Dante's inferno opens with Dante running through the woods from three horrible monsters. He runs for so long that he finds himself lost in the dark woods. He's tired, he's alone, and he realizes his doesn't know the diritta via, or right way out. He becomes conscious that he is ruining himself and finds himself falling into what he calls a basso loco, or deep place, where he says the sun is silent (I sol tace). My disordered world is my basso loco where I sol tace. The words found here are my desperate attempt to articulate what feels like my stumble through a place where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It seemed so easy to find my way here but I'm finding it much harder to find the way out.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Rape



Rape is such a primal thing.  It's an act that strips you of all of your humanity, ignoring your protests, disregarding your wants, your needs, thus reducing you to nothing more than a body.  It's a crime against sleep and memory that echos into all aspects of your life, voicing itself in quiet moments.  I often wonder if I'll ever be the same.  I wonder if there will ever be a kiss that doesn't remind me of his, a touch that doesn't cause my skin to shudder with remembrance.

I really thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the terror-would fade in time.  But that hasn't happened.  Unfortunately these memories have just grown stronger as the light I'm shinning in this dark place is revealing details that for so long were buried.

This remembering brings up a barrier between myself and the people I meet.  I suppose it's the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past.  When people talk about their childhood, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was purging in the elementary school bathroom, when I was feeling like I was suffocating under the weight from the men on top of me, when I was crying in my bathroom at night terrified to step into my bath lest their be another one of them there, waiting for me.  That was when I lost sight of my soul and died.

I became aware that my body was a separate entity from me.  My corporeality became very clear to me, the physical imposition that I had upon space was always a point of contention for me.  It seemed that the body was the problem-my body.  A body that had its incessant wants and needs and feelings and aches.  A body that was too small to fight attached a mind that couldn't make sense of what was happening.  So it seemed only natural for the two to be split, it seemed they could be better dealt with separately.

I'll burn in hell for saying this but there are days, so many days that I wish I could go back and just want it.  So many times I've thought that it would be so much easier to just go back and lay there, not fight, and accept it as sex.  The word rape is loaded.  Sex is easier.  It's easier to accept that I am a whore than it is to accept that I am a victim.

Remy


"And, what's more, this 'precious' body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing form of media, harrassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn't enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself." 
 Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)

4 comments:

  1. Just started keeping up with your blog and I've told everyone in my rape trauma group about it. Thank you for being so honest and putting words to a situation in which there are no words. I plan on reading your older entries too, keep writing!

    Sam

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  3. Thanks Sam :) I'm sorry that you're in that situation but doing a group and getting to experience that community and universality that comes from other people who you can relate with was one of the best things I have done for myself. Thanks for reading and take care of yourself ♥

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  4. Hey Jess again see that you online. Luv the quote at the bottom. This is completely what it feels like I feel like you took the words right out of my head only your words are better than any I could make up. Thats pretty fucked up though I got to say about wanting it to just be sex not rape because it was rape, or at least that's what it sounds like but maybe it wasn't. Just think its weird that anyone would want to go back to the night they were raped and want it?? I mean to each his own but to me that just doenst make sense

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