#collaborative writing projects

Disclaimer: I (@draksisreborn) own nothing but my OCs. Star Wars belongs to Lucasfilm and Disney. Many thanks to my fellow writer @zazabelle, who has been amazing as always and who also did the cover art and character designs for this project. Please review and critique this tribute to the characters of SW who are never spoken of, the ones who only wish to survive.

Rating: T (sci-fi violence and language)

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The fire, the smoke, the agony.

I couldn’t breath.

I couldn’t think.

I didn’t want to anymore.

The closet door had caved in on me during impact, I couldn’t tell if my vision had gone dark or if I was being smothered to death. There was blood coming out of me somewhere I could feel it. Gashes, bruises, blood, I didn’t want to move. My lips tried to open, they tried to make a sound come out of me, but nothing worked.

What do I do… What could I have done?

A COLLABORATION*

BY MEGAN MILKS

Best section by far. Melissa would bring the new issue [of Seventeen] to the bus stop every month, and we’d go straight to the Trauma-Ramas. The boys made fun of us but you know they loved it too. One time Eddie pulled me aside to ask what a wet fart was like it was some secret girl thing, and I had to make something up because I didn’t actually know! I guess the word ‘shart’ had yet to emerge in the popular lexicon. Anyway there was one [a wet fart] in each issue, usually ruining someone’s lavender prom dress. And there was an early period, and someone tripping and spilling soda all down their shirt so their bra was visible, and someone’s dad walking in on them shaving their crotch. The same ones every month, a humiliation machine. We loved being unimpressed too. Like oh, you walked into the volleyball net…and a boy saw it! Come on. We wanted the most humiliating things imaginable to happen to other girls. —S.J., 28

I think they really equalized us. I mean, I felt so awkward and gross all the time, a pimply blobfish floating the halls. The Trauma-Ramas were a relief. I wasn’t the only one who’d made eye contact with a cute boy and promptly fallen down the stairs. I wasn’t the only one who’d imagined Chad’s note for Stacey could actually be for me. All of the Staceys had done these things too. —M.T., 31

Of course they were all made up—by the staff writers if not the girls themselves. During sleepovers, we would stay up concocting the worst Trauma-Ramas that could ever happen. It’s funny, we totally knew the formula—some sort of bodily exposure or malfunction, a cute boy or “major hottie” to witness it, a humorous quip at the end—but we were so naïve and, well, uninventive that the best we could come up with was an orthodontics mishap that’s probably physically impossible during a sexual encounter that’s also pretty unlikely. It went something like: “I was with my husband in our hotel room on our wedding night. I was soooo nervous giving him a blowjob for the first time…and then his condom got stuck in my braces! Now every time I give my new husband a blowjob I’m” —wait for it—“braced for disaster.” —C.M., 28

This is an excellent distraction for a rainy Sunday! I’ve been pondering your e-mail in the back of my mind for the past few days, and really haven’t been able to come up with anything show-stoppingly/jaw-droppingly/gleefully good. But here’s something, for what it’s worth: When I was in grammar school, I was speaking with a classmate by the sinks in the bathroom, and was so engrossed in the conversation that I mindlessly attempted to follow her into a bathroom stall, upon which time I was called a lesbian. So for the longest time I thought being a lesbian meant a) not being cognizant of the natural end of a conversation or b) someone who liked watching people urinate. —A.D., 25

It was 1997. The first Lilith Fair. I was wandering the grounds and reveling in the queer camaraderie when I spotted the woman of my horny teenage dreams. She sat sobbing by herself on the edge of a fountain in the cobbled square where vendors were selling hemp yoni necklaces. She couldn’t have been more than 22, but I gotta say, it took some brass ovaries for a 16-year-old to do what I did next. I sat down next to her and asked what was wrong. I nodded, oozing concern, at the same time stroking her hand and shooting her bedroom eyes. Little did I know, I was also oozing something else. When it became clear the woman wasn’t the Sapphic sister I’d hoped, I gave her a lame little platonic hug and retreated back to our spot on the lawn. As I knelt down to sit, I caught a glimpse of my crotch. It was my “Moon Time”! The Goddess had summoned forth my womanly essence all over the back of my khakis. The stain was shaped roughly like Africa. Not exactly the smooth loverboy look I was going for! —G.S., 29

