with fewer resources have a fighting chance?
Bearing witness. This is something I need to do for me and for others. I sense that sharing my story is important.
Here’s the other reason I can’t forget it: I need to own what was mine in that relationship and learn from it. I wasn’t just a victim; I was a participant. I don’t blame myself, but I don’t want to relinquish all responsibility for the way the relationship devolved. What did I need at that time of my life that compelled me to stay? What kept me from leaving? How did I allow him to chip away at me until I was a guilt-laden, compliant, self-disregarding partner? How was he able to go in and slowly re-wire my brain to alter my perception of who I was and what was true?
I’ve worked my way through a lot of these answers, but I feel like an alcoholic. You never stop being an alcoholic; you will always be a recovering or recovered alcoholic. You can’t let down your guard and think the disease has left you. I stay on the lookout for unhealthy patterns that could develop in my marriage, worried I will slip back into old habits of clinging, compartmentalization, and detachedness.
When I look back now at the girl I was, I feel a mixture of disgust and non-recognition. Who was that person? Who and what created her? Once you’ve seen the darkness inside you, you can’t un-see it. But when I tell my story, I feel brave. I feel strong. I feel like giving that girl a hug. I feel incredibly grateful for my second chance at life and love. I experienced a true resurrection in my life, a vibrant return to life after living death. A complete turn-around like a black and white movie turned technicolor.
New life
I have a tattoo on my side that extends from my left rib cage to the edge of my back. My college best friend Sophia and I got the matching tattoos in May 2009, a few months after the horrible night and the very week of our college graduation. My skin was still raw and bloody under my graduation gown, wounded flesh sticking to black polyester baked by the Mississippi sun. Now, understand that my tattoo is no token tattoo. I like to call it a “street cred” tattoo because when first seen, it makes people say things like, “Whoa! That’s a tattoo.” It’s big and unexpected because people don’t know it’s there unless I show them. It’s there almost exclusively for me to see unless I decide to show it to someone.
I showed my mom that summer the night before I had an outpatient surgery. I figured I had to show her because she may see it while caring for me while I was recovering. I didn’t want it to be a surprise and something I had withheld from her and had to explain while coming out of anesthesia. I wasn’t nervous; she’s a “cool mom” who has a tattoo herself. A token tattoo, that is.
After informing her about the tattoo and warning her about the size, I lifted up my shirt to show her. Her head reared back suddenly like a threatened snake, and she said, “Why’d you have to get something so big?!” You know, why not a butterfly or four-leaf clover on my ankle, something cutesy and small found on a socially normative person who’s not covered in ink or selling crack on the corner? No no no. I wanted that big, confrontational tattoo, a tattoo so unavoidable that it became part of my landscape rather than a pretty adornment. I wanted a tattoo that was intimately part of me, not a one-inch shout-out to the world.
I even embraced the pain required to birth this massive image on my rib cage. While the needle probed my skin over and over, I was in a meditative state, acknowledging the pain but not scared of it, comforted by the fact that this was pain I had chosen. The rape left a deep wound on the inside, a rotting stump with a far-reaching root system. I wanted my pain to fertilize something beautiful. For now, it flowered into this tattoo.
Mom looked so disappointed, like I had ruined the perfect body she had made for me. Or maybe she imagined how far my life had taken me since I was a baby in her arms, realizing that the pain of my experiences had put a gulf between us that she could never fully cross. It would always be my own pain, and she couldn’t hold it for me. The tattoo was the space between us, an outward and visible sign of an inward passage. Her little girl was gone. She cried in bed that night and kept taking swigs from an old tequila bottle she found in the pantry of my late grandmother’s house.
Sophia and I both have the same two words needled into our skin forever: VITA NOVA. New life. Mine has a swallow flying toward new life. Historically, swallow tattoos were worn by sailors to show off their sailing experience: one swallow for each 5,000 nautical miles. One legend holds that since swallows return to the same place every year to nest, the swallow tattoo guarantees the sailor a safe return home. Often a sailor would have one swallow tattooed before setting out on a journey, and another swallow tattooed upon safe return home. I certainly felt like I had endured a treacherous journey and had come out safely on the other side.
Why vita nova? I wanted a reminder to wake up every day and make a commitment to new life. A fresh start opening to me every day. Furthermore, I wanted to commemorate the new life I had chosen for myself. We got the idea and the exact stenciling of the words from our favorite book of poetry that Sophia and I read aloud to each other call-and-response style during our four years at Millsaps:Vita Nova by Louise Gluck. In this way we were also honoring our friendship, which had survived the crazy years when I alienated myself from everyone out of shame and fear.
I knew that my relationship with my tattoo would change over the years. I may not always like it. What if I get side rolls, and my bird loses a wing? What if I get stretch marks? What about when I’m old and my skin is all saggy and my bird starts flying south? No matter. I wanted to always remember the strong person I was when I chose to get the tattoo, and I wanted to honor that person. I hoped to never get too old and stuffy to love the person that entered The Ink Spot with a clear vision and a commitment to living every day with fresh eyes and renewed intentions. A girl who had been delivered home safely and who brimmed with energy and hope for future journeys.
I’m glad that girl existed. I wouldn’t be the same person without her. Ain’t nobody gonna break these wings.
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