I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m never going to catch it, because there is no it.

It’s some very Buddhist thing Sam said to me today about something unrelated to me.  Despite that, I quietly argued with myself about the potential application of this phrase to my own life, all as I criticized a poem, breaking up its thoughts and words and lines to construct or discover pure meaning, moving things around as I saw fit to mark with my red pen.  By the time I had analyzed the poem, my eyes had grown tired.  I read Sam’s Buddhist sentence, typed across my laptop screen, “I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m never going to catch him.”  I stopped immediately, knowing I had made an error, fearing it was a Freudian slip.  I meant, “it.”

Sam was talking to me about something, and I hadn’t been paying attention, too self-involved again.  I struggled to pay attention before I finally asked him, nicely, to be quiet.  It’s sometimes better not to pretend.

“Alright,” he said, with a loving smile.  “But why don’t you write about something happy today?  Count your blessings kind of thing.”

Because I tend to take his suggestions seriously, here goes:

In 2009, I…

I graduated college.  My Dad talked to me respectfully, and everyone seemed less threatening.

I started a new job with healthcare benefits.

I finally brought home the pet I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.

I solidified a life in which I feel absolutely confident and safe.

Wow.  I’m taking deep breaths, I feel so much better after writing that out.  It’s not always that easy to crawl up and out of those dark tunnels in my mind.  Even now, I’m very near to falling back in.  Down there, hope seems ridiculous, an unattainable and dangerous goal I’m not to think of if I want to keep my sanity.  There’s only the here and now.

I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m never going to catch it, because there is no it.

With that in mind, I can’t deny, I’m not comfortable with the fact I’m never going to catch him nor that there is no him.  Andy is an icon, a symbol.  Symbols can’t be destroyed, only forgotten or re-imagined.  I don’t know how to do either of those things to the memories in my head.  On a conscious level, I’m at peace with what happened to me.  Unconsciously, there’s a dark creature ravaging me at all hours of the day and night.  I can’t make him stop.  So often, it’s me, tearing at my own clothes, hurting myself.  How do I stop the it that’s him and me at once?

That’s always the question, isn’t it: how do I stop myself?

I can’t hold back.

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Another night.  It doesn’t seem to ever let up.

At work, to keep my mood up, I typed my emails standing up.

At home, there are no such distractions.  Music is a nuisance.  TV can only distract me for so long.  I would read, because that would do it, but—I don’t know.  I can’t keep my focus.  I can’t get past a sentence.  I can’t get past a word—sometimes.  My mind halts and jumps and trips and falls back.  I keep it together at work because I have to.  That’s money.  I need that.  And I have a drive to impress, a relentless drive to accomplish and achieve above and beyond those around me.  I have to prove that I’m as smart as I think I am.  I have to prove that I can work smarter, faster than them.  If I don’t, if I can’t, then I’m a failure—even if I’ve proven to just be normal.

To me, normal is failure.  I don’t want to be normal.  There is no part of my life that I will accept as normal.  The very word comes out as a scoff with a hint of bile behind it.  Normal people seem so pathetic, like content impotents.  They might as well not have the organ that could furnish their lives with such pleasure.  Mental eunichs.

See?  My focus is lost.  I’ve strayed from the point, a lousy habit I feel has begun to become a staple of my posts.  It’s not something I’m happy about, this struggle for coherency.  I place such value on words.  I see nuance in the very shape of them.  Yet lately, I’m—stuttering.  Yes.  I get stuck on an idea, and I beat it to death until you tire of it, and I tire of it, and my sentences tire of it, too.  I perceive the flow is like that of a broken faucet: inconsistent, annoying, unsatisfying.

I want to tell myself it’s my depression talking, but I can’t tell the difference anymore between what’s real and what’s in my head.  It all sounds so damn plausible, so convincing.  My intelligence, my obsessive tendencies, and my ego are playing tricks on me.

The Clonazepam quells my anxiety.  What of the insanity I fear?  What of the memories I recall too well?  Is there a drug for that?

Marijuana, but it’s illegal.  So I’ll just keep crying into my boyfriend’s arms.