I was speeding on my way home because I was about to have diarrhea so bad, I mean really bad, any second, and of course I get pulled over. I stop and I yell at the cop, “I know I’m speeding, I gotta go shit! Follow me to my house!” So he does, and he parks in the driveway with the lights going and gets the paperwork started while I race inside. I take my shit and I come out, and he’s like “Hey...did you go to Gretchum High?” It was Rob, that guy from Spanish. —K.S., 33

So I come home from my first semester in college and I learn that my mom has found my private journal and read it, and she’s corraled the entire family into confronting me about my unholy perversity. My family is a family of God, and I had been journaling extensively about my repeated attempts at autofellatio. Awkward! … I confessed to substance abuse. Not only did this divert their attention away from my exciting masturbation life, it also provided my mother with something more palatable to moan about with her church friends. —C.A., 27

I went to Miami my first spring break in college. One night we were at a bar and I was chatting with a guy who bought me a drink. So I drank it. I started feeling woozy, so I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I was able to get my pants down and sit on the toilet but then I lost my ability to move. Something was seriously wrong. I couldn’t even move to get up off the toilet. After a while my friends found me and helped me up and sort of dragged me back to our hotel. I know, my bad for drinking a drink I didn’t buy myself. I’m just thankful I was smart enough to recognize something was wrong and get myself out of the situation before—you know, I don’t even want to think about it anymore. I wish I had a story about tampons or something. —L.F., 32

When I was 22 I was seeing this girl and every time we fucked she had a tampon in, which I felt was not right, but because I hadn’t had a lot of sex and she had, and because she was incommunicative and kind of scary, I decided to make sense of it in the way that we all make sense of things that don’t make sense, through rationalizing. Maybe she likes the feeling of getting fucked with a tampon in, maybe it extends the feel of the fingers, maybe she is an ejaculator and the tampon absorbs the mess. Then one night I encountered a tampon in her vagina and it was slimy and gross and I knew with horror that it must be always the same tampon. I stopped and asked her about it but she kept dismissing me, saying I was only feeling the powerful muscles of her cervix, so I shut up and kept fucking her. This happened the next night too. (She was really scary, you don’t understand.) Finally I couldn’t take it anymore, I was having nightmares about TSS, it had to stop. So the next time we were fucking I didn’t ask, just coaxed out the tampon as gently as I could. It came out soaked and shrunken and stinking of stale band-aids. We both stared at it, silent, until in one motion she jerked out of bed, scooped the lump from my hand, and ran shrieking into the bathroom to dispose of it. Of course she’d had no idea it was there, and who knows how long it had been there, and meanwhile I’d known about it for two weeks and hadn’t pressed the issue because I assumed I didn’t know anything. We were equally mortified, I think. —L.O., 26

Last summer I went to a queer dance party with my girlfriend, who can get a little insecure when we go out, because I’m very social and outgoing, and she’s reserved and prone to jealousy. It’s an ongoing problem that we’re both aware of. Anyway, we were all having a good time I thought. I was dancing with my friend Dara and just having fun and my girlfriend comes over drunk. She grabs my waist and slurs all this crazy shit about how I’m flirting with Dara and making a laughingstock out of her [my girlfriend] in front of everyone. I laughed because it was so ridiculous. Well, that just made her angrier and she hit me in the face. Obviously this does not fly in any space, but in a queer space, it’s particularly bad, because there has to be all this processing afterwards. The organizers made her leave and told me she wouldn’t be welcome there ever again and that they would make sure I felt safe there, which was cool of them. But then the next day they send out a message to the entire Facebook group of like 800 people, attempting to process the violence and to reaffirm their safe-space policy. So now everyone—and these are people I know—thinks I’m some battered woman who’s staying with a shithead who beats her up, which is not true, this was the first time anything like this had ever happened. And you know what, I love this person and she’s absolutely mortified by this moment, this one stupid mistake, and she’s apologized repeatedly and she’s agreed to go to couples counseling and take an anger management class and curb her drinking, all this stuff. But my friends are all judging me like I’m some passive victim who’s too weak and codependent to get out of my abusive relationship. It’s just like, aaaahhhhh! —J.B., 29

