Holy Water

winterofdiscontentviaFlickr

(sitting naked in the shower.)

If water could be made holy through the silver ball that hangs,

pushing it out like rain to bead against my pale face, do you think

it could gather up the poison from beneath my skin? could it run in trails

down my naked back and suck the demons into each drop

and flush them down the drain? could it calm this tension growing

in my stomach? Could it flood on through and preform the miracle

that I need right now, multiplying a fish to help feed the crowd 

of angry sinners in my head? Would they quiet down then, leave me

to listen to the rush of water, the gurgle of it falling down.

He says from all sin He will wash me clean. He says for all these ashes

I will someday turn to rose. He says that even in the dark when I lie beneath

the devil, when I leave this body that He's scultped out for me, even when

I cry and cry and swear I'm no one but alone, He's already here,

if just a figurative shadow in the corner of this room that sits and lets

the tears run down His own face as they run down mine and feels this torture

with me and understands. If water could be made holy could it save this tired

soul, could it wash the heavy outer layer of hatred from my body, and do you think 

He could forgive?

Peace

can i walk away now and leave you there

knowing that I will never know if you were

watching the back of my head as I did not

turn around. Can I stand up, head in the clouds

on some sort of platform labeled success

and keep my eyes from wandering down

to the gutters where I know you lie. Will I

stop wondering if you see me now, stop

smiling just incase you do, stop holding on

to each breath that I take, as if I must measure

it first to make sure I've packed enough life

into each moment now to make up twofold for

each moment that you robbed of me. each bad day

seems somehow worse as it runs through the filter of

the past and I must replay the source of this discomfort

that can never just be a present moment pain.

has it been enough time yet. one day for each

minute. one year for each day. I serve a lifetime sentence just waiting for parole, while you walk

free. and if I try to take any role in retribution,

the only person that I hurt again is me. how many times do i have to decide 

to be bigger than all this, to beat it, to never let you win. 

how many times must I loosen my white knuckles 

and open up my calloused hands and let you go. 

how many times again do I tell the universe 

that I understand that I will never understand and all I ask for 

is peace. peace. that floats like sunlight on the waves of a lake.

that splashes away onto the next wave as I try to snatch

it up. peace that I cannot find in one all-consuming, life

altering decision. It's never ending. One more time. One

more time. One more time. I choose to live.

Wall of Shame

Example of Rape Culture

I found this in a men's fitness magazine at the gym. 

Some Days

Some days it feels like all I do is keep starting over. I work and work and work. I run until I cannot run anymore. I write until no words are left. I try, as hard as I can try. And I let it sink in for one small second that I am making progress, and then, I fall.

Some days, I figure that this is just the nature of the beast. I’m connected to a group of people I know only a millionth of their names, all suffering a similar life sentence. I understand this in a way the rest of the world will never understand. Some days, I know that it will be like this forever. My life will always be different. It will always come back. No matter what I do and where I go. No matter what I accomplish. There will never be a way to remove this part of my life from the person that I am today.

And then there are other days that I want to scream until my voice is horse. I want to scream and throw things and tear it out of my body in whatever way I can. I want it gone. I want him out. I want to be done with this. I want it to have never happened, so badly it takes over my entire body with a force I cannot explain. I don’t want to deal with this for one more second. I’m done. I’m done being a victim. I will never let him win.

Some days, I fight. I refuse to let this own me. And some days, sadly, I surrender to it and I get through the night by remembering that tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow, maybe I won’t have to deal with this. Tomorrow, maybe it will somehow disappear.

Some days I feel like maybe I could talk. I want to call up a friend of mine just to tell her my secret. Just to get it off my chest and let someone else carry it for a while. Some days I get close to actually dialing the numbers. And some days I swear that no matter what I do in my life, I will take it all with me to my grave. I will never let people know what really happened. I will never let it be real.

Some days I feel connected. I hear another story, and through the sadness that I feel I find a small piece of understanding in the knowledge that someone else out there is this big world feels the same things that I am feeling. They know what it is like. Even if I never meet them. Even if they never know we are connected. Somehow, this helps.

And some days I feel completely isolated. I know that no one in the world will ever, ever, ever understand. I think that it would be better if I didn’t get out of bed, or if I just laid down on the floor and stayed there until people forgot about me.

Some days I can’t even remember what it was like. I think about it and I pause to wonder if it ever actually happened. Maybe it was all just a crazy story that someone told me. Maybe it’s just a story that I know. A story about a girl I used to be friends with.  A sad story, but not mine. Not mine.

And some days, sometimes, I let it sink in. And I can still feel the fingers wrapped around my wrists. I can still feel them across my mouth. I can still feel him. And it makes me so nauseous and numb that I can’t even try to deny its existence in my life.

