CW: sexual assault, rape.
If you or anyone you care about needs help, call 800.656.HOPE (4673) — the National Sexual Assault Hotline. Free, confidential, and available 24/7, or chat at rainn.org/hotline.
If I were to write a story in which I was not harmed, I would write about the thunderstorm in Sydney when I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and stood for a very long time surrounded by images of the naked, violent body of photographer Julie Rrap. Her young-nude juxtaposing her old-nude. How I compared my stomach to each age of her and wondered if she knew I would do that. Later, in another gallery of another woman, I read a quote about memory and chronology. How memory is not structured in terms of dates, but by impact. Moments of significance ordering themselves regardless of their when’s and where’s, regardless of time passing through the bodies they inhabit.
In the story where I am not harmed, I might write about being fourteen in Germany, visiting a childhood friend the year after I had moved back to the states. The thin, animal quality of her fingers unwrapping then lighting a white packaged cigarette. As we crossed legs in the grass of a park along the Rhein behind my family’s old apartment, we played Channel Orange and talked about our first-steps into sex over the last year. It struck me like a needle–one where the nurse counts from five but goes on two–how beautiful my friend was. So unlike me, but there with me over anyone else. We stayed well into dark. My parents did not know where I was, and when I returned to our hotel late and smelling of tobacco, I learned they were preparing to report me missing. Later, I tried to explain in my fourteen year old vernacular that I had never been missing, just gone.
***
If I wrote a story in which you think I will be harmed and then am not, I could write about Sierra and I’s final night in Fairbanks. In the red dive bar, its U-shaped countertop where I beckoned two Alaskan boys to play pool with us. Maybe I would mention that, four years later, I return to this bar and the pool table is gone, and I can’t remember where it had sat before. Then move back to that night and how the Alaskan boys took us from the bar into a night that was colder than any night Sierra or I had ever touched, tucked us in the back of an old white pickup, and drove us into nothingness. Nobody in the world knew where we were but these two strangers. I wasn’t scheduled to arrive back in Tennessee for another twenty hours, and I wondered how long it would take for us to be reported missing. How much longer until we were found.
Up a mountain, out into the snow, and far away we saw the thin white glow of town. How quiet the snow made everything. One boy took Sierra, and one took me, and I sat with the boy who picked me as he held me against him on the powder under blankets, kissing just to kiss. I couldn’t see Sierra. Perhaps from the return of sobriety, I didn’t want to kiss the boy anymore, but now they had us back in the truck and now we were in their house and the lights were fluorescent and Sierra disappeared with her boy, and I touched the elk-skin on my boy’s bed before bringing him back downstairs. I sat on a pleather couch while he leaned into me. Thick brown hair, thick dark beard, tall, wider than the kinds of men I slept with. His hand against my collarbone when he said, “You don’t want this.” He made us coffee in the kitchen until Sierra returned happy and in love, and we were delivered safely to our hotel.
Would I add some flash? Four years later, the same couch sits in a different Alaskan house, a different man beside me. Wider than men I used to sleep with. I tell him I have been on this couch before. He tells me he wants me to move here.
***
What did not happen to me dozens of times does not negate the time it did. That story I have written plenty, but it always feels like court. Me versus the story he would write. Each dull, unpoetic detail vomiting itself on page after page. Scrambling for a chronology that doesn’t exist anymore. My recollection powerless, as I had been. I can’t tell it in order, can’t defend myself when telling it in pieces. He had blue eyes. That’s the only story I want to give him.
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If I wrote a story about escaping harm, it may feel like fiction, and in fact, it is. A story constructed around what could-have-but-ultimately-didn’t happen. The unknown outcome like a cat in a box, a missing girl, a gun hitched on a set wall–one that in theory, must go off.
I could write about the bathroom at Zinnie’s bar in Memphis. I walked into the single-stall with a man. His face misty in memory. Dismembered from the rest of him. I recall his hands, dark and dry. The bag of cocaine he claimed to have that was most obviously not cocaine when he pulled it from his jeans pocket–a hard, golf ball-sized bag of crystal shards. I swung myself to the door, struggled his dry, reaching hands from the lock, off my ass, and flung him back with more force than I’d known I had. When he hit the sink, the door opened to bright light like a scene change.
I might tell you that years later, a lawyer calls me about a rape that happened in that same bathroom. One I know nothing about, and all I can say to myself after we hang up is not my rape, not my rape. Would I conclude that I am congratulating myself on escaping what another girl did not?
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Earlier, when I said missing girl, did you imagine her unscathed?
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If I wrote a story devoid of harm, I’d write my solo road-trip across the American West where I got drunk alone in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Amarillo. I stared at the Golden Gate from my car and cried, mourning something. Two in the morning at a Santa Fe motel having drunk phone sex with an old coworker. Teenaged innocence of the reunion with my high school sweetheart in San Diego, making a fort from the blankets in my AirBnB as we binged Peaky Blinders. This trip constructed from seconds, moment to moment decisions. My twenty-two year old self unbridled by observation, villains, past. Chasing down harm each mile I drove, how harm nimbly evaded me every turn of my three-thousand mile trip.
