but the feast, down to the gore.
the core said, it's enough
and i said, i will meet you there,
so i brought tit for tat, and everything, to cincinnati.
and in the rocking chair, it's a rocking chair now, oversized
so comfortable
so comforting for those who need the rocking
i like the choice of chairs
not so much her choice of words
she signs realize
means reality
and i mean to bring it up soon because it's just not time yet
for us to argue
i don't let her see me cry anymore, and i would spend two or three days crying and screaming
the first year
just crying and screaming
she'd make me three appointments and usually i'd miss one or two
come in crying and screaming and floating, dissociating
forgetting everything i meant to say, a cloud of dissonance, dissolution
suicide to keep my rapists' secrets
and now it's back--not all
but enough, and worse
so she says
you just never got over that abuser, the one from MSSD and gallaudet
and now she knows that he tried to come back in 2010
that i stuck with david
that david started hitting me the same way that fucker did
fatso is mean, and it's insulting to anyone who feels or is called fat, so...
woodpaneling
that's the car he picked me up in when it all went back to it, and i was fat, i was so fat, i just wanted to eat and eat and eat what happened with him into fake, into not real, into not me, into not him, into not us when we're alone and his eyes go so big and so blue and so blank, like he's calling the stars home, calling heaven home, calling himself back into heaven, calling himself an angel home, calling himself the beginning of the universe, calling the universe meaningless and nonexistent, the way he did
and they'd bang the table and call him back
and he'd close his gaping mouth and wipe away the drool
and he'd do it in class facing me...
just because...
he wanted me to remember...i couldn't get away, and because...
...it was the kind of class that triggered both of us back to our abuse, our deepest shames, that we repeated the class together, that we repeated it because i tried to kill myself to make it all stop, that he didn't really love me when he kissed me, that he started beating me up and laughing at me for crying, that he started to look for ways to make me cry and tell me that that was love, and just fall into trances, trances that would last for three hours when he'd rape me in my room at cogswell.
and i didn't want anybody to know, but everyone thought they knew.
so i stayed with david because the more i told him i loved him and the more i told him what woodpaneling did...
and i was really thin then, a lot of things that are stretched out from the last two years started out so baggy they needed a belt to define my waist, and i looked hotter than hell. i mean, i'm 37 and my rosacea destroys the texture of my skin so when i have a good day i'm amazed that i actually have elasticity and a smooth face, but even when it's terrible, when it's aging me and so bumpy my makeup does little to fix it, i get hit on by people in their early 20s, and people think i look around 28 or 32. it's fucking funny, like, all this time i've hated myself for being ugly when all i needed was to stay thin both times, stop eating because of the abuse--
--david, oh, what a silly boy, thinking he had me fooled, then beating me up because every step of the way i was like, dude...let me tell you what you do when you're with your friends, with other women. i was like, dude, listen, that doesn't give you any reason to beat me up for telling you i want to buy you a $7 milkshake that melts you into orgasm and gets you talking about how life is nothing like it is for me where you're concerned. it just doesn't. it doesn't, and it never will, and i won't fucking stop giving you presents and buying you shoes because yours have holes in the soles and you get brusque and almost dislocate my shoulder when you realize after you've run all around the mall in the FiDi really getting into hamlet, getting lost, me staying lost...because when we're together you're hitting me and yelling about what a shitty time you're having, how i'm a snobby white girl, but when you don't know where i am you're rapt, running as fast as you can to keep up with everyone else, edging ever closer and closer to the action, to the stages...
...when it's over and you're glowing, telling me how much you love me, that it's really true, you just didn't know life could be like this...and the white guy with the hat comes around for tips, and you have no money to give because you live with 300 flies, a mattress on the floor, rotting food, rotting dishes, rotting clothes, a couch of iron with padding that hurts (i found it a year later in a store downtown, ever the sleuth, and it's a $50 couch new)...you do not
have the right
to get so angry you jolt upward and out the door and yank me so hard
i've had my shoulder nearly dislocated by two assholes in 14 months
you don't get to tell me to give you $150 to fake it to your mom that you're making a salary raising a baby but coming to have an affair with me when you know my roommate has tried to kill me because i wouldn't let her rape me...an affair you give my roommate the blow-by-blow of because i'm deaf...and don't know you're doing it, and she tries to stab me to death a week later, screaming that i let you have all this fun, that instead of having the volume on the TV up all the way you've turned the TV and the cable box down to 0 and put them on mute...and all weekend you stand there laughing, laughing, laughing, and i'm like, what did you do, i don't get it, i know you're up to something, but what...you just waited for me to turn my back to do that after showing me you had them all the way up...i mean, david, i told you, all this time, i know that this is what you do now...since that night, since Hamlet...i know, i saw the change, i felt it in my shoulder, in my arm, my elbow, in that i couldn't wrest myself away, that you got more violent when i tried to give him a fiver...
...i saw it all, and the point isn't that you get to rape and beat me and cheat on me and tell me to die, and tell me i have to let other men rape me to make you happy that i'm not only with you, all because i'm a white woman in love with a mexican man...
...you don't get to do all this and demand $150 for your mom after you've told me you know she told me to kill myself and that i had to die to make everything better, and then twist my arm...
and this is what i've told marci
so i can feel the bone just barely bend to break
so this is the saga of how people give my abuser renewed access to me
and how i just want it to stop, but how
what david did to me as a direct result of my first real abuser doing as a direct result of hearing about my first rape and getting excited about it, getting horny over it, finally acting on the crush he'd had on me since before we ever exchanged words except "ugly polack" and "asshole motherfucker"--
--is really, really scaring me
and how joe
just started hitting and raping and trying to control me for the same reason those two did
he felt it was unfair that i have such a good grasp on life, art and on a lot of matters, just sizing things up in a flash. understanding almost anything immediately. he got so angry that day
and snarled
and ended with a fist and a sharp inhaled flair of his neck, boomerang
then a cold, smoldering, blue-flamed glare, and his nostrils
and that was
the break
it's always
the break
and it scares me
why was it always
the break
in gallaudet bathrooms
dorms
hallways
libraries
/my tomb?
i don't want to stop this flash that makes guys like this fucker in the red sweatshirt
the neanderthal face, the blunt nose, the heavy brow with bushy caterpillar eyebrows
start stalking me where the woods
(disappear the city)
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