Whatever.  I’m tired.  Just as I think I’ve begun to deal with my pain, more rises to the surface.  I see no end to this: crying uncontrollably into a pillow, feeling exactly what I felt when he whispered to me.  Can you imagine what it feels like to be anally raped so violently, every stroke makes you wonder if your entrails can come out that way?

Just another night.

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Fuck

The word forces one long and frustrated shove of air from your throat.  From the moment your teeth press down on the meatiest part of your lower lip, gently biting the soft, pink skin, to the rise and collapse of your tongue against the back of your throat: you finally release the trapped air in a show of endurance.  The word fucks me, as it should.

I miss writing poetry.  My old high school teacher emailed me a few weeks ago and begged me not to give it up.  I’ve thought about that for weeks now.  She felt so strongly about it.  I couldn’t believe I had ever created something someone could feel strongly about.  Normally, I would have dismissed it as an anomaly, but people’s messages and emails to me refuse to let me dismiss her—or myself, for that matter.

But the above “Fuck” is the best I mustered.  In my opinion, it isn’t bad.  I used to sexualize language when I was still very much enthralled with it, so I need to fall in love with it again in much the same, again.  So far, over these last few months on this site, I’ve discovered we can be friends.  It’s faithful and reliable.  It’ll go where I go.  Now, it’s time to trust myself with it, to give myself to it once more.  “Fuck” was all I could do today.  It was a crass, adolescent move filled with fantasies of love and harmony.  In reality, there’s sweat and slapping sounds.  I’ve got to get there with my poetry, much as I have with my prose.

This is my first poem in years, an impromptu performance, but I invite you, for my own good, to tear it morpheme by morpheme in the comment section below:

the walls die without
collapsing but
I’m not built
that way

so he
lifts me
saves saves. no
i say

i say to him no
more of me to save

no
more
he says

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Yes, yes. I know I owe you more about the dream. But perhaps I don’t. Perhaps the dream was just a precursor to what happened last night, the reason I didn’t post anything yesterday.

I smoked medical grade weed from Cali last night, a gift from a friend. I take one hit, and I’m high. But this is a different high than ever before. It’s smooth. I don’t even feel high, except there’s something different to the world now, an ethereal haze from which I never want to get out.

Sang and my boyfriend are talking. Sam–Brw wants to be called Sam from now on–says something that pisses Sang off. Sam’s being offensive, Sang as being defensive, and I’m being asked to side. An argument I had with Sam earlier in the day–something about me always siding with Sang–led me to realize I was afraid to disagree with Sang. I’m afraid because he’s a man. This man I love in a different but equal way as my boyfriend: I’m afraid of him. The realization was still with me when they asked me to pick sides. I side with my boyfriend; I disagreed with Sang. The fear killed me. As I said the words that declared my position, I fell away. Or rather, the world fell away from me. I was somewhere else, staring at a small floor fan whirring its cold air at me. I watched the blades turn and turn and turn. Its whirring silenced everything else. And I was gone.

What emerged, I’m told, was over two hours of raw, ugly confession. I remember some of it. What I remember is painful. I begged Andy from the dorms to stop. I begged him for months, and for months he said I had made him that way. Then, right before Christmas break, after three months of brutal violation, he promises things will be different when I come back from visiting my family. I come back at the end of January. We had talked about this, in the interim, everyday over the phone. He was going to stop. I was so happy, so hopeful. We have sex at my return, and he isn’t forceful or cruel. I’m actually involved in it for the first time in a long time.

That lasts ten days. At the very beginning of February, he rapes me. I cry and beg him why.

“Sometimes I have to. It’s in me now. You put this is in me, and now I need it.”