For the story to be utterly devoid of harm, though, I would have to go further back. A time where harm was still hooded, shrouded in strangeness. A story of high school. My junior year starring role as Lady Macbeth. The thick red paint clumped in my hair, stiffened in my costume. The girls’ dressing room with all my closest friends as we tossed foundation and mascara and bralettes and socks to each other like orphans sharing scraps of prior lives. I took my shirt off in front of the mirror, briefly forgetting the oblong grey hickey across my breast planted there by my first ever girlfriend. How all the girls saw, and the room went quiet with understanding. I was changed. When we left the room, a few of the girls smiled and touched my arm. I felt so very grown up.
***
Writing about the absence of harm is a lot like describing a place you have never been. No matter how well researched, how many pictures you have seen, there is the element of fantasy. I remember what unharmed was the way you remember the fantastical series you read as a kid, in textures and ideas and images–the plot and relationships eroded by newer, more concrete memories.
I fantasize my body often. As thinner than it is, as more desired than it is, freer and richer than it is. I fantasize my body having sex while it lays in a bed alone, thousands of miles from who it has sex with. I think about how my body has been utilized in other’s fantasies. How, every once in a while, those fantasies are enacted on it without my choosing. I think about how I have been used in fantasy by people and in ways I won’t ever know. That fiction of what didn’t-but-could-have happened. The boxed cat. The prop gun. The still missing girl. This unharmed iteration of my body now, too, fantasy.
That missing girl could be run away to Italy, could be married and living in a small mountain cabin with all that she needs, could be dead and buried in the woods, but my missing girl? I know where she is, and that is not fantasy or fiction or absence. That is a bloody glove. That is a shovel of dirt. That is blue, dead eyes watching as they take her from me in grunts I still hear. I saw his blue eyes once more in a mural, a few months later outside my undergraduate college. This time on the face of our mascot–a tiger. I saw no difference in the mural-predator’s eyes and his.
***
I could be wrong about the absence of harm. Maybe that story is supposed to be about the ways a body has been loved. At Sierra’s wedding to the Alaskan boy who took us up the mountain, a groomsman–who I later learn now owns that couch I sat on when the man made me coffee while Sierra was falling in love–follows me outside after the reception to deconstruct the arch. The dark green zip ties I’d frantically attached earlier I now asked him to cut free. I turned my face up to his as he drapes a long strand of rose-gold plastic flowers over my neck and expected he would kiss me. He didn’t. He walked me back inside, untangling my hair from the polyester leaves. When we kiss months later, it is better than if it had happened drunk and in the dark.
It might be more like the story of me in the airport when I left him in Fairbanks to fly home the first time. Crying over our impending three month separation, heaving shoulders, my red face dry. An older woman approached me and asked, are you okay? I laughed at my melodrama. Yes, I said. Her grey eyes fixed on mine. No, are you okay? I understood then that she was addressing something. Something that has happened to all of us, sometimes right in plain sight, shrouded in its unknown. I felt the need to tell her, I’m sad to leave my boyfriend is all. Only then did she soften. Oh, she breathed out. I wanted to make sure no one here was hurting you.
***
In Sydney in the rainstorm where I watched Rrap etching her now-old body around and around in charcoal, the Go-Pros attached to her extremities lending the footage an edge of violence, her motion foreign, I thought about harm. Rrap is not in danger in the installation, but I sense in her a rage. In the adjacent room, I walked between photos of her young body taken forty years prior. Two opposing camera lenses capture her reflected in a mirror and her before a white canvas. It left me with the eerie feeling of standing with her, in front of her own nudity which she embraces obstinate and grotesque. Rrap’s installation is not sexual. I felt the images of Rrap brim with defiance. As if she had been thinking of violence, of harm as she pranced intransigent and nude through her Brooklyn studio.
I thought of my own body’s mapping. I wondered if the people who have touched me have felt that warm pooling of pain. If they have sensed the body they pressed into has once been a desecrated place. If my body has ever made another feel dirty. If they knew harm was no stranger here.
***
I meant it when I said the only story I wish to write him is one of blue eyes. That is all he gets here. His eyes unyielding, witness to every time I was not harmed. How easy I am to not harm.
***
On the pleather couch in Alaska, the one that two harmed-me’s have been on, I considered myself both times a missing girl. Once a runaway. Once an anchoress. In the fantasizing of my body, never have I been the missing girl dead and buried in the forest. I knew I would not be killed. My fantasy body is unaccompanied by pain. I wake from nightmares of blue–oceans brimming with thalassophobia, blood beneath a vein, eyes watching as they alter something once untouched–then wake. Somewhere else, dozens and dozens of times, I am being loved. It is tarred and thick and sweet as gun powder going off.
******
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