Some days I can’t help but to question God. Why? Why? Why did He let this happen to me? What will it take for it to go away now?

But at the end of every day, I bow my head and thank Him, with tears in my eyes, that I am still alive. I found a way to survive.

Twelve

 My cousin, Ella, is twelve. She watches me as I take off my dress at the pool and comments on my striped bikini, adjusting the straps of her own bathing suit and asking me how old I was when I started texting boys. I tell her, when I was her age, I didn't have a cell phone. We had something crazy called instant messenger to talk to our friends and read the away messages of the boys we thought were cute. Later that night, she lays with her head on my stomach and runs through another list of questions, promising that each one is the last, but then finding another moment of confusion within each of my answers.

I try to remember the things that I needed to hear when I was twelve, or that I would have liked to have known. Be patient; when you are older you will find a wonderful guy, but you’ll probably meet a lot of a-holes on the way; focus on what you want and don’t worry about what boys think of you; be a strong and independent girl…I try to think of answers that won't scare her, but at the same time don't give her false hope or senseless reinforcement to the idea that everything always works out in life and there is nothing to worry about. I find, it is a difficult balance. I don't know exactly what these answers are, but I think maybe all she needs is just to have a chance to talk and to ask and to connect with someone who remembers what it feels like to be lost in a changing world and uncomfortable in a changing body.

At twelve years old, she is discovering the unfriendly nature of growing up that has her running to the bathroom in half hour increments, and glancing at every mirror we pass as we walk through stores in the mall. Aquina and I dress up in fancy hats and scarves, talking to each other in British accents as we run around the spiral racks at Claire's, picking up anything that sparkles and trying to use it to decorate Ella. I put a silver flower clip in her hair. She takes it out. Turns it over and over in her hand. Puts it back in her hair. Takes it out. Puts it back in her hair as she walks over to the mirror. Takes it out. I tell her not to worry because she looks beautiful, but she cannot get past herself today.

When she unpacks her suitcase and shows me her new bras, I try to act excited. I try to pretend like growing up is fun and exciting, hoping I can convince her more than I am able to convince myself. I don’t tell her that when I was twelve, I cried every night for a month after learning about how my body was going to change.  Or that I wore my womanhood as if it was a deformity I was desperate to conceal, layering on five or six sports bras beneath a double set of t-shirts every day; that I prayed over and over, pleading with God to not make me get my period, writing letters to Santa asking if he could turn me into a boy in exchange for being good all year, and hiding each new hair, each new bud of growth with desperate hatred.

As I lie in bed tonight, I can’t stop thinking about twelve. As much as I hated every single moment of maturity, I loved being twelve. I was still like seven-year-old Aquina when I was twelve. I ran around and got dirty and loved loved loved beating my male classmates at every sport. I wore florescent knee-high socks during basketball games. I put a girl in a headlock for telling people not to talk to me because I was a really a boy. I put a boy in a headlock for calling me a girl. I succeeded in changing the dress code for band recitals, so that I could wear my brother’s suit instead of a skirt. I wrote a six-page petition to my gym teacher when he separated the boys from the girls during class, complete with a charted recording of the difference in average time allowed to play (9 minutes each round the boys played compared to only 4.5 minutes per round for the girls), as well as the signatures of every student in my grade. I refused to wear makeup. I refused to shave my legs. I refused to be like everyone else. I loved everyone and I laughed at everything and I knew that I could do anything I wanted to.

Two years later, I would begin my first relationship, and within a year after that, I would watch as my childhood was stripped away from me, stealing with it the pure innocence and naivety I was unaware anyone could touch. Fifteen doesn’t sound that young. Sixteen, seemed so old at the time. But when I look at Ella, with her baby face and training bra, still throwing tantrums when her mom makes her go to bed at 9:30, still fighting with her little sister about who gets to sit in the middle seat and who gets to push the button to call for the elevator; all I can see is beautiful baby. A little girl. A child. And I can finally recognize how young my own face looked, in the darkness of my pale pink room, lying on sheets that had pictures of troll dolls on them after picking myself up from the crumpled pile of dirty t-shirts on my floor and trying to make sense of something to which I hadn’t yet learned the word.

How Do I Accept a World Like This?

I don't always know how to deal with the ignorance of people on the subject of sexual assault. I shut down today. In the middle of a conversation with a guy friend of mine. He told me that's just what he thought girls wanted (sex). He thought they just said no, but they didn't mean it. He thought, that people just have sex. Right away. And that's what they do.

