Scared = No words by V

When I get scared I stop writing.

It usually corresponds with some sort of event that triggers me back to the ugliness of the path. 

Textures, smells, they all begin to resurface and pull me into years of what used to be blackness and now are full canvassed color.

See, I remember so much of it now.  And it’s difficult to straddle that story, that history, and continue to walk in this world which is so devastatingly undifferentiated from the world that hurt the little girl that was me.

I was speaking recently and found myself saying that I could not count the number of times I was raped.  That it was literally beyond me.  I used to soften it by saying that I couldn’t count the number of times I had sex to somehow assume accountability for it…  Truth is, I’ve been having sex since I was 2.

And as I lay in bed with my lover, in present day, and his bristly cheek rubs up against my soft cheek…  Or his hand touches the top of my hair…  I fly back to the past.  Back to it, again.  Again.  Again.

It was haunting for a long time.

Now it is an entrée in the 12 course supper Spirit has prepared for me.  To feel pain, chew it, saturate it with spit, and swallow it.  Not whole.  Processed.  To digest it, allow it to move through me, down my esophagus, into my stomach, intestines, and eventually flow back to Spirit where Spirit can use it productively.

To do whatever it is that Spirit does.

And as particular entrees come up, I find myself sharing bits of the meal with those around me…

“You know, I used to have a wad of hair that was all ratted up on top of my head.  You know when you have sex and you get a wad up hair all ratted up there?  Well, I had so much sex, so little self care, was tender headed after my neck was broken, so I didn’t comb my hair.  And the wad of hair just got bigger and bigger and you couldn’t get a comb through it.  But the boys just kept raping and I kept tolerating and the wad of hair got bigger.  Til finally, we were on a family vacation down south and some hair stylist commented on it, thought it quite remarkable really, that it had survived as long as it had, before she unceremoniously cut it out of my hair.  And I was missing some hair on top of my head for a while…”

That’s tough to swallow.  Especially when I know that girl was about 12 years old.

And the knowledge and sensation just eats at my guts and I stop eating.  I stop drinking.  I stop breathing.  I do whatever I can to shut myself up…

It takes a hell of a lot to kill a person. 

It would take a lot to finally shut down this story.

Myself, that is.  Not someone else.  Never someone else.

That’s probably my biggest character flaw...  In the Darwinian sense...

There is a Greek Chorus of mother fuckers who deserve to be dead and whose energy I internalize into mine until it makes me so angry I just gyrate.

And there is so much that needs to be said that doesn’t get said.

So much that has taken place.

What am I here for?  What do I stand for?  I stand to testify to the fact that it is not okay to treat a human being the way I have been treated.

Perhaps my goal to date has been to small.

My audience too small.

Perhaps I need to blow this shit up in my mind--- this concept of helping the ill and impoverished.  Perhaps it needs to be all beings.  That my perspective needs to get so big that I can’t possibly do anything but that…

I don’t know…  All I do know is that what I am doing right now isn’t working for me, on the whole…

When I slow down to process the bits and pieces with words, with movement, with a circle of support, I begin to find more patterns to wind around…

More sensation of support.

And I’m living with that, for now.