It happens every time.
2003-09-23

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Visions of sugarplums were the furthest from my head this night.

It hurts in my belly.

I hate pap tests, gynecological exams, the whole ballgame.

Dave asked how it felt and in that way that I have learned to speak to him from the heart I told him honestly.

It feels like rape.

I get up on that table, just like thirteen years ago, I'm in a room I walked into half-knowing I'd regret it, someone tells me to take off my clothes and moments later I'm tense and vulnerable and lying on my back and someone is putting something that I don't want, inside me.

I don't go very often.

I always revisit that ghost afterwards. That ghost that barely bothers me anymore, that keeps its head tucked away during hollywood violence, causing me to cringe and nothing more.

I have a thousand metaphors but not enough courage to type one out.

It hurts in my belly, the vague ache of the scraping of a pap smear, amplified by my own terror.

I didn't sleep very well last night, again. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a school filled with every face I've ever shared words with, sitting quietly on tables while faceless people came for them one by one. Every one. I watched, helpless, waking up shaking only to fall into the same nightmare.

Again and again until it was 5am and only an hour until I had an excuse to be awake.

I dreamed of a beast called rape, wearing a satin outfit and immortalized by the press, every journalist pointing doutbing, accusing fingers at all men. I dreamed of trying to stop them, tell them that isn't it, that isn't it at all, it isn't about men, or women or vulnerability, it isn't the tv-movie nightmare that tells us to question every penis-bearer we know because everyone is a potential rapist. They're not. I can list a hundred names that aren't, that are just as beaten by this slick satiny beast, that sit and watch their loved ones break and try to understand.

It hurts, inside.

Dr. Wong is a good woman, professional and intelligent, we spoke of the weather and the upcoming elections and the project I'm working on and her own data privacy concerns. She is giving me a referral to a cardiologist, she has ideas about my blood pressure and some of them are terryfing and some of them simply suggest factors that the internet had not dug up for me.

I watched so many faces go blank and numb in that dream last night, I watched them lose hope and expression. I watched them one by one and that mute part of me screamed soundlessly.

Dave was there when I got home, and I spoke of little things while we hugged and screamed inside. We sat together and he asked me how it felt and because he is different from any human I have ever touched I could tell him. I'd tried before, the three times I'd been to a gynecologist since college. I'd tried telling boyfriends and lovers at the time and they stared at me with as much sympathy as their kind hearts could muster and I spent a few nights crying and it was forgotten again.

I told him. I told him it feels like rape, the way my body responds despite my will. The way my body lubricates to ease the passage of the speculum. When the doctors pulls out I feel that lubrication leak out of me, as though it were someone else's.

I have had good gynecologists and bad ones. I've switched cities often enough to conventiently forget to visit them. I've read every write up for teenage girls and their first exam in the hopes that soothing familyplanning words will talk me out of it this time.

It was one night, thirteen years ago. I was a lonely, terrified child, getting attention from a boy with cool hair who never laced up his sneakers. I was stupid, I asked for it. I know the rules. I understand what happened, I understand what happened years later when he reappeared and started dating a friend and I was stupid enough to think I should warn her.

It was one event. There have been a thousand worse nights, cold and violent and alone, dangerous and even promiscuous. There are a thousand terrors that I exposed myself to intentionally, arrogantly, trying to learn how not to feel.

It was thirteen years ago.

I don't want this ghost anymore.

It hurts, inside.

It isn't the first time.

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3 comments on this spew so far

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Last few Rants:

I guess this is goodbye. - 11:57 a.m. , 2005-02-10
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Imposter syndrome strikes again - 1:20 p.m. , 2005-01-19