Work Text:
If you know nothing else, please know that I tried.
I tried everything.
Alcohol.
Nicotine.
Drugs - prescribed and not.
Achievement.
Avoidance.
Therapy.
Razor blades.
Sex.
Beautiful women and passable men.
Pain and pleasure.
Romance.
Celibacy.
Immersion in recreation, in what others call fun.
Food. Restriction, indulgence.
Even moderation.
Movement.
Graceless, gasping for air, frantically chasing the endorphin rush.
Training my muscles until I feel I could best a man in a fair fight.
But I can’t. Ever. I know that.
So for a while, I focus on cardio.
A 5k every morning. Because if I can’t take him, I have to know I can outrun him.
Then, eventually, always, I stare into the soulless eyes of another rape victim, at the half-rotten corpse of a woman who ran until her fibula snapped in half.
And it hits me.
It doesn’t matter.
If he wants to fuck me, he’s going to fuck me.
If he wants to kill me, I probably won’t stop it.
I’ve even tried the quiet kind of movement. The kind that doesn’t feel like movement at all.
Sitting alone with one’s thoughts is not, however, the safest idea for someone like me.
I called to God, and God called me a whore.
The closest I come to feeling like something is working is when someone looks at me, eyes wet and face crumpling but grateful, and I know that I made a difference.
I helped. I made something better.
But then I remember that if I hadn’t, someone else would.
Someone told me that I look happy the other day. That all the stress has melted from my face. I look five years younger, she said.
All I had thought about that whole day was dying.
You tried all of that for what, you’re thinking.
I know.
I’ve been asked by therapists and doctors and the occasional lover who cared enough to see my cover slip.
What could possibly be so bad? What’s wrong? What is the fucking problem?
If this isn’t your lived experience, you are incapable of understanding.
There’s no way to explain it without being seen as dramatic, crazy. A neurotic pain in the ass, looking for attention or a benzo prescription.
But we’re a little past that mattering for me, and this letter is addressed to everyone in the world that I love, so let me try.
One last time.
You know that feeling you get, the dread right before you walk face-first into something that utterly terrifies you? That stomach drop when a truck just narrowly misses t-boning you on the freeway?
Fight-or-flight. The sympathetic nervous system sends a smoke signal, and suddenly your palms are sweating and your hands are shaking and your heart is pounding and you need to puke your guts.
That’s my homeostasis.
Every day, nearly every minute. Perpetually bracing for something I can’t name, but vividly, constantly imagine.
I cope with it, poorly, by ripping open my cuticles, biting my nails, massacring the surrounding skin into an ugly, bloody mess.
The most acceptable form of self-harm.
Sometimes I rub alcohol into the wounds. Because they need to be cleaned, I tell myself.
The truth is, it’s the only time my heart slows.
The closest I get to reprieve.
This, paired with the devastating loss that I feel but cannot explain, makes breathing unbearable.
The loss of what? My last therapist asked me.
I told her what I’m afraid to lose, which is a pretty short list.
Then I started rattling off every goddamn thing I’ve already lost. The losses I feel so deeply in my rotten fucking soul that I want to disembowel myself with my bare, mutilated hands just to feel anything else.
I’ve lost my sense of self, of safety, of innocence, of justice, of humor.
I’ve lost two children. At my own behest, but the end result is the same.
A man with a weapon put them inside me.
A man with a scalpel scraped them back out.
I know I have no right at all, but my arms feel empty.
Sometimes, when I hear an infant’s cry, my breasts physically ache.
I’m barren of anything that matters. Nothing but caffeine and nicotine and a nervous system set on fire. I’ve lost my desires, all of them that make life what it’s supposed to be. None of it appeals to me anymore.
I eat to sustain and balk even at that. Movement is tedious.
I fuck when I’m bored and hardly ever orgasm.
I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever held dear, everyone before the six of you. Those losses were painful, in the way that all deaths and endings are.
Losing any of you, though, is a pain I’m too much of a coward to face. It’s just a matter of time, in this world, this job.
I’m sorry. I cannot face it.
I’m sure you’re wondering.
How do I hold my gun steady? How do I stare down killers and predators with such precision if my insides are trembling and my knees are going soft?
I’ve thought about it a lot.
It’s a practiced reflex. The deep inhale right before the bad thing happens, slow exhale through the pain. In through your nose, then out like you’re blowing through a straw.
That’s what the nurse told me when I started to kick during the rape kit.
It’s come in pretty handy.
But it takes solid, sustained effort. Motivation.
Which I can only manage when I’m saving someone else.
That’s because I’m good at it.
Saving myself was always, at best, a shot in the dark. Not that I could never pull it off.
But I eventually lost track of how many times I failed.
It occurred to me recently, during one of our last investigations. Context isn’t terribly important. Most of our cases involve rape.
Fuck, I just read that back, and God. There are enough men who brutalize women and children that we always, always have a case.
And we don’t even take a fraction of the cases, and most rapes are never reported at all.
The fact that anyone has any semblance of will to live genuinely baffles me.
Anyway, back to my epiphany.
I realized, for the first time, that my body has been fucked more times against my will than with my consent.
That’s not even counting the gray areas. The times I said maybe and it was taken as a yes. The times I pretended to sleep, but it didn’t matter. The times I gave a blow job because I felt guilty for bleeding.
When I was about twelve or thirteen, my mother told me that men are weak. She said it like a secret. Like I didn’t already know.
I know exactly what I am.
I’m a liar. A cheater. A coward.
I’m a killer.
If it helps, think of this as delayed justice.
If it doesn’t, or if you think I’m full of shit, just know that I love you, and I tried.
I just can’t do it anymore.
Love, Emily