Content warning for rape, incest, suicide.
We’ve spent all of our years with milestones penciled into the planners of our lives. We’re taught to look forward to our first day of school, and dread each school-day from there until you’ve gotten that highfalutin degree. We’re taught to look forward to love, marriage, children, and we’re taught to prepare for the inevitable grief that comes part in parcel with loving others. These checkpoints of life may take us by surprise when they occur, but there is still a preparation instilled in the human psyche. And yet, I have no script to look to regarding “my rapist is dead.”
Even my own language choice there makes me bristle! Congratulations, my formative years were disrupted by sexual abuse and all I get is… this rapist. My rapist. One of my very own, imagine that. Mind you, I don’t wish to give credence to the idea that he has taken anything concrete from me (my virginity, my sanity, my hymen; I refuse to believe any of those existed in the first place), but I’m also hesitant to accept that I was given anything in my suffering. Reducing what happened between us to a transaction feels like a disservice, but it’s hard not to feel as though I’ve gotten the raw end of the deal. He gets to be dead in 2020, and I have to be alive in 2020. What kind of bullshit is that?
Jokes aside, it’s hard not to feel ripped off. In an abstract sense, I have lost an innocence. Not the precious lily-white innocence wielded by save the children crusades, but an ignorance of the depth of cruelty this world is capable of. If you want to frame it this way, I suppose you could say the abuse radicalized me. I never needed to have a wake-up call to realize that other people’s pain and suffering is often a stepping point to happiness for those who’ve decided to mute their own humanity in the interest of power. Sure, even I have trouble comprehending what part of a man’s conscience needs to atrophy for him to wake up every day as Mitch McConnell and not do the world a favor and kick the chair, but I digress. Just as a person who is born with power becomes more and more comfortable with the idea that they might be the only important living being through the magic of neuroplasticity, those born into suffering quickly adjust.
I was listening to a favorite band of mine very intentionally the evening that news broke regarding the lead singer’s sexual assault allegations. I won’t be naming names because some washed up people like to Google themselves and this frankly has nothing to do with him, but this news came as I was stoned out of my gourd in a cabin in New Hampshire, lounging outside on a warm August evening gazing at a multi-colored sky flecked with fireflies. My senses were heightened, my pineal gland decalcified, and my heart was open to empathize with this man.
So it's not loaded stadiums or ballparks
And we're not kids on swingsets on the blacktop
And I thought at fifteen that I'd have it down by sixteen
And twenty-four keeps breathing in my faceLike a mad whore
And twenty-four keeps pounding at my door
Like a friend you don't want to see
Oldness comes with a smileTo every love given child
Oldness comes to rile
The youth who dream suicide
Like, fuck you, man. You really have the gall to peel back my skin and point out all of my fears and insecurities about the callous indifference of time and effectively spit in the face of every assault survivor who identifies with your music? Now of course, this is all meaningless. He’s just a depressed man with a guitar and some sad sad tunes, and I’m just a depressed bitch with a blog. It’s parasocial and it’s unhealthy, the spite I feel rushing through my veins even as I type this. Whatever perceived personal slight I have is entirely one-sided, one of solidarity with those of us who’ve internalized that very little on this earth is for us. It’s not like I’m usually susceptible to hero worship, but discovering these lyrics and feeling their impact deep in my chest and finding out he was under fire that very evening broke my brain just a tiny bit. I can’t have fucking anything without heartache, not even some whiny slowcore band.
I think about all the countless times I would watch Law & Order: SVU, and how with every episode I would be taught to rely on some omnipresent Order to restore justice to the world by arresting the baddies. Despite my aforementioned cynicism regarding the systems that be, I held onto my hopes that I would be able to show up to a precinct with a laptop full of My Rapist’s child pornography and an address to say “let’s get him, boys,” or whatever other fantastical scenario I whipped up to deal with everything, sometimes even while watching the show with my mother and silently projecting my experience onto the guest star. My mother would later refuse to accept what happened to me was true, and it made my memories of SVU turn from bittersweet to straight sour. This was the lesson I needed to take a step back and realize how much my working class Irish cop family upbringing instilled poison into me, venomous ideas of how justice and healing really work.
24 is right around the corner for me. My “I didn’t think I would make it this far” shtick is getting old, despite it always being true. I didn’t plan out much past 15 or 16 (my version of “having it down” was to be the sweet eternal silence I craved so desperately), so finding myself hurtling onward is bewildering. My brain is supposedly still developing, though my aggressive weed smoking will have to see about that. I have so much opportunity ahead of me, but this world has exhausted me to the point where I have no idea what the rest of my 20s are supposed to look like. Before the shithead passed away, I had visions of courtroom scenes, images of him getting his ribs kicked in by another inmate, or my boyfriend punching him in the face to thrive on, but they don’t feel good anymore. They’re fake, and he actually died because of an entirely preventable pandemic killing people his age (29) and younger all across the country; I can’t feel ceremonious about something as horrific as that. But what I choose to celebrate is my improbable survival rate of 100%. While I don’t take my place in this world for granted, I am proud to dig my toes into whatever dirt on this earth is mine, however small it may be.