In all sincerity, I am worried about her. I can’t help myself, and there aren’t enough rocks to kick or water to splash on my arms and face to make me let go of the desire to make sure she is alright. I think back a bit on the chain of events. How many sunsets did we watch together here? I want to say it’s ten, but I slept for a long time after crossing into the forest. I was awake for a few days, saw two, maybe three sunsets, then I slept, and slept and slept, and then there were the other seven. So let’s say thirteen to be safe. Thirteen sunsets, which puts me at day fourteen here. Fourteen mornings with her. Days of seeing her retreat into herself at certain times. Days of learning that when she did so she needed to walk away and not be spoken to. She needed not to be helped. She had been helped her whole life and all it had done was confused her. That’s what she told me. She talked about her sister, who had been raped when she was sixteen. Her sister had never told the police, she hadn’t even told their parents. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know, initially because of the shame, and subsequently because she determined it was nobody’s business. One night, she was reading her poetry at an event in a part of the city nobody she knew ever went to. She told her younger sister she could come only out of pity for her; the poor girl had just been broken up with again, by the same guy as last time, for the third time this month. She told her some of the poems and artists might help her finally get a back bone, or at least peak her interest in knowing what a back bone was to start with. The sisters had walked there, and forty minutes later, my love found herself surrounded by bruised and battered people, people with pasts marred by other humans’ pain and suffering, by the expressions of their own loneliness and shame. Their bodies were beautiful, all different, all marked like canvases. Some were invisible marks that came out in words. Others were there, tattoos, piercings, scars, evidence of the times their pain was so vast and ungraspable that they had to stamp it on their bodies to get to know it a little better, see what the devil that haunted them could look like. She had sat there, and watched as her sister got up and sat on the little wooden stool. It wasn’t a bar stool. It was shorter, a painter’s stool. In that way the artists were closer to their witnesses, and it made the whole experience that much more visceral for them: no one could escape the mirrors these poets were holding up one after the other. She had sat in the front row, and was now listening to her sister speak things that didn’t make much sense. They had both grown up in a good home, one in which their parents loved them and pushed them to reach for the stars. She herself was reaching, every single day, blazing through obstacles–refusing to see them altogether–towards the firmament of her promised future. And yet here she found her sister, of the same ilk of dreamers, trapped. She was a fish in the ocean in a fisherman’s net, a comet blasting across the universe, now trapped in some man made magnetic field, hovering there, floating uncomfortably. She watched her sister unfurl herself in a river of words, and learned what had happened to her. How could it be? That someone so strong, so loved, so forceful in her ways, could succumb to a mere man? My love couldn’t understand. She couldn’t face her sister’s weakness, and even less her betrayal. Their family kept no secrets, and here she was, buried alive in the toxic waste of one night that took place three years ago. They didn’t speak about it on the walk home. They didn’t speak about it at home, either. She woke up and found a letter from her sister on the coffee table of their small living room. Her sister told her she never meant to hurt her. That she knew it was a lot to take in, but it was something she had to deal with on her own. That bringing more people in would only make it all the more present in her life, and that she was trying to break free from it, not make it a permanent mark on her record. She knew she could beat it, she knew one day she would come out of it, this haze of defilement. But she didn’t want her sister to worry. She was ok. A few days went by. They lived like they did before the poetry night. They ate their respective dinners–boiled carrots and hummus for one, greek salads for the other–and watched shows on TV. But then the weekend came, and the younger one went home to their parents, and, having dinner by their childhood home pool, flowers on the table that their dad had cut right before dinner, a hot meal prepared with so much care by their adoring mother, she found that she could not contain herself, she had to tell them what had happened. This was a house without secrets. This was a house where we shared our griefs as a family and helped each other out of them. This was a home where we were who we were because of each other, not just ourselves. She told them everything, and though her sister’s poem hadn’t outlined every single detail, she managed to piece together the story in a way that both horrified and muted her parents. She kept talking, she couldn’t stop. They had to help her, they all had to band together and help her get out of this. It had been three years, for Christ sakes! Three years of her suffering! How could they have all missed it? Her mother got up from the table without a word. She busied herself in the kitchen, washing dishes, putting out dessert. Her father sat there, eyes riveted on the flowers he had cut, his fingers around the stem of his glass of wine, twisting it so gently that the red liquid barely moved. Her mom sat back down. He looked at her for a moment, and then, breathing in, and then out, he looked at his youngest daughter, found it within himself to squeeze his features into a kind and patient smile, and asked her what else had gone on with her week. She was confused at first, and looked to her mom for clarification. But her mom wasn’t there anymore, and only said yes, any news about that test you took…? while refolding her already folded napkin. She asked what they were going to do about her sister, and they said they would speak to her and take care of it. She said she wanted to help, too, and they said it would all be okay, that things happened in life and that they were grateful she told them about it. She was confused. The tension that filled the screened-in porch pushed against the punctured walls and threatened to splinter the wooden beams that held them together. She found it surprisingly easy to change the topic. She found it surprisingly easy to pretend none of it ever happened.