How do we accept a society like this? How do we live in a world like this? A world that somehow portrays this idea so strongly that my well-educated, super-liberal, environment-loving, animal-activist male friend, that spends his time volunteering to help less fortunate people and cried after reading about what global warming is going to do to our planet, thinks that it's ok to have sex with a girl after she says no because it's what she really wanted.

My heart hurts today. I don't know how to help change our society, but I will keep trying to find a way. I'll keep trying to be apart of the change. I can't accept a world where this is accepted.

Writing In The Dark: The Power Of Writing To Help Us Through Trauma

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." 

-Barbara Kingsolver

When I was sixteen and couldn't fall asleep at night, I would lie for hours on my lofted bed and try every possible thing I could think of to find a way to rest. I counted backwards from a thousand, listened to relaxation tapes, read the most boring book I owned, but by 2am I would give up and crawl down the hallway to my parents room to the makeshift bed at the far side of theirs.

One night, as I was rolling around, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable, I felt one of my mother's notebooks on the floor underneath the comforter I laid on. Digging it out, I flipped through the blank pages, then reached up on to her nightstand and found a pen. Before I knew it the words were pouring out of me. From that night on, I slept with a notebook under my pillow. When I crawled into bed, I wrote a poem. A poem about whatever I was feeling or thinking or afraid of. I wrote until I had nothing left to say, sometimes repeating the same thing over and over and over until my hand grew tired. If I woke up during the night, out of breath and terrified by the all to realistic nightmares, I would write, in the dark, through the teardrops that fell on the paper, until I drifted back to sleep. 

Without knowing it, I found not only a way to finally sleep at night, but a way to survive the trauma I was going through and the aftermath that followed. To this day I still sleep with a notebook in my bed and my computer on the nightstand next to me. I write before I go to bed. I write when I can't sleep. I write when I wake up in the morning after another bad dream. I write during the day, on the train, while I'm eating lunch, while I'm waiting in the doctor's office or for a table at a restaurant. Sometimes just a sentence. Sometimes ten pages at a time.

          When I decided that I wanted to write a book, I thought it would be easy to write. However, when I sat down with another blank screen and thought about writing something that someone would someday pick up and read: I froze. Writing while thinking about an audience somehow transformed my words into flat, lifeless sentences that sounded far away and fake when I reread them later; but the things I wrote when I was all alone I hid with a desperate urgency. No one was, or would be, allowed to ever read them. They were just too private.

          Comparing the two categories of my own writing, I came to an important discovery. Not that I have the audacity to label myself a great writer, but looking back on things I have written over the years, the one thing that rings true is that when I write for myself, disregarding any notions of what another person might want to hear, I find the strength of what I have to offer. I find the raw story, the real story, of the girl that tried to make sense of something to which she had not yet learned the word. What it actually felt like to lay in the dark, night after night, on the same bed that held the secret abuse; to wake up in a panic, feeling something wrapped tightly around my wrists, unable to breath; to go to school and play the role of the star athlete, the perfect student, the strong and beautiful girl who never did anything wrong and whose life was so perfect.

        Maybe this is the beauty of the art. When we expose ourselves at our most vulnerable point, when we stop trying to keep the weakness a secret, when we write without regard to what others will think, we find the strength of the gift we have to offer.

January 23, 2004

Somedays I don’t think I’ll ever be a human again.

I’ll never be alive again. I’ll only ever be

a girl with a hole in her chest where she cut out

her heart so she wouldn’t have to feel.

I’ll be a shadow. An empty shell of a person that fell

in love and never saw it coming.

Nothing but a memory—

of a girl who knew how to be a person.

Who didn’t have to think about things like how to push

the words “Hi! How are you?” out of her throat.

Who could sing at the top of her lungs.

Who could dance however she wanted and wear whatever

she wanted and when she laughed, she felt the laugh, and when

she cried, she felt the pain and when she thought about the future

she knew. She could be anything she wanted to be. But most of all—

happy.

Somedays I think that no matter what I do, I’ll never be ok.

Hand Writing

I think that everything might just be better if I stay

laying on the floor of my closet on top of the pile of dirty clothes.

I think, maybe, this is where I belong. Maybe I could just disappear

and no one would notice and it would all just go away.

But then I remember to listen to

that voice that screams so loud I can almost hear

it whisper. “I will never let you get the best of me. I will never

let you hold me down. I will never let you win. And if it takes me until

my very last breath in this life, I will find a way to be happy again.

I will find a way to overcome whatever you try to throw at me.

I will find a way to thrive. “

“Most people have been mistreated to one degree or another in their lives, but the experience of being mistreated alone does not cause someone to develop a victim’s outlook. It is only when a person is abused and then left to deal with it on their own that the victim mentality begins to form. The abused child begins to organize his/her world around the wound.” Mic Hunter author of “Abused Boys the Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse”