My Body, My Story

What I forgot, for years and years, were the details of what my body experienced at the time. But my body did not forget.

Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement, edited by Shelly Oria (McSweeney’s, September 2019). Reprinted with permission.

There is a story that lives inside my body. My body does not lie. We say listen to your gut, but I have learned to listen with my liver, my lungs, my back, my sternum, my palms, my teeth. I have left men because their gas-lighting left my jaw sore; I have imagined my beloved’s departure and read love in the twinge in my chest. I have felt guilt trapped in the cold sweat on my spine, security in the bright light expanding in my lungs after laughter.

Sometimes my body tells me things whether I want to know them or not. Sometimes it keeps secrets from me, burying them until the day I crack a memory open. That’s when my body surprises.

For years, I told this story with laughter: Deep in throes of depression, caught in an unhealthy relationship with X, a man who was lying to me, I met up with a different man, Y, an old friend, for drinks. Both of us temporarily back in the city we had moved away from, the city where X lived.

I’d tell how we got drunk, bought condoms, booked a hotel room, tried to have sex, could not have sex because he was too drunk to maintain an erection. How, exhausted, the alcohol wearing us down, we tumbled over into sleep.

I awoke to him on top of me! I’d laugh to friends, at the big surprise turn of the story. Already fucking me! How I saw my phone on the bedside table and began to text X behind Y’s back.

Literally behind his back! I’d say, delighted. He was so drunk he didn’t even notice. This was the punchline of the story, the hilarious image of a man drunkenly thrusting and grunting against me, oblivious as I indifferently texted someone else.

How crazy is that?

And then the finale: how, when X asked to see me, I pushed Y off my body and locked myself in the bathroom, calling X before running back out to pull on my clothes. How I fled the hotel room with incoherent apologies, leaving behind a gold bracelet I loved.

The worst thing, I’d say, was leaving that bracelet behind, all for a horrible one-night stand!

As I grew older, my understanding of consent evolved and so did the vocabulary I used to describe this incident. Hilarious story turned to gray area to assault to rape. Even after I came to the realization that I’d indeed experienced a form of assault, I recited the statement as fact, not as lived bodily experience. It sucked but I’m not traumatized, I maintained. Maybe it barely qualifies as assault.

What I forgot, for years and years, were the details of what my body experienced at the time. But my body did not forget.

I’d been trying to write this story down for this essay for weeks, but I kept finding excuses not to. Work I had to do, movies I had to see, long chats with friends who needed my advice. With the deadline looming, I tried to write a pared-down third-person version, a narrator like a hovering eye. I failed. Finally, I braved a first-person, linear, confessional account. I’ve told this story before. I just have to tell it with a little bit more honesty.

How hard can it be?

It was in the process of trying to be accurate that I became aware, with alarm and surprise, of the nausea mounting in my gut, of the way my throat was closing up, of how suddenly I felt like I could not breathe and yet I might vomit if I tried to save myself from asphyxiation. I feel this now, at the very moment I am typing this. Each key is difficult to press. Each word results in a throb, a pulse against the insides of my chest, my throat, my eyelids.

I remember now: the sudden confusion of waking to pressure, the gray light filtering through the windows, the disorientation. The pain of it, the rough stickiness of dry skin being peeled and chafed, the fisted meat shoving itself through me. The numb realization that he was not wearing a condom. His closed eyes hanging above mine, his morning breath hot against my skin. The turn of my head to look at something else, anything else, because I felt I had no right to say no.

The clamminess of my palm wrapping around my phone. The stupefaction at the understanding that, at that moment, I was so little of a person to Y that he had not even noticed. The relief to find that X—whom I both loved and hated—had texted. The irrational flood of salvation worming through me. The cold bathroom tile shocking my bare butt as I huddled and dialed his number. The chilly November dawn outside the hotel.

And later: the bruises on my thighs. The soreness of my crotch. The dirty linoleum of the Walgreens floor where I crouched as I confessed to X what had happened. The two hours I huddled in X’s shower, crying. The two days of diarrhea I suffered after that, apropos of nothing. The humiliation I thought the doctor could see when I went in for STD testing. The way I hated my body for weeks, wanting to claw off my own skin with my nails or sandpaper or razors.

I had forgotten all of this because I’d told no one about it for years—no one except X, who, despite all of his assholery, stilled my hands that day and insisted I was not dirty or disgusting or deserving of everything that had happened. And so time passed, and I survived—the rape, the depression, the terrible relationship with X—and the narrative changed in my mind and I forgot. Until now.

I am not interested, now, in pointing fingers or burning Y’s life down. For better or for worse, I feel absolutely nothing towards him. What I am interested in is my body. The memory that lives in my body.

What I am interested in is my body. The memory that lives in my body.

My body that cannot lie. It is a body that has so often been out of my control. A body that our culture told Y was his for the taking, even in my sleep. It is a body that is legislated by men who have never met me. A body society feels it has a right to shame, to put standards upon, to comment on. A body disrespected by men who have taken from me both consensually and non-consensually. A body cherished, enjoyed, cared for by men who have loved me.

It is a body that has laughed and ached and danced and a body that I have sometimes sought to destroy, especially during the period of my life when I thought I deserved every bad thing that came my way. It is a body that often reaches for fight or flight, a body my therapist has determined has rewired itself due to PTSD. It is a body whose womb hopes to one day carry a child, a body that grows lean and certain from daily runs, a body that knows my craving for good food is the surest sign that I am happy.

It is a body that has not forgotten what it has survived, even if I want to tell another story.

A week after the incident, Y emailed me and said he had my bracelet. I asked him to mail it to me, but he kept forgetting. Months later, we both knew we would be at a friend’s birthday party. When I arrived, he was standing outside the bar, smoking. Without a word, he reached into his pocket with his free hand and gave me my bracelet.

Thank you, I said, smiling awkwardly. I did not hug him. For years, I wore that bracelet with various outfits, relieved to have it back in my possession. In retrospect, I think I felt it was a token of what I did not lose that morning.

And now I wait to see if telling this story, if putting it into words made permanent by ink and paper, will help exorcise the symptoms rushing through my body. I wait to see if this is how we begin to heal our bodies, by airing out what we have forced them to reckon with silently, protectively, alone.