Fully Listening

To the dispossessed. The silenced voice. The ghost of family.

Hot in SoCal while I go through decades of notebooks. Painful lower back. Hard to stand. Hard to sit. Difficult to read the news. So, I listen to my body. Try to situate this old body in this weighty world. So many times, this body had tried to speak to me and I didn’t listen. Now it’s time to fully listen before it’s too late. Paintings stored away never shown. Writing I’d never transcribed from the pages of old notebooks.

Decade after decade. A body of work I am now unearthing.

1972, almost twenty years old and two years transitioned out of the foster care system in Missouri, I worked as a nurse’s aid for a senior care home in Edmond, Oklahoma. Didn’t drive yet so I walked to and from the apartment I shared with L. a girl I’d met in art classes. Her boyfriend S. was just back from Vietnam. A big guy who wore the same outfit everyday: tight black jeans, a cowboy shirt, cowboy boots. A chain smoker with slicked back black hair and an angry stare. He’d taken a class with me and L. at the Christian college where I went as soon as I aged out, because why not where else was I gonna go. No money. No parental support. A transcript full of bad grades. Charity girl who wanted to go to college but didn’t have a clue how to get there. My roommate’s half of the rent was paid for by her parents. Mine by the salary I earned working shifts at the nursing home.

Every day that summer when I walked in the door of the apartment after work L. and S. were there, in the living room on the couch smoking. I’ll never forget the death shroud of S.’s furrowed face. His thick fingers. The brass buckle of his tooled leather belt. The skin on my legs shivered as he watched me walk by. As he stomped across the kitchen and opened the avocado-colored refrigerator door to get himself a beer.

The way he glowered as he pulled the tab. Gulped it down.

At school he’d sit in the doorway of the drawing class, the sun at his back, flicking lit matches over his shoulder into the flower beds behind him.

Pansies and violets wilting in the Oklahoma heat.

Most days it was just him with my roommate when I came home from work. Then one day he brought a friend. What’s his name? I never knew. He was a bony tall man with no eyebrows and very thin lips who wouldn’t look at me when I came through the front door. Creeped me out. I was immediately wary of him. The way he sat on the shag carpet near the coffee table full of beer cans and ashtrays, flicking a knife open and shut, open and shut. Click. Snap. The ominous twist of his thin wrist. His bony head bent over the knife blade intent on watching it snap and click in and out of the sheath. The smell of beer and cigarettes in the air. Smoke and stink and the click of that knife I don’t think I will ever forget.

And yet I did for decades.

“Sit down with us,” my roommate said. Made some room on the couch.

I walked on by. Fast as I could. Through the living room, past the kitchen, straight down the hall to my bedroom with it’s vaulted popcorn ceiling white flecked and clean looking. Beat from work and walking home after. Tired from life already. In that hot apartment one summer day years ago, I just raced to my room and threw myself on the bed. Grateful to have some space of my own. Weary from work. Drowsy listening to the music and laughter in the distance. Relieved to be alone. Hungry. Yet ignoring the growl in my stomach. Thinking who was that guy, who is what’s his name, as I dozed off.

I fell asleep on my back and awoke to cold. Cold slice of something at my neck. Jolt of metal taste in my mouth. Ceiling light blocked by what’s his name’s body. His hand. His hand against my belly. Holding, pressing me down into the mattress. His knife across my throat. I am dead. Simple thought in my mind. I am dead. Killed by what’s his name. Looking down at me with a switched off look in his eyes. A look I recognized. Saliva pooled in my mouth, and I tried to swallow and couldn’t constricted as I was by his blade on my voice box. Pressing. I tried to speak, croaked out a sound, and he drew the knife away and laughed.

“Hey, you guys,” he yelled down the hallway. “She thought I was gonna kill her. She looked like she thought she was gonna die.”

This one of many experiences I had in my young life while trying to make it on my own. A young girl alone in a world where nobody has her back.

I tell this story now, I own it and tell it, like every story I tell, because I know I am not alone. Every second of every day in this sick world some young girl, or boy, is confronted with more than they should ever have to fend off on their own. Alone. With little to no help. Or support. Gauntlets to run before they can find help. If ever. Often never. Other people asking them to prove it, prove it, prove you were harmed. Prove you deserve to be helped. Before too long you give up trying to make people care. I know I did back then. Just to keep going. I knew the unwritten rules of society. Covert yet clearly understood by anyone disenfranchised for any reason.

Try not to show you are afraid. Ever. Because that’s exactly what perpetrators want to see. Our fear. Our weakness. They get off on it. And those who stand by, those who ignore what’s going on simply don’t want to be bothered.

For years I didn’t delve too deeply into my own experience. Tried not to feel my feelings; mainly lived in my head. Think. Reason it out. Be logical. Acted strong and capable even when I was trembling inside. Acting as if, for all those years, I ignored my body’s logic and pushed away what I knew in my gut. Living that way, I betrayed myself and developed a delayed response to danger. Later on, after the danger seemed to have passed, I’d ask myself was that real, can you believe that? Did that happen? Participant and witness all at once. Not knowing who to tell, how to describe what had happened. Thinking does this matter. Do I matter? Detached from my own bodily experience until…

Until in a workshop up in Tomales Bay I was reminded by the writer Lidia Yuknavitch.

“Remember,” she said to us. “Your wound is also your superpower.”

Back in my room I sat staring out the window through a grove of trees dense and tall and protective growing all the way to the sea. I sat there for a long time before I opened my notebook and wrote this story down.

Pen in hand: mighty as a knife. I wrote a story long buried in my body. Lost. Then found.

Then lost again. Until I discovered it last week while going through another stack of old notebooks.