i can no longer mend myself
By the end of it, all I knew was this: He may walk away, but I, as a woman, have a mandate from this world to continue suffering.
The thought of him being as traumatized as I am, that memory of ours pervading through years of finer ones, fills me with an inimitable rage so all-consuming that it simply leads me to bed for the better part of the day. It was I who was penetrated, violated, physically marked and psychologically darkened for my entire childhood. It was him who left that bedroom, resided in by his father in his childhood, and it was I who never left. In the years following, I’d have to stay in that wretched room when we took trips to our grandmother’s house in Westchester, lovely and surrounded by all sorts of bushes, looking over the Hudson at Bear Mountain. They’d put out that same air mattress, the same thin white sheet and the easily depressible pillows and I would lay there, tense and straight like a stick, never getting more than a few hours of relief at a time, where my dreams would take me away from the room I was raped in.
There were two night-lights at separate outlets and several lamps. A couch decorated with striped pillows, teddy bears, and letter-shaped cushions that spelled out my grandmother’s initials. A few photos of my cousin’s family decorated the room, and a bulletin board with our family tree laid above the printer. Mostly, it was a harmless utility room, not truly lived-in since my father and his brother were just boys. There was even a window, and the bathroom was simply a few steps into the foyer. Light flooded in from so many points in the room— there was no reason to fear the darkness.
In fact, it happened during the day. The lamps, I can’t remember if they were on. But the window filtered white, mid-day sunlight through the blinds, illuminating the clean sheets freshly laundered with the scent of baby powder and linens, the carpet basking in that warmth. Just harmless five-year-olds, playing doctor in a room where the door is shut.
The door seemed much taller, white and slender, its golden latch-bolt gently shut but never locked. We were never to lock doors (especially myself, who had a habit of desiring privacy, even as a young girl). I remember my cousins being in the room alongside my brother. A plastic tool, my underwear tangled in the sheet, and a fervent understanding that something was deeply wrong. And it was mid-day, it was. I wasn’t even old enough to scrub that feeling of soilage and dinge off my tiny body. We never spoke of it again.
In the pleasant, floaty yesteryears where I felt as though I wasn’t in complete control of my consciousness, I often wondered if it had happened at all. That cousin and I, though: we were never friends. There has always been some distance between us. But worse than the pain that any girl knows from an experience of violation is the guilt of being possibly at fault for her own destruction. He is a year younger than me; how can he have possibly known that what we were doing was wrong? Why am I allowed to blame him, call myself raped, when it felt dirty and squalid but good all the same?
It’s unclear to me which one of us began the play, but all I know is that I was the only one being touched. I had shoved the actual details of this memory so deep, before I knew what arousal was, before I knew even remotely what sex was, into a part of myself so completely shattered by the guilt and abhorrence of what we did that I can no longer assess its truthfulness. Only in recent years did I fully understand the gravity of this experience, and why I would think of it during church and during family meals and especially during prayer. How every time we saw those cousins coming from California or Shanghai or wherever they lived at the moment, I would briefly be unable to access my personal bond with them, a mysterious sense of disgust travelling, I’m sure, between me and them.
Most of all, I am not sure how to receive treatment for this particular ail of mine. I am wholly unable to have pleasurable sex, not just because of this, but because of my plethora of other rape-adjacent experiences, and the moment I begin to give a name to this experience— child-on-child incestual sexual abuse— I am utterly disgusted by my own self, and the urge to end my own life speaks to me like a nurturing whisper in the night. I am not quite sure how to repair myself.