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swinterwriting-blog · 7 years

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Final Blog Post: Two Sides of a Coin

He touched me, and I shook my head no. He grabbed me and I pushed back. I said no. I screamed no. No was the only word I could muster up, but I poured my heart and soul into that word. This wasn’t what I wanted, I did not want this. No, No, No. He continued, he pulled my hair and mushed his grotesque face onto mine. He was taking this from me, this thing that should never be stolen, because once something like this is done, there is no repaying, no giving it back. How can you replace something like this? He advanced and I continued to struggle, but this struggle was of no use. He beat me. He raped me. The pervert dressed himself, let out an extraordinarily misplaced sigh of content, and walked out the door.

How can something be two things at once? It is all so clear and so blurry. I remember the details of the room, beautiful flower stencils on lilac walls, the way the sheets were already all fucked up just before I was all fucked up. I remember the sound of my voice, I can hear myself yelling. But I cannot remember his face, I cannot remember him at all. Even the way it made me feel then feels distant and blurry, and yet I feel that same way right now. This is my life, this precise moment. He gets up. This moment is my life, resigning myself to my newfound misery as the forgery of a man, as he walked out the door. I begin to mourn myself.

* * *

She woke up screaming. These screams, they are nothing new. The rape, and the scraps of it that return to her as she is unconscious, will never truly dissolve. Her husband sat up and touched her, and not fully awake, she pushed his touch away, as far away as she could. Coming into the here and now, she felt the nightmare begin to blend with her current reality. The flower designs on the walls of her past began to fade, and her familiar and plain bedroom now began to take its shape. Her husband once again reached out, and she took his hand.

They had a nightly ritual. Her recurring night terrors required it. They each got up, and walked quietly past the bedroom at the end of the hallway and down the stairs into their brightly colored kitchen, that only appeared as shadows until her husband flicked on the light. He made her chamomile tea, her favorite, and they sat there as she drank it. Sometimes he would lightly play music, but not tonight. She put her empty mug in the partially filled sink, and began the trek up the stairs, with her husband quietly following behind her; had anyone been watching they would have assumed him just a shadow.

Laying back down to sleep, her husband was quickly unconscious. She kept telling herself to sleep, tomorrow will be a big day, and you cannot sleep through your son’s graduation. As she laid on her side and lost herself in the dim light shining in through the shades, she closed her eyes and began her return to the dream world, she was swept away with her memories back to another part of her journey; the time after an assault when you can take control, or lose it. Immediately after falling asleep she was right where she wanted to be, waking up in her tent, reliving the last day before returning to society…

* * *

I love that feeling. The feeling of a cold morning, but the kind of cold morning when you can tell the earth is just waiting for the sun to slowly warm her surface, waiting for the sun to warm my surface. I hear the birds squawking, and decided I was hungry. I finish off the last of the cookies I brought with me 49 days ago, and went for some of the fish I had cooked just the night before. I love this place, and I love my isolation. There was no one to assault my body, I was in a place where no one had yet assaulted the land. I finish eating, and unzip my front door. I duck as I go outside, I don’t want to disturb the tarp I so carefully set up near my little home. I am free, I am liberated. I am sure people think I am insane, I did not cope with the rape in a way accepted by the majority. I did not want therapy, I did not want community. So I came out here, to an untouched piece of countryside and forest. Leaving was my way of coping, of seeing what happened to me, and the bigger picture. Tomorrow will be the 50th day of my camping trip, and the last day I will wander. I walk the land, which is neither simply beautiful, nor simply dangerous. How can something be two things at once? These words that we give so much meaning to, they define and separate us, they give things meaning, but can never truly convey that meaning. Meaning is absent and present. How can something be two things at once?