I agreed he could continue to rape me on the very rare occasions. [I didn’t remember that before last night. I agreed to let him rape me as long as it wasn’t too often. I remember bargaining with him about how often was rare! I’m horrified I thought so little of myself. I’m horrified in a way that grips my heart and my throat and won’t let go. I can’t believe I ever thought this man, to whom I wasn’t even attracted, toward whom I felt revulsion, was the best I could do. I was settling, and he knew it. He said he knew it, that I could do better. But that seemed to fire the rage he felt toward me. That seemed to make the raping more sadistic. So I stifled a similar perception of my possible worth. I felt guilty about it. And so when “rare” became every day, multiple times a day, I only weakly protested. My thoughts about what he was doing to me were irrelevant.

Until I collapsed during intermission of a play I was acting in. I had been thinking about new and potentially more effective ways to try to break up with him when I fainted. I was waiting for the play to run its course, as he was in the play with me. I didn’t want to make a hard situation even harder by having to face him during rehearsals. Nothing good, I knew, could come from him seeing me every day after I reject him. But screaming backstage at the top of my lungs, “get this off me,” as I desperately snatch at my costume—hoop skirt and a corset—forced me to notice how near the precipice I actually was.

I made sure, the last time he raped me, to fight him as hard as I possibly could—to say “no” clearly—to tell him, with unmistakeable clarity of phrasing and tone, “this is not what I want, nor has it ever been,” to which I was told “fuck you.” I did this to make certain it was indeed rape. I did it because I still doubted my perception.

I WAS RAPED! For the love of god, I was raped. I was raped. I was raped. How does a person get over that? How do I begin to heal when last night was the first time in four years I admitted out loud–to men, no less–that I had agreed to let him rape me. I had thought that little of myself.

And then I yelled at my boyfriend, screamed at the top of my lungs, that I hated him, that I hate it that he can’t hold it together sometimes, that he can’t be there for me sometimes, that he can’t deal with his depression and pain as silently as I do.

None of what I was yelling at him was true. I do get irked when he’s too depressed to help me do something, even if it’s as simple as the laundry, but I don’t hate. I never hate him. I was just angry. And because any expression of anger, in my family, always resulted in getting struck several times by a belt or a flip-flop or a hand across the legs and butt, I don’t express anger. Ever. Especially to men. I’m uncomfortable with it. So anger feels vile, like hatred would.

That self-disgust and perceived hatred triggered my panic attack. Hearing Sam and Sang bickering, the two men in this world, other than my father and brother, for whom I care the most, set me off. What’s worse is they were asking me to side. I was already angry at them for fighting, and now they forcing me to stand up to a man, whomever I choose.

I was angry and I was afraid, so afraid that they were angry at all. An angry man literally tortures me with the expression of his emotion, with the knowledge that there’s that build up inside of him. I will defile and hurt myself, do anything, to keep a man from becoming angry. That’s how afraid I am of an angry man. And here, for the first time in my life, I had two. My life, I felt, was falling apart. I hid in the world the fan spun for me.

A world, the other day’s dream told me, where my brother could be a rapist. Now seventeen, he could do that to a girl, make her feel insignificant and afraid with just a look, just a gesture. He has a penis. He has desires. He can rape someone now.

That frightens me more than I can stand. My brother is not a rapist, nor do I believe he’s intellectually or emotionally capable of doing that to a person. But men don’t know. Men don’t know how they make us feel when they desire us, when they lust so openly, as they so often do. Nor what they do with their words when they call us bitches and cunts. That anger and the knowledge of their lust for us combines in my mind into a rape, sending me into a frightening panic as I remember how dangerous that mix is.

I start to think, who does these terrible things to a human being? And why? Why? Who did these terrible things to me? Where is that dark place? There it is. There it is. In the fan. In its blades. Watch it turn, disappearing into itself. Running so fast, I can feel on my skin the force of its motion. I’ve run so fast I can feel the wind break against my skin. I’ve run so hard, so fast, for nothing. I hate them for making me do that.

I scream at Sam some more after I stop hyperventilating. My lungs hurt from the air. I can’t breathe through my nose, you asshole, I think as Sam suggests this idea. I can’t do anything. Every muscle in my body is tense. Every muscle is shaking. I can’t stop. I can’t stop it the memories, the thoughts from coming. I’m—I’m—I’m—

I calm down, but it only lasts a half of a minute, maybe less. I start to hyperventilate again. And I start talking, rocking back and forth and talking, loud enough for others to hear, but it doesn’t matter who is listening. I wish Sang and Sam weren’t so near. I wish I was in a dark, warm place.

