that he's here means he's never lost

"Stay away from this heavenly body, Mr. Fermerrygoround!"
Crazy lady on the bus this evening--sexual assault. Not old, very clean, nice, neat afro. She warned one young lady that all cell phone users would pay. The crazy lady tried to speak to me, but when she saw the exhausted expression on my face she rolled her eyes and spit "never mind." I was willing to listen. For the most part, she kept to herself. She just kept addressing an invisible Mr. Fermerrygoround: quit touching her heavenly body; stop undressing her; he'd pay in hell.

Rape has been on my mind, a lot, lately, for a couple of reasons.
I've been having more and more flashbacks to the first time I was raped. I'm having problems being intimate with my new guy. I, mostly, figured that being out of practice accounted for most of it. As I investigated that attitude, I realized that having been celibate for two years did not improve my relationship with sex. Counter-intuitive, right? I never wanted to be in that situation, and all I really wanted from the guy I had been--whatever--had a crush on, initially, had been an intimate relationship. I don't know why I waited all that time for him, except that I thought that we were doing the right thing.

Ah, but the last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.--T.S. Eliot.

I thought that in waiting, we would build a relationship based on love and mutual respect, but I see now that we weren't waiting. I just kept believing that something would come of nothing. And, although this sounds insane, I feel like I have been the victim of a different type of sexual assault.
I feel like he manipulated me sexually in order to exhibit or exert control over me. I feel like a fool, and that is exactly how I felt, and often feel, about having been raped in graduate school.

I'm, also, very afraid. One fear my current lover can and does allay. Paranoia governs my inhibition that he has no earnest sexual attraction for me. I wonder does he just want to be my friend? Does just pretend to be sexually attracted to me so that I'll keep being his companion? I don't think men act that way normally, but I guess they do. I mean, after all, isn't that often what happens when they take mistresses? They no longer feel sexual attraction for their wives, but they love their wives and don't want to be with out them. What a blow to the ego! I certainly felt humiliated when I realized this man had no desire to be with me, and for years had just been pretending--especially knowing he'd had sex with other women. I don't see how those women were considerably more attractive looking than me, but, clearly, he felt deeper attraction to them than me. I don't know why, though I guess it has something to do with the perception of vulnerability or danger or something. Why take advantage of me, I still wonder. And, I still fear that this will happen again. The new guy seems to be sexually attracted to me, though he enjoys my company more. I don't know if it makes sense to be disappointed by that fact...

The other fear I cannot shake. It comes from far further back than my most recent dumping, but I think the distrust I feel for my own judgement has triggered the new anxiety. When intimate with my new partner, I cannot relax. I cannot relax my body, physically. I become a rigid board. I'm okay all during the foreplay, but as soon as he tries to penetrate me I stiffen and I can't release. It hurts; everything hurts. I'm totally scared. It does inhibit our sex life, and I never felt this type of fear about sex before--not even after I was raped. Why? It took me a long time to realize I had been raped. I didn't know that the pain and the injury I incurred were from being raped. Why? I don't know why. Because I didn't know what sex should feel like, so I didn't know it shouldn't hurt or make me bleed--for years.
I mean, initially, I didn't know why I was bleeding, and it hurt, a lot, but I just thought it hurt because I had been so new. Although I was in my twenties, this guy was just my second partner in life. He stole something so precious from me. I hate him. I hate the memory of him. I hate a lot of men for our sexual interactions, but none that I want to kill, but I'd like to kill him. An American Soldier. A U of C student. A handsome, older man . A dirty, rotten rapist. I bled for an entire month after he raped me. I just thought my cycle was crazy, and I didn't have health insurance at the time, so I wouldn't have gone to the doctor under, almost, any circumstances whatsoever. And, it wasn't until applying for the Peace Corps, and taking my physicals, that I had any indication that a year later I still had swelling inside my body from where he pummeled himself against me. A year later, still swollen.
And, if I hadn't bled after sex for years and years afterwards, I don't think I would have called it rape. I would have continued to say he sexually assaulted me, because I carry so much guilt and blame that maybe I shouldn't but I do--for trusting him. Now, I hardly trust anyone, and I see that sex games don't always involve sex. I don't trust myself, you see? It has been a couple years, and sex hurts, again, and it isn't the hurt that is really the issue, it is my fear of that old hurt, that hurt that left me doubled over in pain, and swollen, and bleeding, and I'm guarding against it, and it is affecting my sex life with my new guy.
So, I'm having flashbacks, and it has gotten to the point that anytime I hear a story about a woman being raped, I cry. I'm crying, now. I'm less whole now than I have been in a long time.
I listened to this NPR story today about how the people of Salt Lake City neglected to see Elizabeth Smart walking among them the entire time she had been kidnapped because they accepted her as the new wife of this zealot, and I know that just hours after he kidnapped that girl he stole her virginity and her choice and her fantasies and her sanctity of mind. And, I just wondered to myself, how it doesn't smack them in the face that there is little difference between this kidnapping and rape and these polygamous relationships between old ass men and children except that the parents consent to the rape. And I wish no one in the world were ever raped, or that everyone in the world understood what it means to be raped so they would stop.

It has been ten years, and I guess I just didn't know this would stay with me forever.

So, I wonder if I should tell my guy that I was raped? I think I shouldn't. I don't think it will be good for our sex life, and I think he will see me differently--not as damaged goods, so much as fragile, too breakable. I want to explain to him why I feel so scared, and I want him to understand and be patient, but I just know it will freak him out and make him even more nervous about having sex with me.

Anyway, all that is to go back to Mr. Fermerrygoround. I'd like to kill Mr. Fermerrygoround--and not in a slow, torturous, vicious kind of way. I just want to shoot him, one time, right between the eyes, but I know that won't make him go away.