As much as I would like to stay forever, my time here is ending. As the sun begins to set, I start my nightly fire and grab my leather worn journal, and the pen barely holding on to ink. I am not healed. The savagery that was done to me, it is a wound that nothing can heal from. But I can function, and I am making the choice to do something about it, something productive. I begin reading through my entries, I begin to travel through my own journey once again. My journal begins on that very next day after the attack, after binging on next-day contraceptives, and purging myself of them that night; and after leaving the society that allows a lucky few of its members to crush flowers, and bruise faces, simply because they desire to. The fire pops and cracks. That is where this journey began. And it ends tomorrow. Tomorrow I will pack my things, take my final steps around this place, and conclude this chapter of my story. A small piece of wood crumbles into two, heated past what it can stand. What I will do with this story, I am not sure.

* * *

She wakes up, not in her make-shift tent, in a lonely part of the woods, but in her warm bed, with her husband in the shower. The light shining in the window almost makes her feel like she never left her dream, one of her favorite memories. She goes back down the same stairs, lit by the sunshine, and yells on her way down at her son in his bedroom to get up and start getting ready.

The graduates throw their caps, and she and her husband frantically try to get a picture of their son at the back of the group. He looks nothing like either of them, and he shouldn’t, he was adopted at the age of three. This is not new information, however in watching the parents and children taking pictures of their families forged through sex and blood, she is once again reminded of her inability to have children, of the harm she inflicted on herself, the large numbers of contraceptives that she could not keep down. She knows she is broken, she knows she is shattered. But she did not crumble. She instead shattered into shards of glass, and on this monumental day, she would use this to put a small slice into one of many underlying inequalities that caused her so much grief.

After the graduation, before the parties and the chicks, before the booze and the pictures, she called her son into the kitchen to give him a small piece of herself. This wasn’t something she had given her husband, nor her mother, nor anyone else. In adopting a son, she promised both him and herself, that she would not let him fall victim to the lies of a society run by men. She pulled out the pages ripped from her journal. Those she had written on the last day of her wandering. She was not a woman of many words. The words she carefully chose to say were, “My boy, I give you this wisdom to empower you. The world is not only yours for the taking. Live a life of grace and giving, do not worry about the words, and do not worry about their connotations.”

Day 50

The assault on women’s bodies is not separate from the assault on the Earth. Man feels like it is his right to own and dominate, however it is not his right at all. Similarly to the way victims of sexual abuse often shrivel or explode, Mother Nature will do the same, as she has been plundered and raped by man for hundreds of years.

Sex is a powerful thing. It is naturally nothing extraordinary, however we have created this word, and these feelings that are supposed to be inherently part of it. Things can only hold power if it is a harnessed power, we cannot use power if it floats freely. This is why our society traps us, especially women, in bubbles. We are supposed to avoid sexual desire at all costs, for sex is the driving force of society, and only when you harness and impose it, can it give you power.

It is no coincidence that females are seen as objects of sexual desire, and it is not coincidence that we consider the planet a mother. Men love to slice things up, create borders and difference, because this is what they are told they must do to be men. The social construction of manhood, of binary opposition between man and woman, is just that-a human made construction.

How can we be two completely different things at once? How can you see me as life, angelic and pure, and death with all of its dark curiosity; how can I be both of these things to you? How can our earth only be seen in the same light, as either the mother giving us life, or the vengeful and dangerous wrath of a mother? Why is sex, so often pushed onto women, seen as either a perfect or all-destroying energy to be harnessed? The female form, in all its glory, was not created to be dominated, divided, and abused by man. The female form was not created to abstain from, or give at any moment, sex. The earth is not simply here for our taking, and sex is not a tool for manipulation. I am a woman, and while you have taken something from me, I do not wish you harm. If harm comes to the top of our society, then it will trickle down to us all. But that is not to say that I do not wish harm upon that structure, the pollution within the minds of all of the people, which created my scars, which promotes this reign of terror.

I will have a son. I will cherish him, I will love him. And most importantly I will make sure that he is the kind of son who sees through all of the bullshit. My son will not rape the earth, he will not accept the “rights” given to him for his manhood, and he will not follow society’s unspoken rules. My son will grow into a man that changes the world by looking at it for what it is-a planet with no expectations, and the men on it with too many.

#ILS2215

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