Insomniac's Journal

You are so silent,

You and your clanking, snapping, roaring aftershocks.

You are so buried,

You and your heavy, lurking, shadowy echoes

You are so harsh, and dark, and sharp, and blinding.

You are so fast, so rushed, so quick so loud so mad so strong.

You are so slow, prolonged, so heavy and sticky, your chains so rusted.

You cover my mouth and my eyes and my ears and my mind and my heart and my mind.

You steal away my memories and plague my mind with these fears, these dreams, these angry, angry whispers.

You break the mirror so that I cannot see myself,

You scream and shout so that I cannot hear my breath.

You are so callous, so cruel, so dark.

I wonder who you are, inside,

If you’re hurt and tired and lost, as I am.

But no, you’re too dark, to heavy, to present.

The silence would kill me.

Do you remember me?

It was so long ago that you stole my identity. So long ago that you committed your act of fraud, masking yourself as my friend before deciding that it was time for you to strip me of my dignity, my happiness, my comfort in the world.

If I asked you to, would you be able to remember what you did? What you took from me? Would you be able to tell me if it was intentional, if you had any clue what damage you would lay upon my body?

How many years ago was it that you responded to my “no” as if it had been a “yes?” Has it been four, maybe five? Do you remember what the weather was like that evening, what music we listened to, what things you made me do and told me I couldn’t do? I do. Do you remember what you put in our drinks? Or the way you laughed when I froze, confused as to why your lips were on mine when I had told you not to put them there? What about the things you forced me to sit witness to? The acts that you exposed me to, that you violated my mind with?

Do you know how truly empty I felt after that night? Do you know how I sat on the floor at four in the morning, terrified to close my eyes partially because of the nausea and then partially because I did not know if it was safe to close them? Do you know what a ghost of myself I had been in the months after that night, the way that I looked in the mirror and wondered who it was that was looking back at me? Do you know how you shattered me, how the cracks in my body and mind expanded and trembled and splintered like an almost-broken windshield? Do you know how drastically you have impaired my ability to feel, to love, to smile, to think? Do you know of the anxieties you have plagued me with, of the dreams I have at night where you are still here, of the relationships and loves that, because of you, I have let crumble?

Do you know the hold you have on me? The grip you have around my wrists and neck and tongue and mind and life?

We will always be our fathers’ “little girls,” our uncles’ innocent nieces, our grandfathers’ naive granddaughters. Our experiences in life -those of joy and of pain, of elation and of trauma- will always be disregarded and belittled in the simplest yet deepest of ways. Even some of the women in our families -the ones who have been so forcefully taught to accept their insignificance in a man’s world- will see us as “less than.” Our voices, often unheard, will carry little strength in a family tree that depends upon a masculine hand, but we must speak out or we will be silenced.

but I want the kind of love where I can cry,

where I can pout,

where I can whine or roll my eyes or speak without thinking.

I want the kind of love where I can be

apologetically me

instead of unapologetically scripted.

I want the kind of love where I don’t have to tip-toe through my thoughts,

where I can laugh and sing and shout without a hindered voice,

where I don’t have to wonder if it’s “okay” for me to speak and act without second-guessing myself,

where I don’t have to play a role in an attempt to be perfect and “good” and entirely conscientious.

I want to make mistakes,

I want to be the bad guy for once, but only for a moment,

before I apologize

and you forgive

and we accept each other’s flaws.

I want the kind of love where I am allowed to be myself,

To make mistakes,

To have flaws,

To act selfishly,

To speak,

Maybe if I had spoken up, you wouldn’t still have a hold on me. Maybe if I had told someone before it was too late, I wouldn’t have fallen apart so rapidly and so drastically. It has been years, and still the memories of that night haunt me. Perhaps it is not even the visual memories- perhaps it is the memory of the heaviness that had set in my gut, the confusion that had swarmed in my mind, the still, uncertain fear that had manifested my heart. Maybe what still holds me back is the fact that now -only now- do I know what you did to me.

To call it an “assault” feels selfish. To apply legal terms to such a broad, limitless term feels wrong and misleading and unpredictable. I know what it was, I know that I had not asked for it -that rather, I had opposed it- but oh, how much worse it could have been. I was not in physical danger, but the threat that you posed to and executed upon my mind was grave. The way your words and your actions and your forceful, selfish nature crippled my youthful perception of life and love and intimacy and grace... I cannot forgive it. I cannot even understand it. Am I weak for feeling affected? Selfish for feeling violated?

Can an assault, while only momentarily physical, be mental as well? The experiences which I was exposed to were animalistic and primal. New terms and sudden, forceful exposure violated my mind, left permanent scars in places no one can observe, places I am ashamed to make visible even to those I love and trust.

Tell me, when I one day come to trust someone enough to hold me, to explore my body, to look me in the eyes and move their body close to mine, will you enter my mind? Will that dark, confusing night of stripped will taint my mind forever? Will it taint experiences of loving, pure intention? Will it taint my future, just as it has tainted my past and my present? Will my body ever forgive me for letting you touch it, my mind ever forgive me for letting you invade it? You do not even know that you still have this suffocating, blinding hold over me, and yet somehow I still allow myself to ask, will you ever let me go?

I feel guilty for acknowledging my own trauma, for allowing you to have caused it. I feel foolish for knowing that all those years ago, I was not wise enough to follow my instincts, to leave before I even arrived. Why, as a child, was I so naïve? And why did I ever let you steal that from me? Perhaps if I had told someone, they could have told me that you were to blame for what happened. Perhaps if I had confided in one single soul, then it wouldn’t have taken until my adulthood to realize the truth in that night. Perhaps, if I had only expressed the disgust that I felt for myself for years, the confusion and fear that I felt, then I wouldn’t still be affected.

Sometimes I wonder what damaged me more: that night itself, or the years of silence which followed. Sometimes I wonder if I have a right to hate you -after all, you likely did not know how violently that night would affect my mind. We were both children and I, so foolishly, remained silent. Is it right for me to look at you as an enemy, to see you as the person who turned my life upside-down? I know, some nights, that what happened was not my fault -that I in no way asked for that trauma, for what you did. Yet, some nights, I feel that same sting of disgust, that same sting of fear when I imagine loving someone so intimately.

Tonight, I realize the gravity of your actions. I see you for what you are: selfish and driven by hunger, a sort of beast disguised in some domestic cloak. Tomorrow, I might find myself foolish. I might chastise myself for what I have felt, I might attempt to erase the effects of what you did. But tonight, I know. Tonight, the blame does not rest upon me.

I do not want to see with these tired eyes,

To speak with this empty voice,

To hear with this echoing mind.

I do not want to breathe with these paper-thin lungs,

To feel with this numb heart,

To hold with these calloused hands.

I do not want

To be

Me

Your slow collapse for his beating heart,

so lost in a black stagger.

A lonely sense of uninvited yearning,

elusive comfort turned to dust.

With hesitation flooding your breath

confess no hope,

no balance.

Forever a ghost of a touch will linger,

meaningless beneath your darkened veil.

Surrender away your silent existence.

Shut parted lips with some

broken fragment of empty romance,

of unknown grief,

of aching guilt.

Seek not your desires nor even your needs,