The soldier who raped me was named Patrick. I can see his face, his physique, hear his voice, see his dorm room. I remember that after he raped me, he tried to corner me in his dorm room, and although I didn't get it, then, I knew that sex with him hurt, a lot, and I didn't want to do it again. What did he think? Did he think he was doing something wrong? He was almost fourteen years my senior. He must have known. But, even if I were to kill Patrick, he wouldn't go away. He lives in the recesses of my mind. He stalks me in my own stiffened posture. He emerges every time I hear about a woman being raped. I see him, looming over me as I try not to cry out.
I let that man come home with me and stay on my couch because he had been locked out of his dorm room. And he was angry at my friend because she had belittled and emasculated him, all night. Though I never did any such thing, nor did I participate in any way, he hurt me because he couldn't hurt her. I opened my home to him. Every time I open my heart, it seems like I open it to the wrong person--those hurt will attack, those deceived will betray.
I can convince my mind and my heart, but my body remembers.

Damn.
What should I do?
I would have listened to the crazy lady...and understood.

Life is a bitch, and then you die.

Hey World:
I went to see my Grands in Hampton. My Grandma is definitely losing her mind. My Aunt Mable has definitely lost her mind. My Grandpa is about to give up and go where they are because it is better than the reality around him. My mom's brothers and sisters are all in agreement; the grands all have to go into a nursing home.
Aging is a bitch!
I guess it happens to us all... if we're lucky. That is what they say, anyway.
My parents have started talking about what they'll do when they are old and becoming dependent.
As science progresses, we have to discover a new ethics for aging. When my grandmother's mother grew old, there was no nursing home for her. Any nursing home that existed in that place during that time wouldn't allow blacks. My great grandma had to give up her farm and live with her kids. Great grandma didn't outlive her body. She died in her 80s, but the science did not exist that would feed her when she couldn't eat, or give her oxygen when she couldn't breathe, or keep her alive when she would have, otherwise, died--at least not for poor blacks. She just died.
These days, science will keep you alive even if you want God to take you, and I oppose it. Perfect, certainly, cannot, does not describe my life. When the preacher shouts: "raise your hand if you know you going to heaven," I never raise mine. I don't want to be so arrogant. I'm not scared, though. I fear the pain of death, or the absence of life, but I don't fear the day I meet my creator because I try to make decisions I believe in. I try to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. I try to own up for my mistakes. I try to be reflective. I try to be a better person each and every day. When I go, I go with the knowledge that I did the best I knew how to do. So, I want science to let me go.
This time last year, my grandpa was in better shape than most people 20 years younger than him, and far better shape than many of my good friends. He tore his rotator cuff trying to lift my grandma out of the bathtub. The hospital gave him a blood transfusion. The transfusion resulted in an infection that seized his entire body. He has been in the hospital since June 25. He cannot walk. He has walked 5 miles every single day since he left the military until June 24. Now, he cannot walk. He has sores on his feet that will not heal. He can't accept that he can't walk, so he keeps trying to get out of his hospital bed, and he falls. He doesn't know why he can't walk. He said that to us many times. We don't know either. He's almost 90. This time last year, he was walking 5 miles a day. Today, the doctor says my Grandpa must have dementia because he keeps forgetting that he can't walk. It's not that he can't remember. It's that he can't believe it.
I went to visit my Aunt Mable. She keeps pulling the oxygen tube out of her nose. How many times have I been through this? How many times will I go through this? Is this the new face of death? Tanks, machines, tubes? I don't want to die like that. I don't want to have imaginary conversations with my relatives about people who I wish to join. I just want to die and meet my creator and accept my judgment.
My grandmother is so small. Hardly intelligible, her memory has become elastic--stretching far into the past then snapping back to forget breakfast by lunch, lunch by dinner.
My poor mother. Me. Poor me. All my Grands are dying. And, it would be so much easier if it weren't these protracted declines spurred on by science for the sake of science. Why keep a 90 year old woman alive? My Aunt Mable is 90 years old, and she lives inside her mind, and if not for the machines, and pills, and feedings, and "help," she would just die. And she and we would be happier for it, and if that sounds cold as hell I don't give a fuck because it is the fucking truth!
Then the poverty! Then they drain every dime from your family in order to torture your people with death in slow motion. Then the moral questions--should I care that this is bankrupting me? Is this money more important than my Grandma's life? God have mercy on us and take these decisions out of our hands.
I only pray that as I age my children hear me tell them that I want to die a natural death. I don't want pills to help me remember. I don't want machines that make me breathe. I don't want tubes to feed me. I just want to die in God's time.
I hear you, World. God created those machines. Who is to say what is God's time? Or, you won't say that, Sweet Potato, when you are facing death. When it is your time, you will thank God for those machines.
I suppose you are right, or something.
Every year for the past five years, black clothes--Great Uncle, Great Aunt, Grandpa, Grandma, Great Uncle. Now, 3 more, and slowly, watching them waste away, watching them forget, watching them lose their independence, seeing them long for death, and watching as the doctors hold death at bay. Have you ever seen anything like that? Have you ever lived anything like that?
I'll kill myself, first. Maybe that will be my greatest sin, but I will look at my creator on judgment day, and the Most High will understand that I wanted, only, to spare those I love.
Bah! I meant to write about something else, but this is what I needed to write about. At least, I know that I have smoked enough weed to stave off dementia until I'm 130 years old. Arthritis has already set in. My knees ache as I type. I exercise and eat well. I try to keep my life stress free. I wish I had children, but I do not, and I don't know if that makes things better or worse. Aging is a bitch, I tell you.