Obscene and Obscure

On a molecular level things never really touch, they are repulsed just before meeting thrown out of each other’s orbits. He never really touched me.

Every bit of skin that he didn’t touch is gone and replaced and new.

Consciousness is the emergent property of electrical synapses of an ordered system of nerves that are sustained by the meat they’re housed in, I am a series of small shocks and neurotransmitters, I am not my body, no one has ever touched me just my body and I am not my body. I am not my body.

These things don’t really help.

I am a rabbit and his hands are a snare

I am a rabbit inside a rabbit inside a snare, watching myself twitch like I am already dead

I am a stillness pooling inside a still beating body I am frozen in his hands

I forget to struggle

My silence is a snare and I am a rabbit and I am screaming

I can’t even hear it myself

I tell myself that someday I’ll stop writing metaphors about sexual assault and write about sexual assault.

Like

I am twelve and the boys in my class sneak up behind me, poke me in the sides and when I cry out they say “That’s your sex noise” like sex is the same as a surprise and discomfort like since I grew tits I became a performance

I train myself to cut off my surprise to cut off my skin so that when they sneak up behind me and jab at me I am silent. And years later when I have sex I am silent. Like if I make a noise I separate into layers and the one in the back says, you’re just doing it for attention. Like I wanted the attention. I shut up.

Like

I am sixteen and the boy I kiss for the first time drags his hand across my chest in a park and says I can’t wait to see the rest of you, hungry, and I am suddenly conscious of my push up bra like a performance that won’t hold up, and I am silent like I’ve agreed to something that wasn’t a question

Like

I am eighteen and this boy is so honored I’m a virgin and I don’t understand why and don’t have enough of myself to wonder why I feel all this distance. When we kiss on his bed he grabs my wrist and holds my hand to his dick to feel it through his underwear. I stand up and go to his bathroom and wash my hands with soap, and wash them again, and wash them to my elbows, then up to my shoulders. When his dad and brother assume we had sex he lets them, and when they assume we’re dating he lets them, and I fill myself with silence.

Like

I am seven and on a school bus, reading. There is so much laughing. It is so loud. When I look up the boy next to me has his pants pulled down. The older boys are laughing. They tell him “Put your penis in her mouth.” They are all laughing. When I run he tangles his hand in my hair. I kick him.