UPON DISCOVERING MY THERAPIST WILLINGLY SHARES AN OFFICE SPACE WITH A MALE THERAPIST WHO IS AN ACCUSED SEX OFFENDER SUPPOSEDLY RECOVERED FROM HIS URGE TO RAPE 13-YEAR-OLD GIRLS - Andrea Gibson

I sat on her couch,

back stiff as a roofied drink,

jaw tight as a tourniquet,

asked if she had forgotten

that I too had been exactly 13,

had only just started my period, was terrified

to use tampons for fear one would get lost inside of me

when the man as old as my father got lost inside of me,

reminded her

that I was yet to find the string of him

anywhere but roped around my own neck.

I absolutely hear you, she said, But how could I do this work

if I didn’t believe in everybody’s ability to heal?

In everybody’s ability to heal...

It was a reasonable question

but I could have slit that questions mark’s throat.

Kept flashing to the night at the hospital

after I tried to excavate his smirk from my skin,

how I still nightmare the wound bleeding in spurts

like someone trying to hold their laughter in.

Thirteen can be destroyed by a pimple, by a curfew

a half hour earlier than a friend’s. I was yet to watch

an R-rated movie without blushing

into the sleeve of my sleepover pajamas

when he X’d out all that was left of the girl in me,

my voice 3 octaves lower by the time he was done.

If you’re going to tell me that everyone has the ability to heal,

that everyone has the ability to recover,

then I’m going to ask why I am still covered

in so much shame I rarely go a day without butchering

my own name? Why I can still take a punch

better than I can take a compliment?

Why I teeter so constantly between flight and fight

it’s like I’m trying to beat the daylight

out of my own fucking sky,

like my body will never stop fighting him off.

Do you understand how certain I am

that I could have torn my nails into his wrist

pulled out his pulse

deactivating a bomb?

I could have called that peace.

I could have called that not checking my window

a hundred fucking times every single night

before I fall asleep.

What if I don’t want the monster

to stop being a monster?

What if that’s the only anchor I have left?

What if my sanity depends on being able to point

at the bad thing and say, That is the bad thing.

Haven’t I already lost enough time

losing track of who the enemy is?

I’ve spent half of my life not knowing the difference

between killing myself and fighting back.

What if I don’t want healing

as much as I want justice?

What if I don’t care if justice

looks exactly like revenge?

Do you think I don’t know that I can’t

want revenge without strapping the bomb

to my own chest?

That’s how the dominoes of trauma fall.

You become just another thing about to detonate.

And whatever part of me that could believe in healing

was the part he stole.

So go ask him for my forgiveness. Go ask him.