Britney

I find myself miraculously suspended in a mess of past, present, and future, unable to relate to anything but the biting rope of time snaked around my ankle. The only pockets of sleep that I am able to crawl into are lined with selections from my vault of repression and fantastical accounts of my everyday tragedies. I become a spectacle no matter where I turn.

I think of red, enveloping myself in it and becoming a fetish for Aphrodite or some envious younger sister who churns her rage into sex like butter. I think of the Virgin Mary, whose calling-card I found on the day of her messenger’s supposed visit. The subway’s rank steps have always offered me more than any chapel, and taken less, too.

I think of the boy I knew at church when I was 10 and he was 15 who had a crush on me. We were both altar children and I couldn’t understand his infatuation. Our game was being mad at each other—he would call me a name, I would call him two. I would tease him beneath the communion wine cabinet and he would follow me down the hall to wrestle me, his hands swimming to the bank beneath my chest and lingering there until he heard footsteps. One day, when we were lying in a crumple of white altar robes, he told me to kiss him. I remember it being one of the first times my thought loop had come to a full halt, the only substance in my head being the dual image of his overly polished snakeskin Sunday shoes and the fair cotton in front of me. I’d had an obsession with first kisses that saved me from being eaten by him, one that dictated that I would only allow it to happen when I was really attracted to a person that I wouldn’t mind remembering forever. I don’t remember how I made him leave but I did. I quit being an altar girl and sat in the back row until I stopped going to church. “Boys will be boys,” the priest told me.

“You should have screamed and ran,” my mother said as she washed my hair after bringing me home. “Isn’t that what I taught you? When a stranger tries to do something to you that’s what you do.”

He hadn’t been a stranger. It wasn’t like she’d told me the attempts to steal me away would be like. The fear factor had always lain in the image of an unknown lurking behind me in his car, or approaching me to ask for my assistance in looking for his lost dog.

I think about the man who spent hours and hours telling me all the different ways in which he would hurt me, and then even more time telling me that I wanted it, all while his wife slept beside him. I think about him telling me how much he wanted to watch me skate and how he would never get bored and how much he wanted to visit me and how transparent it all was, but how little I saw because I was infinitely smaller than I fully realized, the way we always are before our next progression in life. I think about how many poems I write with his image melded onto those of all the other, lesser abusers in my life, a Frankenstein of unwantedness for my own private crucifixion. Strangers I welcomed into my own home with a too-warm grin, and ones who broke in through the basement window. Another spectacle.

I consider all the other ones I can’t name: the two men who found me when I blacked out in France, the tens upon tens of men who have stopped me in the street to ask me if I can really ride my skateboard, the hundreds if not thousands of men who have yelled at me for my number or to fuck or even to marry me, the same hundreds of those who have gone into great detail in the middle of the street about how they would fulfill my uncommunicated desires, the ones who lurk on the social media of my friends and I because, with the end of the era of chat rooms, they can forgo the coercion and settle into intense sexualization under the guise of blind admiration, the boy in ninth grade who got so mad when he found out that I had a girlfriend that he called me a dyke every day for a week and told me that he hadn’t known that I liked to eat out, the teacher who made eye contact with my chest for a day and would only talk to me out of all the seniors in my class and stuttered when I asked him questions, a much needed et cetera. I am afraid of how long this list grew before my eyes as I wrote, and even more afraid of the fact that there are more offenses to be named, and absolutely paralyzed by the thought that this will only double itself annually for the remainder of my days. No matter how resilient and combative I become it persists. Boys will be boys. ♦