She told me this story after I woke up from my sleep, and at this point in it she stopped talking. She needed a break, she said, and told me she’d be back sometime in the afternoon. I offered to go with her but she was already gone, unresponsive to my presence, walking away into the woods. When she came back, she seemed refreshed, open again, and invited me to sit down so she could finish her story. She said that after her dinner with her parents, she went to bed, and that the next morning when she woke up, they were gone. She thought they might be at the grocery store, or maybe on a visit to her grandmother. They left a note saying they had loved to see her and that they would call her later today, but wouldn’t be back home until much later. So she ate breakfast and got into her car and drove the hour it took her to get back to her apartment. She found that home empty, too. She was surprised; her sister usually always slept in on Sundays. It was her favorite day, and she most often spent it in her room, listening to music, “recharging,” as she put it. But now it was quiet, no one home, her bed unmade, also unusual. She stayed home, wanting to be there when her sister came back to warn her that she had told their parents. She didn’t want to apologize per say; she believed she’d done the right thing in telling them. She just wanted her to know that she wouldn’t be alone anymore, that the people who loved her most were going to get her out of her trouble. Her sister came home late, a shell of herself. She walked into the living room and sat on the couch next to my love. She never looked at her, and calmly she asked: why did you tell them? She told her she wanted to help her, that she wasn’t alone anymore, and her sister bristled at her enthusiasm: it wasn’t your story to tell. I don’t need help. Didn’t I tell you not to mind about it? She said yes, she had, but that she didn’t know what was best for her, not in the state she was in. I still go to school. I still work. I do everything I’m supposed to do. I am living, and I was fine, and you’ve messed it all up, out of this fucked up version of love you’ve been taught. You love so much you don’t listen, and that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They’re going to love me to death.
They did. She took another break here. She invited me to make love to her by the creek. It was enjoyable, but anytime I looked at her I wanted her lips to begin talking again. Her sister was present all around us. She didn’t cum. I did. She refused my offer to continue. She didn’t need to cum, she just wanted to feel her body for a bit. We lied there and listened to the water.
She was never the same after that day. They brought her to psychiatrists and therapists and forced her to file a police report. She didn’t want to do any of it, and at first she fought them. But they were persistent. They never took their eyes off of her. She felt better at first. She said that they diagnosed her with things that explained why that happened to her. She understood now that her whole past had led to the moment with that man, and that now she would learn how to avoid that situation in the future. She was lighter, but somehow something like a shadow trailed behind her every move. Her smile changed. Her honest, tooth filled laugh was replaced by a placid lip raise that showed just a bit of her spaced front teeth. She went to school, she went to work, but on Sundays now there was no music. She did homework, or friends came and picked her up, and she was busy always…all the time now she was busy. I asked her one day if she still wrote poems, and the space behind her eyes emptied a little. Her placid, pasted on smile faltered a bit, it trembled. She said no with the huff of a disillusioned mother asked if she remembers what a good night’s sleep feels like, someone trying not to care. She threw out all of those poems, referring to them as pain porn that she doesn’t need anymore. She changed. She was happier I guess, but not herself anymore. She was a version of herself to whom something like what happened could never happen again. She was the place holder for the person who used to feel things. She was easier to be around, because the weight of her pain was lifted right above her head, ready to crash down, but held up by the “people who loved her.”
I thought what she said sounded good. I told her she had done the right thing, that her sister was ok now. She looked at me with contempt, and said her sister had died the day people started forcing her to be okay. I disagreed. People need help. People need people who love them to show them the way sometimes, to pull them out of a bad situation. She said her sister was doing that herself. That she was doing it on her own time, in her own way. She said that everyone who intervened forced their own view of how she ought to be on her, and she became all of them, and left herself way far back somewhere between Sundays filled with music and writing about the pain that reminded her she wasn’t in a perpetual dream, that she was alive, on earth, alive enough, tangible enough to go through what she did.
She had told me once, early on in her treatments, that she missed feeling the pain of it, because the pain made her feel like she mattered, like she wasn’t just a placeholder for another human unafraid of experiencing life. She demurred, said she sounded dramatic and changed the subject, but that destroyed me forever. That made me realize that I didn’t help her because I cared that much. In the end, loving her would have been loving her the way she was, bruised and all. She had decided to live with what happened and not run away. She didn’t ask to be helped because there was nothing wrong with her. And here we were, all of us, trying to fix something that wasn’t broken, it just wasn’t perfect anymore.
I held her in my arms, and though her body was there, she was not. She let me hold her, but she was away somewhere, talking to her sister, wondering how they both ended up where they were. We stayed like that for a long time. We didn’t have any place to be. It was a nice setup. My internal clock was completely screwed. I had no idea what a day looked like when there were no demands on it. I asked her what she wanted to do for the day. I wanted to change the subject. I wondered why she told me the story in the first place, what reminded her of it. She fell asleep. The sun peered through the trees right up top, and I something in me said it was noon, but I wasn’t hungry, so I didn’t wake her for lunch. I didn’t wake her for dinner. I sat there, watching the sky welcome clouds and then stars, and I thought of all the people I had helped, and all the people who had helped me, and on I went until everything was dark, and all I could hear was our breath, and life was simple again, and no one needed help ever in the history of planet earth.
Her sister’s final poem:
Support
Loves
Privacy