Often at night, a good man will pull a woman close to him with just a bit of force. He will loom large and she will surrender to the masculine spirit that is driven to set a woman's body on fire, for the sheer joy of watching her simmer and burn, then melt happily in his hands. It is a play. They are scene partners, each trusting the other, so as they fall into one another's arms, it is natural to close their eyes.
When that woman closes her eyes, where does she go? What does she see?
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In the evening, when he comes to me, I have two options. If the music is louder than my stories, if the rhythm of that music is slower than my anxious heartbeat, I can close my eyes and fall deeply into my own body, tethered safely to the man holding my hand as I am sucked into delicious oblivion.
But with out that music, I close my eyes and a jagged cave emerges from the darkness. And from that cave a murder of fears and memories fly out, circle me like bats then fly down my throat.
One bat is my father sitting on the stairs of our split-level house in Oregon. He is lovingly stroking the belt in his hands. He is whispering how scared he was while waiting for me to come home from rehearsal for The Music Man. He says its only fair that I should hurt as much as he did. In his dark bedroom. In my teenage underwear.
One bat is my little brother’s voice pleading for his own safety. I stole the walnuts from the kitchen. I lied about it and my father knew of course. So he made me watch my little brother’s head bounce off the kitchen wall as many times as it took for me to confess my crime. What was worse? The burning shame in my heart as my brother took my beating or the burning hole in my stomach because I was just so hungry.
Another bat looks like a boyfriend. He is sitting on our ugly brown couch with a gun in his hands, his eyes struggling to ride the slow waves of whisky and the manic waves of cocaine that was supposed to pay our rent. He is crying like an injured child, begging me for help and saying if we broke up, one of us was going to hurt, and it wasn’t going to be him.
In college, a bat flew in through the television. My male roommates are watching a movie. On a 19 inch screen, a group of men stand in a circle watching another man kill a woman. He suffocates her, covering her face, blotting out her human-ness while simultaneously raping her. My roommates watch the scene with mild interest then ask me what I want on my pizza. They are completely unaware that I am a woman watching men watching other men playact the complete obliteration of some one just like me, for entertainment.
Today, bats fly across my path through televisions, computers, the phones. I don't let them into my own home, but the screens are everywhere. For reasons that escape me, confuse me and horrify me, millions of people think it's fun to watch women stripped naked, tied to steel tables and gutted like fish between commercials. Millions of humans chitchat while scenes of women who look overwhelmingly just like me, are raped and tortured as dinner theater or back ground music, light jazz.
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These scenes, and many more, live in my head, stored photographs. But they are not always spread out on the table. Mornings are safe. Mornings, full of light, sheets made soft by 8 hours proof of safety with the man I trust, are glorious. My body wakes quietly in his hands and mind follows with out fear. In the morning the bats are still asleep. They sleep all day.
But at night, when all the Bad Things happened, when he touches me, the bats wake up. Unless there is very loud music to hypnotize me, I must keep my eyes open, to keep me from being sucked backward, to keep those scenes from ruffling behind my eyes like a flip book.
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