The Thing I'm Not Saying

TW: SA

There was a different essay, before this.

I had been writing it for three years, because it’s been three years since It happened, the Capital I It, which neatly (brutally) cleaved my life into Before and After. Only it wasn’t so neat, because really that story began months earlier, in a hotel room, but that was the other essay, this one is different.

I wrote it. I edited it. I edited it again. For three years I pored over every word, every em dash, every line break. My finger hovered over Publish, I published something else, over and over I published something else. Over and over I gave this ugly thing power by refusing to name it, by conceding it was my One Great Shame. After all, I was no stranger to talking about hard things, I talked about everything else, but not this, never this, lest I become A Girl A Thing Happened To. A Girl, The Girl, you tell this story and then you are all One Girl, the royal Girl, the universal primordial Girl, experiencing the universal primordial violation, over and over, ad infinitum, it’s not even interesting, he was my boyfriend.

It was a different essay. I explained everything. Now I explain nothing. Now I offer glimpses. The way a man doused in alcohol can set you on fire without you ever having a drop to drink. The city of Savannah, as hot and wet and inviting as a womb. My lover, the one who did not do this, with his arm around me by the water, watching the barges float by, the engagements and the bachelorette parties, and I cried in his arms while we slow danced to Stapleton, fingertips still stained violet with juice from plums devoured greedily over the sink, eating almonds and frozen mango while he smoked, while storms shook the Spanish moss outstretched over the tour buses under his balcony, and I just kept thinking how I might have been there with the man who did this vast and unspeakable thing. This is a different essay.

It was a different essay, it was the same story. I left. This was brave, a small consolation for having been stupid enough to be there in the first place. I left and went directly into my humid Southern summer, three seasons of flight, I would have been anywhere but here, inside myself, with this. I got abandoned, suddenly I was grieving everything, more than the loss of the man who did not do this, I grieved what I lost at the hands of the man who did. Grief is a hole whose shape I still have not memorized, in darkness I grope along the walls of myself and even now I fall in. That is this essay. This essay is the shape of my grief, this song, other songs too, the sound of it.