I don’t want to be here again, staring into the gullet of familial history, waiting for another monstrous memory to emerge like vomit, hissing and acid, burning my skin, the skin of the world, away.
I don’t want to be here again, in that terrible closed off place where my father rapes me again and again.
I don’t want to be here again, this place of not-wanting, this place of refusal, this place where I split from myself and live in the gaps and cut-off corners, my body like a colonized land split into pieces, artificially divided zones mapped out by my father-rapist, my conqueror, in collaboration with the treacherous parts of me. But maybe that’s not right. In at least two ways. Whose responsibility is my pain, now? My disconnection, now? And as much as the divisions hurt and cost me, they were (and sometimes are) necessary for my survival. They could be barricades built by the resistance. The first duty of a revolutionary is to survive. Yes, and the second duty of a revolutionary is to remember, to reconnect that which has been severed. But survival must come first. And so the revolution-within-me may now be tearing down the barricades they once built in self-defense. But, Goddess, I wish it did not hurt so much.
Tags: father, incest, male survivors, radical, revolution, sexual abuse, sexual violence, surviving, trauma
