You've Escaped

"What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must. Like Rohinton Mistry, a banking executive, or Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive, or Edmund Wilson, who spent his most productive years sitting in his big stone house in upstate New York and writing about what he damned well pleased. Samuel Pepys, who wrote the greatest diary in the language, was a high officials in the British Admiralty. Many people can write well and yearn to, but they are not content, like Pepys, for their work to go unread. A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young women in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years."

— Roger Ebert in The golden age of movie critics

Nothing will ever make you feel smaller than the elements of nature. You pass the abandoned, eviscerated umbrellas on the street and hope to God that you can keep your cold fingers on your own. Even the parts of you that are still dry feel wet and cold thanks to the wind and you wonder how you ever thought that it was just another rainy day from the 11th floor. You come home and peel off your wet jeans and shirt and your boyfriend’s Mets cap and feel the cold in your bones the whole afternoon despite the hot tea and the bath. The whistle of the wind keeps you home, apple-cheeked and foolish but still small.

Seen and Not Seen

(I posted the link earlier but decided to post all the text when bee reblogged.)

I was date raped when I was 17.

I don’t say that to shock or elicit sympathy, I say it because it’s a fact. Earlier I read this and have since then had a few conversations that saddened me. I heard about how it was odd that someone would know so many rape and sexual abuse victims and I heard from two friends quiet confessions of how they had been sexually abused or taken advantage of, stories of how when they told someone in their lives, their stories were ignored or taken lightly. This makes me sad and more than anything, it makes me angry that we live in a society where rape and sexual abuse towards both men and women is overlooked and ignored, where victims are made to feel somehow responsible for the violence forced upon them. It’s hard to be a survivor when your proclamations are seen as invalid, or even worse, not listened to at all.

As in many cases I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances, I was raped by someone I knew. It was a guy I had been dating for just a few weeks and we were at a party at a friend’s house. We were spoiled private school kids and we drank every weekend while maintaining perfect grades and the right extracurricular activities to get us into the best colleges. This guy and I ended up in a bedroom at this friend’s house while everyone else danced to the loudest, most obnoxious music imaginable. I felt dizzy and wanted to lie down for a little while. We kissed playfully but when I tried to close my eyes and rest for a second, I felt his hand up my skirt. I pushed him away and told him I didn’t want to do anything. He ripped off my underwear. His breath smelled stale from the alcohol and he felt heavy against me as he kept on kissing me, his hands roaming between my legs. I was nauseated and said no. He held me down, his knees against my legs as he unzipped his pants. With that action, all the adrenaline in my body rushed through me and I screamed my head off. No one could hear me, or maybe it was just that no one gave a shit at that point. I struggled, trying to free my wrists from his large hands, thrashing as he forced himself inside me.

As soon as he did that, I became aware of the fact that this was happening. I was being raped. It was everything my mother had always warned me about and here it was happening. I felt like I was watching myself outside my body, watching myself fight the entire time. I fought because I knew that I was being raped but I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of giving in. I fought the entire time. When he tried to kiss me, I bit him, hit him with my head; I yelled at him the whole time, and when it was over, it looked I had had the shit beat out of me. He rolled off of me and I jumped up, pulling my skirt down, fixing my shirt. I found my shoes and ran out of the room. He tried to follow me and I shoved him as I ran outside to my car.

I drove home, still technically drunk but more alert than ever. I entered my house quietly and tiptoed to my room. I grabbed a towel and took off my clothes, shoving them into the back of my closet. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at my body for the first time. I had bruises on my wrists and arms, my thighs were black and blue, my ribs felt sore. My mouth felt swollen and I could feel his skin under my nails from where I had scratched at him. I suddenly looked so small in the cold bathroom light and everything hurt from the inside out. I turned on the shower as hot as I could stand it and stood under the water, my face into the stream. I couldn’t tell when I started crying, my tears mixing with the water until I was on the shower floor slamming my hand against the wall and sobbing. The water eventually turned cold and I got out, wrapping myself in the towel. I put on a long sleeved shirt and pajama pants and climbed into bed, falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I woke up the next morning to several missed calls from him. I deleted them from my phone and ignored him. I never spoke to him again. Something clicked in my mind, I still don’t understand it. Perhaps I went into survival mode. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I figured that he was going away to college in a few months and I would never have to see him again. Something in my head just wanted to put it as far away from me as possible. My friends asked me why I had stopped seeing him and I brushed it off. I ignored it in my own mind because if I had to really think about what had happened in that bedroom, I wasn’t sure if I would ever get out of my bed at that point. So I didn’t say a word for the next two years and went through the motions in a lot of respects in my life.

The first person I told was my ex-boyfriend. I was 19, and it was close to the holidays, and I started having bad dreams. I woke up from a nap one Thursday afternoon and I couldn’t stop crying. My boyfriend held me in bed until I stopped hyperventilating and then he waited patiently until I told him what was wrong. He held me for about three hours and just when it seemed like I wasn’t going to say anything at all, I told him. He held me tighter and let me talk and cry in his arms as the sun set outside. He and I broke up a few months later but his support in just being able to choke the words out led me to go to therapy and talk about it.

