by: Clara Dunn
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A___
It is midnight, this document looks like bright white surgical DMs and I would never actually write this letter to you. Because of you, the creature that sleeps inside my dirty white ribs is awake once more and gnawing on old wounds, like the sting of your after-midnight needs. You should know that I do not miss you tonight, or in the mornings, or when you come up in conversation as “the guy that did whatever”, but you are peppered in me – buckshot stuck in scar tissue. My limbs are supple and slick and wrung out with one long night’s use. Yesterday I was pink and dishevelled and satisfied again and yet still, there is the thumping ache and pressure and memory of you.
I thought I had done the work, more than tape and glue to put myself back in one gold-lined piece.
And yet, I am in bed with the ghost and there is the soil-clad sound-clip of your huff and the bedspring-creaking twitch of you not quite sleeping and your shadow rising between my ankles and –
Every boy I meet threatens to become you.
And the last man I shouldn’t have been with left me dripping and marked and gasping but there was a sparkle in his eyes – or was that just the big light? – and a softness in his features that seemed at odds with the things my body remembered.
It has been 453 days and I have spent many hours replaying the snippets that I remember of that night: the brush of your nose under my ear and the press –
Let’s not.
There is beer in my bloodstream – admittedly not much – and fire in the thump of my heart.
I have become cum-rag again, ragdoll, at least that’s what the throbbing inside my ribs is trying to tell me, and the impulse to spiral is rising, and I am doing my best to blink it back. The burn I collected in that sad November is tingling and I would scratch it and I would go to the kitchen but there are sharp edges in the kitchen. And with a mood like this I can get clumsy. I can give in to thoughts that are without the range of the happy and yellow character I cultivate for the boys that come to feel me up.
You were drunk.
And in the haze, you have gone down as a charming drunk, stumbling, smiling, losing track of the glasses on your nose.
My shoulders are prickling again but I do not remember if they were then and why did the alarm system grow into me after the event?
Just being on your side of the city has me thinking about the slick way we knit our pink bodies together and left a bloodstain – cum-stains – on that velvet sofa, and how we fought over a duvet in the dawn-light, and just these three flashes have my stomach doing back-flips and you don’t think about me and I don’t think about you quite so much anymore.
This is not the first or last poem I have written you
or the first shout
or the last troubling, bursting affect I will put on to talk to you.
I painted the target for you, told you all the wet pink daydreams I use to cure my low-mood hangovers and midweek menial labour depressions, imagined you as the satisfaction to complement the thirst in me, the one that springs from a well so deep that I’m no longer sure of its source.
I wish that it were as simple as you’re an asshole A___! I wish that it were as simple as hopping into an angular little movie-favourite car and whizzing back through the seconds to undo it, to see you lurch out of that packed hatchback and know from the backslaps that you weren’t in the mood to sleep and to lock the door hard against your desire.
And I remember thinking, this is what it took for me to learn the lesson? I thought it was you. I thought it was you. I thought it was you. I thought there was an us, you sent me a tawdry love heart and sweet nothings and you pulled the rug and I fell, screaming I thought there would be an us. And there are only so many break-up songs to listen to and there is only so much heart-pounding I can endure and the day you said you’d come, you said you were coming, and I sat by the window and waited until the only thought in my head when you had me pinned was didn’t you want this, didn’t you want something?
And it is hard to know how to pay myself reparations for abuse I ignored in the name of fantasy.
It’s not as if I can erase you.
The ghost of your body still lies with me
and I’m not hateful, not one to let my pink insides fill with that rot, so there’s no shouting obscenities when your spectre looms over my shoulder or when I hear the Snapchat pop.
I know that revenge is in the script, but I do not have violence in me. I might wish you the scratch of a needle missing the vein ten thousand times over, but I will not sink the pins into you myself. I can imagine the altercation, have written before the sharp citrus words I could throw at you – called you vampire – but there would be no standing tall before you.
Every day that I don’t report, that I don’t tell the story of that night, that I don’t use That Word, is another day that I stand sentry to your innocence.
I’m good at it – grenadier blinking back the tickle of the chin strap, I stare right ahead.
You go about your business unaffected. You don’t remember. You think maybe I just needed to be sweetened, called the kisses I had to beg for adding sugar.
I write this bopping my hips to pop music, wearing another boy’s hoodie and still reeking faintly of his cum, anticipating another block of conversations with a qualified someone.
I write this knowing it doesn’t really help.
I write this knowing tricks won’t put this behind me.
I write this as an act of aggression.
I write this to say look at the rubble you have made of me.
I write this to say that I was raped.
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