You Have Not Yet Lived

Splayed. You’re splayed across the sofa; the bed is not a safe place. Call it insomnia, if you must. The true name is fear.

One day it is your reality, your life, something you speak about in present tense. Here he stands again. If you’re lucky, one day the tense changes. Present to past. I was fucked against my will. Past to past perfect. Perfectly past.

Abuse does not die; it lives. It is a living thing. But abuse does not live in your mind. The mind is easily malleable, believing everything it is told, easily making up stories, then forgetting them. The mind can be swayed, made to doubt itself. The mind lies. Layers upon layers of memory sit on top of each other until they seep in, like water into soil, burying what went before, changing it. A memory is a permeable membrane. It blends into the one before it and the one that will come after.

The body tells the truth. Sexual assault lives in your bones, in your skin, in your organs, in the very cells of your being. It shows up as the stomach upset that has been constant for a decade and never goes away, in the nausea and the breathlessness that happens every time you sit in a car. It is in your body when you yell at the driver to stop, jump out, and clutch at your stomach as the cars whizz by and you stand unsteady, trembling. You cannot get into that car, not yet, not again, but the driver impatiently taps his fingers on the steering wheel, inconvenienced by you, inconvenienced yet again, and so you must. You get in, you buckle up, and you wait for it to happen once more.

You want to defeat your body and so you get in the car, again and again, again and again, and each time you fight, it fights back stronger, reminding you that the knowledge lives in your bones now, deep inside your skin in a place that cannot be touched. You are at its mercy because you can talk about it and you can rail against the world in anger, but it will never go away because how can one possibly pull out what has seeped into one’s bones and become a part of one’s body?

So perhaps the answer then is to get rid of the body itself. Perhaps the only logical thing, the only sane thing, to do is to break those bones. If the body doesn’t live, the memories don’t live either.

You think about it. Over and over, you think about it. But there is more than just that memory mixed into the fiber of your bones. There are other memories, too, happy memories, all gooey and worked up together in a strange concoction. That is physical, too, the beauty. The whoosh in your heart when you stand in the middle of a library surrounded by wall-to-wall bookshelves and the scent of your mother’s fragrance finds its way to your nose, the way she would carry books home from the library, even as they fell because she’d borrowed too many, so many they wouldn’t even fit into her arms. The way she wore stones on her fingers, not diamonds, ever; cheaper ones. A moonstone, a green onyx. Your mother’s hands, long and elegant, unlike yours. Your father’s grey jumper, the one you borrowed so many times, he asked if you wanted to keep it. Your husband’s socks. The ones you insist you never take, but that are on your feet now.

Those memories live in you, too. The way your heart flutters every time you drink a mojito because it was your first. Hemingway’s drink, he said, and he pulled you to him and kissed you, the salt from the glass still on your lips. You felt pleasure explode in you, like a water balloon bursting inside your stomach and spreading its contents outwards to every part of your body, from the inside out. But you felt fear too, because pleasure like this came with pain and you didn’t want that pain again. You did the only thing you knew to do to keep this man with you in the moment but take away his power to cause you pain. You threw yourself at him, asked him to take you back to his place. Years later, you are happily married parents and you are grateful, so grateful, that when you whispered into his ear that night he pushed you away gently. NO. Not because he didn’t want you, but because if he did, you would leave the next morning and he would never see you again. He wanted to see you again. So, no. No. That memory, a happy memory, it lives in your bones too. Someone wanted you more than they wanted sex with you. How foolish would it be to erase that?

And so even though the memories in your bones make you want to rid yourself of the bones themselves, they’re too integrated with the memories that make you want to keep those bones intact. There is no distinction. They’re all together now, mixed up like vegetable soup. Which part is the carrot? Which part is the leek? Who can tell anymore? It’s all just soup. And if you break these bones now, if you jump to your death in this moment that you stand looking into the abyss, you will have lost the pain, but you will have also lost the desire, the pleasure, the warmth that spreads through you when you turn the last page of a book, the way your heart beats faster when you listen to a good tune, the smile that spreads across your face when you watch a movie and the good guys win. You will lose the memory of the abuse, yes, but you will also lose the memory of the tenderness with which he loves you, stopping to look into your eyes, the way his body curls around you afterwards and he moves his fingers over your arm, kissing the crook of your neck, telling you how much he loves you.

So you go to therapy and you listen to a fifty-something professional tell you all that’s wrong with you. Too weak. Too strong. Too passive. Too argumentative. Too accepting. Too challenging. Too indifferent. Too belligerent. Too calm. Too angry. Too measured. Too unpredictable. Too isolated. Too energetic. Too sensitive. Too apathetic. Too antagonized. Too ambitious. Too ambitious. Too ambitious.

The ambition keeps me alive, you say. Knowing that I am capable of an excellence beyond myself makes me want to keep moving towards it, to live for something that is of me, but not me. To be capable of creating something that comes from me, but is not mine. You don’t have to try so hard, she says. If you fail, the government takes care of you. What does your husband make of all this ambition, anyway? Does it not threaten him, the way you speak, the way you act? It excites him, you reply. You see her restraining the urge to pat you on the head and say, Poor dear. She says only, Sure.

Sure. You are sure. You have never been more sure of anything. You are sure now that if ever your death did come at your own hands, it would be a conversation, not a scream. Not a full stop, but ellipses. It would come after books written, prizes won, art created, life lived, people changed, countries traveled, sunrises witnessed, old friends visited, wrinkly hands, sagging boobs, walking sticks, too bad backs, and many, too many, evenings spent sitting by the fire, reading books, watching movies, listening to music you can’t stand in the company of the man you love, who respects your ambition for excellence, and the child you raise with him, the child you’re teaching to be as sure of himself as you are trying to be of you.

You are sure. You are sure now that in the future, when it comes, you do not die before you have lived. You have not yet lived.