Talking about it felt powerful. In time, I told my friends and my family. I held my mom when she cried at the news, and I reassured my best friends that I was okay. That was the biggest thing I wanted them to understand, I wasn’t a weakened, crippled victim. I was a survivor, I am a survivor. I was raped and I’m changed because of it. I am made of more resilient stuff than I ever thought possible. He has changed me but he has not broken me or destroyed me. I was raped and I am a person, I have a face. I’ve spoken on panels at my college about rape and violence because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some asshole keep me ashamed. I was raped and it wasn’t my fault. This happened to me but I’m not going to let it keep happening to me every day; my life is too valuable and too short for that. I talk about it now because I couldn’t talk about it when it happened and if I can help someone, anyone, feel like they can be honest about something that has happened to them and share it and report it to the proper authorities then I have done a small part in battling a huge problem.

So please. Recognize that rape and violence and sexual abuse are things that can happen to anyone, men, women, children. If someone in your life wants to talk to you about such an issue, don’t brush it under the rug, don’t make them feel at fault. Listen and support them. Talk to them about it. The smaller, more silent survivors are made to felt, the bigger the problem becomes. You do not have to be ashamed and you do not have to be silent. In my experience, you never forget but it gets easier, it gets better, and you’ll thrive. I promise.

journaling september 2nd, 2009 1:07 pm

clicking the random button on your blog is fun sometimes.

I talk to people all day at work. I am a customer service robot.

“Hi, how are you?”

“Did you find everything alright?”

“Have a fantastic day.”

People are rude a lot of the time and I’m mostly a blank smile with the occasional outburst where I tell someone to die in a fire. The nice customers are rare, the ones you actually talk to even rarer.

Today, an older man walked up to where I was texting you, and bought two oranges, those organic key lime-white chocolate chip cookies, and a quart of milk. I put my phone away and put on my automatic smile.

“Hi.” I reached for the oranges.

“Hello, young lady, how are you today?” he said. His light blue eyes looked tired.

“I’m excellent, and yourself?” I scanned the items and put them in a bag.

“As good as I can be.”

“Bad day?” I crossed my arms in front of me.

“Bad few months. Shopping for food is weird without my wife.”

He lowered his eyes and my heart instantly broke for him. No one else was around so I leaned towards him.

“How long has it been?” I asked him.

“3 months.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just, you’re never prepared for it. You spend your whole life loving someone and suddenly it’s over, and you don’t know how to do anything else.” There were tears in his eyes.

“What was her name?”

“Diane. I’m sorry, let me pay you.” He swiped his credit card and waited for the receipt to print.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through. I would die. What was she like?” I couldn’t stop myself from talking.

“She was a schoolteacher, and she was the funniest person I knew. I could talk to her for days.”

“She sounds amazing.” I felt myself tearing up.

“She was. I miss her all the time.” He put the receipt in the bag. “Do you have a boyfriend or a husband or something?”

“Something like that, I have a man. I’m very much in love with him.” I had full blown tears running down my cheeks by this point. “I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I get, I just know about him.”

“I found Diane young, too, and I knew. What’s his name?”

“Gabe. He’s really smart and makes me laugh a lot. He seems pretty mad about me even though I’m a pain in the ass. I’m mad about him.” I smiled a little as I wiped my eyes.

“I can tell. Hang onto that, okay? You won’t find it often, if ever again. Someone who will love you like that, I mean.”

“I definitely know, don’t worry.”

“It was nice talking to you,” he said.

“It was nice talking to you, too.” I held out my hand and he took it in both of his larger hands. We stayed that way for a while until he let me go.

“I hope things get easier to bear with,” I said.

“Me too,” he said. “And love that boyfriend of yours and let him love you. It’s all that really matters in this world.”

He picked up his bag and walked out with a little wave. I waved back and stood still for a long time, shaken by the incident. I felt so close to someone I didn’t even know. These things happen to me sometimes and I wonder what they mean. I wanted to call you and tell you about it. I wanted you to tell me you love me and that I shouldn’t cry. I wanted to call my grandma and ask her if she was scared of losing my grandpa after 51 years of marriage. I wondered how you exist without the one you love. I was miserable for a month without you, the possibility of death tearing you apart seems unfathomable. It was a small moment, not very important in the whole scheme of things, but somehow I am shaken. I want to stop taking things for granted, you, my family, my friends, work, school, writing, reading books, going to the beach, traveling. Things move fast and I need to get every last second out of life that I can possibly squeeze out of it. I keep thinking of this broken man, a hole permanently in him due to this loss, and I dread the day I will lose you like that. You tell me not to worry or think of those things and so I try to put it out of my mind. I think of the life that will span from this day to our last day together and I wonder what will fill it. Words, kisses, afternoon fucks, making dinner together, sleeping intertwined. I have to think of the life that is to come if I’m going to live it at all. Death is just a reminder to keep living in the same way I love you, eyes forward, leaping.