I had a bunch of friends over one night and my roommate was the only hetero in a group of lesbian- and queer-identified women and to her this meant she needed to adamantly assert her love of cock, mainly to be controversial. She just would not shut up about cocks—“real cocks, not the plastic kind.” It was getting annoying and finally she was just being outright insulting to us, saying crap like “you don’t know cock until you’ve tried it, ladies, really you don’t know what you’re missing,” as if none of us had ever fucked a cis dude before, and it was so dumb and I shouldn’t have taken the bait but finally I just told her to shut the fuck up, and she told me to shut the fuck up, and this went back and forth for a while, our voices rising and her getting aggressively in my face and then something went off in my brain and I hit her. I smacked her in the head in front of everyone and then I ran into the house embarrassed. —N.R., 27

Hey friend! I am excited about this project and looking forward to reading what you come up with, but not feeling up to excavating old humiliations right now. I know you and others find sharing cathartic and necessary, but I don’t deal with things similarly. —A.G., 38

There are two genres of embarrassing slash humiliating stories I could tell you—one that is kind of funny and does not reflect badly on me in any way—and the other that is actually embarrassing and lessens my social capital. So the ones I’ll tell you, you probably won’t find interesting enough to use. I don’t think I’ve experienced anything that I would call truly traumatic. —A.W., 30

Honestly, I have so many I don’t know where to start. Okay. So I had this boyfriend who said the weirdest things. Once after I got on all fours on his bed and he stood behind me and fucked me with his fingers, and after I’d come, and he’d come, and I’d come again, this time begging for more fingers, he smiled and said pleasantly, Mildly kinky, eh? Another time, and I don’t remember if it was before or after that, I had read about talking dirty in a book my friend gave me, so I was talking dirty to him while I rode him, and I was doing this baby voice, and flipping my hair around, and I thought I was definitely his fantasy right then, especially when I said, I love it when you make me c-c-come, and he (again) smiled and said pleasantly, Everyone enjoys sex. So I shut up and just kept bouncing. I think it was a different time, but same position, I was approaching my theatrical climax—which was good but not that good, but I wanted to be his fantasy—so I was trying to sound like a little girl but also knowing and experienced and in charge of my own sexuality but also all gaspy and awed and surprised, when I of course farted, this quacky little duck-call fart, and his eyes got all big. He didn’t have any grins or choice remarks about that one and it’s the kind of thing we should have laughed about, and normally I love to laugh about farts, but that time I was grateful he pretended it didn’t happen. —J.H., 28