I realize my mother trained me to be afraid of men by constantly telling my sisters and me that she would never leave us in a room alone with any man, not even our father. She tells us that we shouldn’t let him kiss us on the mouth, as is a custom in most Hispanic cultures. That it’s wrong. That it’s dirty. That he’s wrong. That he’s doing something dirty. He’s doing something inappropriate with us. My little girl mind understood enough to be scared of him.

I realize, I had been thanking my luck for years because no rape had impregnated me. Yet when I look back, I realize what Andy, the will-be lawyer, did to me when he threw me on my back and came inside me. Certainly, the knowledge of what that really is, that it’s rape, had been with me for some months. It was Sam who had presented the idea to me, and I had accepted it, but I had never considered it, and I had never dealt with that.

Until last night, high, for the first time, from medical grade marijuana. No one can ever again tell me weed is bad for me. Perhaps for some, those who use it as an escape, but this chemical took me deeper than I’ve ever been. It dropped my defenses, led me to self-hypnotize, and I remembered the things I’ve been telling you for months that I couldn’t. Today, I awoke, and I feel like shit, but goddamn do I feel lighter. The disgusting things, for four years, I’ve been crawling into my closet and under my bed to hide from: like poison, I had to vomit in order to start healing. I’ve been nauseous from that poison my entire life. Last night, I upheaved it all. My throat is sore and I’m exhausted, but I’ve had a breakthrough. I told my boyfriend and one of my best friends the darkest, ugliest things I’ve ever thought and experienced, and they stared, quietly, respectfully, lovingly, while I did it. Then they embraced me with words of comfort, gave me a Xanax, and settled their argument with honesty. I apologize profusely for the over two hour panic attack they just sat through.

“No. Don’t apologize,” they say. “That was more important than anything we were talking about.”

“Now we have to talk about something real,” they say.

They whisper to each other while I sleep a dead sleep on my couch. They tell me today I was and am beautiful to witness, that they love me, and that they will always listen and protect me.

Then they told me a few hard truths. But I’ve said so much already. I don’t want to overburden you. Later. Later. There’s time. I know that now. There was time to experience it. It’s going to take much more time to get over it. I was tortured. I’ve literally suffered torture my entire life. My parents are no exception: the people who were supposed to love and protect me tortured me instead. I’m 22, and I’ve just come to terms with the reality of what I’ve lived. Yes, indeed, there’s time.

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Please don’t hurt me. I’ve been through enough. It hurts all over, a writhing ache under my skin, in the muscle tissue, the veins. I want to bleed myself, dry its river out so it can’t go deeper. Fuck! I just want it out. Get it out of me. Please. Please. It hurts like hell. I can’t breathe with this in me. It’s going deeper. It won’t come out. Like a leech. It’s got it’s teeth in me and no matter how hard I pull it, it won’t release.

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Too ill tonight. Maybe a fever; no words.

Offer me some words. I like to listen.

::cough::

It makes me feel useful.

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My father is a good man. I mean, he’s got his flaws. He’s a solopsist, making every situation about him. The family goes to a party at my mother’s “best friend’s” house. I’m maybe nine. My parents automatically push my sisters and me toward the other children, but the children are closer to my sisters’ ages. I’m too little, I don’t know how to ride a bike, and I don’t want to learn. But I brought a book with me. So no worries. I go inside, sit on the couch next to a table lamp, and I disappear into myself, into the book. Then I feel my world slip from my hands, and I watch it fly across the room. In that moment, time stops and my mind’s eye watches each page flap and flutter before a loud thump ends it all; freedom, and then nothing. A book on the floor.

It’s only then that I begin to wonder what just happened. I look from the book, follow its trail back to my lap, and then suddenly, in the playback of my memory, I recall a hand, very much like my father’s. I look up, and he’s towering over me. He’s angry, I see. And already yelling. My mind catches up.

