It's Only Logical: A Sexual Trauma Memoir

My eyes appear in the dark, the jade encircling the noir. I maul an idea until I notice a rhythm, a pattern. My pupils focus; I see the downward motion—pushing, pulling, biting, I throw my head back, hands down, unleashing a compact bliss. My own depth darts to me, moving toward the French doors, looking for leaves that sway until the incapacitating winter. The wheat bristles wave and the leaves shake me. My mind runs to something banal as my hand runs down my body; my skin awakens. The twilight air flows in, and my mind, awake, turns toward my heart, inducing an anxious bliss that wakes me up and simultaneously kills me. To breathe at once into consciousness, an anxious flush makes way through nervous bundles and the axonal abyss, shooting stars into my heart. This rush is a shock that tumbles me into the darkness, into the woods and looking at myself while looking at everything else. The waking are startled in a hunt for green, seeking a letter that lost itself on its way to me. Like the purloined letter, I remain unaware of the message’s contents.

In cooperation with my own mind, my past has amalgamated my future to make all of this for me. Lately, I only perceive darkness. The days pulse toward me until my life is severed, then reformed against my will. I am missing the delete key. I imagine inside an afternoon the entire world, reframed in my own image, and it so closely resembles my own mind. When I do this, my world collapses inward while my mind races to consider the life that prevents me from sleeping and wakes me up at night. I cannot keep up—I never will. My basic parts intact, I am possessed by internal images that last a lifetime. I see myself from my father’s eyes, but I am repulsed by myself and my body at every stage. I am an investment, able to be abused in covert ways and taken over in spirit. I know what to do in this instant. I know how my body pulsates. Ridden with anxiety and drenched by the primal violence implanted within me, these violent awakenings are my only peace.

I wake up to an unexpected retake of winter in the Spring, snow scattering over growing shoots. I do a double-take, freezing mid-frame. In the past few days it has dawned on me—I need to take back what my father has stolen. I have been combed to one side like parted hair—groomed. I have to make what is unbalanced, balanced--what is uneven, even. So I imagine power overcoming him instead. This is the person who deserves my wrath. I do not believe in death. I believe in life. I believe in freedom. I do believe in love.

I fantasize about him to satisfy myself, making claim to urges stolen from me mid-sentence, first as an adolescent and then as an adult, taking over his fantasies of violence which engender my power to rewrite the narrative. What prevents my climax with my ex-girlfriend in college is precisely the frame I have of my father, so I face him head on. He is the actual person who deserves a “fuck you,” and so I come to the top of the tall, tan cliff, grabbing rock by rock, pushing my body up over woven tree roots until I reach the top, scraping my face as I go. Even while climbing, scree tumbles down the mountainside as I clamor to get to the top. This is the only way I can stop the habit of scarring myself. I momentarily look to the chasm beneath my eyes. I wish it had never looked up at me in that way.

And then I jump. Deep pulses explode in the right direction. Viscerally, I feel him inside of me—the way my body wanted when I was sixteen. He is next to me in my bed; I am next to and playing from my backside with his particular biology. I picture him every which way, handsome to disgraced. He has tied me up, forcing himself upon me, grabbing my neck, hands behind my back and rocking my body into its deepest recesses. This is the reality that must be fully faced before something else may fully begin. I don’t want to do this at all, but I reach into the deep again and again until my body has had enough, until the waves become shivers and hunger sets in. I have to substitute a fantasy in order to fulfill the logical framework upon which my character rests.

Afterwards there is healing. There are the visceral afterglows and I can feel what I have just done to myself. But I am also attuned to the power I have just taken back. His control, while seemingly infinite, is also mine—mis-shapen clay, poorly thrown to the potter’s wheel, then scraped off, bits and pieces landing in buckets. The clay can be salvaged. The accidental sculpture within bursts into daylight--an unending stream of river strides quickly gliding down mountain sides and into the valley’s retreat, freezing mid-stream in the wintertime away from prying eyes.