viii. my roommate comes home one day and says “we are sexually connected!” like it’s some kind of awesome, spiritual connection. apparently she fucked some guy, who fucked some girl, who fucked the guy who raped me. i scream at her, “rape is NOT sex” but i don’t really think she gets it. ix. Where are all my friends? Where is the community? i can’t tell if i keep pushing them away because intimacy scares me or if ‘community’ is bullshit. it’s probably a combination of both. i have long talks with people about community support instead of police assistance— about using the protection of organized, politicized communities rather than relying on the state. when is it ok to go to the police? where is the community when you need them? x. my ass stopped bleeding. am I better? xi. Summer Love: so many drunk nights that it all turns into one epic story. i feel like a hero. i dress slutty. i go skinny-dipping in the river and steal passionate kisses under the shade and lose my shoes and ride my bike barefoot. i start making a zine about rape and reclaiming sexuality and survival and my ex-boyfriend who i started dating again tells me i’m a disgusting slut. he says that he can’t deal with my past. i dump that fucker and feel proud for it. i can say No now. i start fucking someone else and we get drunk and have sex under the stars and fall into some kind of weird, desperate love spell. he’s a drunk but so am I, so it works. one day at a music festival he freaks out and pushes my friend down a hill and then punches me to the ground in front of everyone. he asks to borrow money for crack the same night. everything falls apart again. i tell my roommates to Fuck Off, Don’t Talk to Me. i cry all my tears out and all i have left is a steady numbness and lots of booze to make me feel something again. i feel so cliché. i am so cliché. i stop saying No again. xii. i don’t have words yet for the racial-gendered dynamic of what happened/ what’s happening. i go to counselling but i don’t know how to make sense of it and this white counsellor can’t help me. she just stares at me blankly. she tells me stories from her youth about growing up really poor and moving to new york and dating abusive alcoholics, which helps a little bit. but it’s not enough. this white town can’t handle my bullshit and i move to montreal where i spend most of my time alone having one-person dance parties, drinking lots of wine, and watching reality tv on the internet. i get back together with my ex-boyfriend to make the loneliness less intense. he gets violent again. he drinks to numb the pain of everything that ever happened to him. he punches holes in the wall next to my head. he breaks my furniture. he calls me a fucked up slut. it’s getting worse. what should i do? i can’t call the cops. isn’t that betrayal? xiii. the phone rings one day. it’s the bloody cops again. they’ve been trying to reach me for a while now but i keep avoiding their calls because i’m scared i did something wrong without even knowing it and they want to arrest me. this time, i answer. the officer tells me that the guy who raped me has been found guilty for ‘criminal harassment’. his lawyer got him a deal. he has to do community service and stay 100 metres away from me. how is this justice? xiv. i’m still searching for community. i’m still searching my way out of shame. i’m still searching for a Life Lesson in all this. ≠
Issue 3
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