Did he just call me abnormal in Spanish? I can’t believe what I’m seeing, the rage and disgust in his smile and his voice and his wild motions. Like a gorilla to this little body I’m inside.

And he says I’m todo alrebe, all backwards. I embarrass him.

Good. I’m glad I embarrassed him. That was the only recourse for a little girl like me, to be me always. In those seconds, if at no other time, was born a writer. Writing became a middle finger at my father. I’m not saying he made me better for his abuse: that would be a level of self-denial I’ve long since risen above. I’m saying, these little moments of abuse define me, and I like me. So I can’t feel bad about that anymore. What good is there in holding all that spite against him? He’s just a little boy who was himself parentified. And when it was his turn to be a father, that’s all he knew to do. He mimicked his father in ways he isn’t even fully conscious of, ways he’ll never be conscious of. He’s sad. Not pathetic, but like so many lives, a disappointment to the one who lived it.

He’d mess up, and he’d learn from it. But that doesn’t mean the damage was undone because he learned his lesson. To make matters worse, some lessons never stuck. So he’s not off the hook completely. I blame only him for not addressing those faults more effectively.

But see how fair of a picture that is of him? Do you see the evenness of my perception now? He has his good parts, but he also has his bad. In short, he’s human. I finally accepted my father’s humanity. Is this a common thing to experience? I mean, plenty of movies portray the moment a kid finds out their father is an asshole, but are there an equal many movies that portray the moment where a kid understands Dad isn’t a prick; he’s just Willy Loman, doing all he can with the limitations set by his prejudices.

So now I suddenly have the skill to hold a conversation with him. We’ve been getting along a lot better since I stopped thinking he’s a prick. Last time we spoke, he talked to me as one adult does to another. He’s always been straight with his children, but I think I’m finally old enough to understand he’s not being a prick. He’s just fucked up

–like everyone else.

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I spent over three hours cleaning the apartment. By the time he walked through the door, I was exhausted. I was so quiet, he asked me if I was mad at him. I assured him I was just tired.

Then the bitterness hit me, the resentment from having spent so much time cleaning when he’s the one on vacation. He couldn’t at least wash the dishes and keep up with the garbage? He couldn’t go out and get some groceries? He couldn’t cook a damn meal?! The kitchen is his only job, and it’s looked like a mess for two weeks. He couldn’t find the time between writing and lounging to clean?!

This had been building in me for two weeks.

But I was calm. I said, “Baby, I really need more help with the cleaning.”

He looks at me with incredulity in his eyes. I’m ready for it, whatever it is. “Who do you want us to be?! You have to make a choice. Do you want to have a life of creativity and thought or do you want an immaculate home? And you can’t have both,” he argues.

I vehemently argue that I can have both. I tell him that I just can’t do it by myself. He lives here too.

He wasn’t accepting it. I wasn’t giving up. So he got condescending: “You don’t think that maybe the reason you are so obsessive about having a clean house is because that’s part of your mental illness, that maybe you’re low-level OCD?”

There it was: the vile poison of self-doubt began invading my senses. But instead of immediately turning that self-doubt into myself, I first question the source. I assess his treatment of others and decide, “You’re manipulative. I am too, but I never mean to be, and when I find myself doing it, I apologize. You should too, and you’re being manipulative right now.”

He continues to argue with me, but I can’t hear anymore. I’m too afraid of the possibility that he’ll convince me to doubt myself. I escape into the shower mid-conversation. I know he’s going to be pissed I walked away from him while he was talking to me, but fuck him. He’s an asshole.

I’m in the shower and I’m having a nervous breakdown making the argument on either side of the question, is my boyfriend another manipulator.

And then the shower curtain moves. He peaks his head in sheepishly. “Can I come in?”

I’m so tired, I say yes. He steps in, wraps his arm around my waist, and pulls me close. “I’m sorry,” he says into my hair. “You were right and I was wrong. I get scared of schedules because I fear being controlled. I know that’s not what you’re doing, so I was wrong.”