Oh, wait. There’s more. The boyfriend before that was finger-fucking me once, and he suddenly stops, and I look up, and there’s this look on his face of absolute horror, like he’s just reached into the Cracker Jack box and gotten a fistful of vomit. What? I ask him, and I’m kind of terrified, because what could make him look like that, there must be something pretty wrong, do I have herpes? and he doesn’t say anything, but he shows me his fingers, which have some brownish goop on them. I figure I must be spotting—it’s at the very very end of my period—and he doesn't know what that is, so I have to explain THAT to him as well, and he basically doesn’t accept it. This should not be happening, he says. Then he says, Can’t you just squat down and shake it out? I really can’t get him to see that it doesn’t work like that, and he goes to wash his hand, with soap and great personal offense. Months later he says to me, Remember the time there was all that old brown blood trapped in your vagina? This same boyfriend, I got pregnant with him, and he was pro-life (or whatever it’s fucking called) so he wouldn’t come with me to the clinic or take me to the hospital when I had a bad reaction to the anti-nausea drug they gave me but he definitely did not want me to have the baby, but sometimes he would poke my belly and say, Baby in there. I know it sounds like I’m trashing him, but the real joke is on me, because I was dumb enough to get pregnant a second time with this guy, deny it, wait for him to figure it out and dump me, have the abortion (uh-gain) by myself, make chitchat with the abortion doctor while she vacuumed out my insides, chitchat about a creepy professor of mine she knew from the gym, someone she considered a close personal friend, someone who whipped his shirt off in front of boys he liked during office hours and propositioned the head of the department, made chitchat with the doctor while staring at a goddamn inspirational poster with a picture of a hot air balloon on it and some bullshit about “there are no mistakes,” made chitchat until it really began to feel like I was being raped by this thing vacuuming me out because I felt it displacing my organs and pummeling my belly sick the way it happened when I had actually been raped, on a weird pseudo-date, the year before, and that’s the point when I stopped making chitchat and yelled at her to stop it right now, just stop it please, and she said OK, and she did stop. This same ex-boyfriend said he was against lesbianism because his sister had OCD and mentioning lesbians or things lesbian-ish triggered her. And I told this guy I loved him, a bunch of times. —J.H., 28

There’s not one event. It’s this shapeless ghost that travels with me, and it takes forms in all kinds of ways and when I least expect it. There are triggers, yeah, but sometimes I can’t predict them. And often I have to do the work of reassuring whoever I’m with that it wasn’t them, it was just this thing that happens sometimes. It’s this whole cycle. Like, I could contribute to your piece but I probably couldn’t read it without going down multiple bad head trips. —S.M., 27 

I was on the train going home, minding my own business listening to my iPod and looking out the window considering whether to make quinoa salad or a veggie burger for dinner and suddenly this dude’s hand’s between my legs. I was too shocked to  move or say anything and I just sat there for a long while, not breathing, not protesting, not stopping it in any way, not looking at him, not looking at his hand, in total denial that this was happening, instead fixating on the comforting whine of Taylor Swift and the hair of the person in front of me, which was long and dark and draped over the back of the seat with one strand hanging loose from the rest. I wanted to reach out and pull that strand, it was all I could focus on. Then the bell for the doors rang and snapped me out of it and I got up and pushed past him to get off the train. When I told my friends later they made a big thing out of it and I shrugged it off, no big deal. But it was. —B.Y., 26

I think that having it fictionalized or not quite right is almost more hurtful than sharing it with people. And it’s also almost more hurtful if were anonymous and not attributed to me. Because I own it. You know? And that’s the hardest thing. I own it and it took a long time to own it, to acknowledge it. Even just acknowledging that these things happened to me, that took years. And it’s not just me who was affected. Getting a reputation in high school, that’s not just me who had to deal with it, I have a younger brother and sister who had to live with that too. I guess I’ve always thought that I would do something good with it. Like work at Planned Parenthood and tell girls who want to have an abortion it is okay. Tell girls who have been raped that they are somebody. They will become themselves. I know you’re an artist and you can do whatever you want but I don’t know. This is mine. —J.D., 32

A former partner of mine had a really brutal experience as a kid that she wouldn’t tell me about. I mean she would occasionally refer to it to explain certain reactions to things but she wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened. Even though I knew it was a bad experience that she didn’t want to relive, I was a little loopy one night, maybe a little drunk, and I made it into a silly game, like I was trying to get her to share some juicy but benign secret, like who’s-your-crush, tell-me-tell-me. What-was-it-what-happened-can-I-guess-if-I-guess-right-will-you-tell-me, I went in a singsong voice, like it was fun. I’m so ashamed. She tolerated me for a few minutes with what I realize now was an embarrassed smile, embarrassed for me, I mean, and then she looked me straight in the face and said, firmly, No. —H.P., 28

_______________________________________________________________

*Some of these narratives are based on or were influenced by my conversations with others about their experiences; some have been written by those who experienced them; some are found; many are fictionalized; all have been anonymized and edited.

◊ This project lives on at http://traumaramaproject.tumblr.com. Please consider contributing!

_______________________________________________________________