Sitting in my bathtub I contemplate how much bleach it would take and how long I would have to vigorously scrub my skin to get the feeling of him off of me. And logic snakes its way into my thoughts and tells me the answer I already know, which is all the bleach in the world wont erase what happened. But I sit in water far too hot for my skin, hoping that I can speed up the cellular process and that I won’t have to wait the seven years it takes to reproduce new cells, ones that won’t remember the violation.
Rape is such a complicated thing because you aren’t just fighting your assailant or the nightmares that he leaves you with, you’re fighting every single preconceived notion, every prejudice, every hang-up, every bias, every contrarian viewpoint from people who weren’t even there.
You’re fighting the beliefs and conceptions of humans that don’t want to believe that human beings can be so awful to one another. You’re fighting the convictions of people who believe they would have behaved or reacted in a manner completely opposite to how you may have reacted. Everyone can survive a zombie apocalypse until no one actually does…everyone would run towards the shooter, until no one actually does, everyone would rush into the burning building until no one does.
Its much easier to play the victor in our heads than it is to admit that behavior in the face of danger or fear may not always reveal what we think it does.
We’re all superhuman heroes with unlimited strength, exceptional vision and eidetic memories with an uncanny ability to recall constitutional law and exercise perfect judgement in ALL situations until were not…
Judgement day isn’t coming, it’s here. It’s always been here.