The air finally leaves my lungs. I hadn’t even realized I was holding it in. I pull him closer, hating that I ever doubted him. He’s right: I’m still afraid to trust him. Now my heart’s a little broken, and I’ve done the damage. What do I do with this? What do I do with myself? My boyfriend is not a bad man–not even close. So I have to wonder, can I even have a healthy relationship with a man given my experiences?

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I miss her. I hate that I miss her. I hate that I didn’t even mourn my relationship with Jacob as much as I’m mourning this one. I guess it’s because, as stupid and crazy as it sounds, I saw who she was, understood her motives and her desires. I wanted to help her. I wanted to watch her come to believe in her own strength. I wanted to go to bed every night knowing she was okay. I wanted her to be in my bed with me.

Ugh. Who even cares?! I’m whining! I need a distraction, a nice girl whose smart, les or bi, and a good conversationalist. I’d like her short and I’d like her ambitious, but I want her playful, too. Maybe I’ll go into the village next weekend to get a few numbers, invite Leopard Fur to come along. He always tells it to me straight and I appreciate that, so maybe he could cut through this malaise with his witty truths.

And maybe I could do the same for him. I feel like I’m not much use to anyone right now and that sucks. I’m nothing if I’m not useful. I mean that literally. I derive a lot of my joy from being useful to someone, but those to whom I could be of use, I can’t seem to help. So what’s left?

“Myself,” my therapist would say. And I’d laugh. I’m useful to myself, sure. But I’m nothing if not useful. Which is probably why I’m shutting off lately, probably why I’ve bee so cold: I gave her my all, but I failed to be useful to her, to Clara. And I don’t know why. I don’t know what I did that was so wrong. Did I push too hard? She says I did. Maybe I did. Maybe I’m just an emotional bully so bent on saving her, I never asked her if she wanted to be saved. She always did say she liked to go at her own pace. I guess I was so afraid she was going to fall off the ledge any second, I stupidly tried to yank her down. She tugged back and, in that, I made her that much more unbalanced.

I wish I could tell her I’m sorry for tugging. I wish I had never pulled at all. Oh, the things I’d do differently with her.

I miss her. I loved her, mess and all. But I was proud. To think I understood what she needed more than she understood herself! The vanity of that presumption eclipses all my good intentions. Clearly. I lost her. I failed.

And now I miss her. I don’t have the right.

These cycles. Everywhere these goddamn cycles. They keep me spinning so fast, I can’t see when I’m about to fall. Am I spinning right now? I think things are becoming clearer the more I write, but now I have to doubt that.

Clara was wrong about one thing: every turn she took was not the wrong one. And every turn I take isn’t the wrong one. It’s just the same goddamn wrong turn every time–again and again and–

until I fall.

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Clara emails me today during work, tells me she figured out over the weekend that she has feelings for her longstanding friend, John. I have two panic attacks in a bathroom stall and I skip lunch. Needless to say, I’m not well. But I was supportive. I emailed her back encouraging words, admitted that I knew this was going to happen but that I’m not angry. I really wasn’t.

I was sad. Disappointed, really. It’s not that I was hoping that we would get back together, though I wouldn’t have opposed the idea. It’s that I can’t trust her feelings. They’re all over the place. On a 1-10 scale, 10 being par with a suicidal depressive and a non-functioning schizophrenic, she’s a 9 shooting upward by the day. So I’m worried instead of mad. I was snippy on the phone tonight. I shouldn’t have been. She was pushing me away again, but I couldn’t see past my own pain to hers to help her. I’m a moron. I should have been there for her. I just didn’t have it in me at the moment. It was just a moment. I faltered–like I’ve always been afraid I would–and now…

…now I have to wonder where she is headed in her head. I never know what to expect from her. She doesn’t know what to expect from herself. I wish she would call me. I wish I could help her. Brw says she needs more help than I can provide, and I know he’s right, but I can hold her hand, can’t I?

Can’t I, Clara?

…

Update: I guess not.

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1. Suffering Numbness
2. Help Me.
3. Can you blame me?
4. Butterfly: An Introduction
5. Torture and Time