tw: ptsd, sexual abuse
close your eyes and let the contents of your day dissipate as you embark on this journey of letting go. allow your consciousness to fade and follow my lead as you find yourself standing at the gate to your inner garden. here, the sunlight pools beneath your feet. reach down and dip a finger into this golden puddle; place a drop of nectar on your tongue. feel its warmth, this liquid force that sustains you, seep into every pore of your being as you push open the gate to your mind's world. as the gate latches behind you, drink in the heady scent of plum blossoms; listen for the babble of brook and birdsong. in the center of your garden flows a river of ether through which your thoughts swirl and empty. as the earth beneath you softens into riverbank, uproot the thought that's been occupying your headspace. watch it drift, slowly, across the ether, and disappear along the horizon. as the afternoon sun sinks toward the river, gaze down at the row of plants from which you've plucked the thought and realize that some of them are dying. brittle leaves wilt into the dirt, a rot of fruit cloying the air. you must tend to your plants to keep them sane. as you turn to scoop ether into your hands, you notice the gate has swung open. the birds have stopped singing. instead, your ears buzz with a hollowed radio static like the angry black scribbles littering your journal. you abandon the plants and step back towards the gate. as you walk, your foot catches on something soft, and you pause. in the dirt before you lies a pair of lacy white panties. torn. you turn back towards the river. for a moment, you quiet yourself in swirling your fingers in the ether. imagine it cleaning your body once and for all. you sink to your knees on the riverbank, and for the first time, you notice the plum-colored bruises mottling your thighs. the static hums, metallic, as thin lines scribble across your vision. you begin to wonder why you are doing what you are told. why even in this meditation someone has wrest autonomy from your body. as the black intensifies you are thrust into split seconds of memory that seize your body and release it. you reach for those pools of honeyed light but all that is left for you is this darkness that engulfs the garden until you're left staring at the black of your closed eyelids. the static dulls and fades, overlaid by a gentle melody that drifts through your headphones as the track begins again. close your eyes and let the contents of your day dissipate as you embark on this journey of letting go. legs pretzeled on the office chair
eyes glued to windows reflecting everyone's eyes glued to screens wild thing, i can't curl my shoulders into the wooden desk when i've seen wood green and sprawling, wood that isn't wood yet isn't material meant for harvesting and wielding isn't four walls whispering workworkwork when i've seen woods that blanket the mountainside lush and dangerous, woods that would never bend to one's bidding fourteen & everyone says you're mature for your age. you've been in love with love since you learned how to dream. precocious children move quicker through life, so when his name lights up your phone at midnight, you don't fall. you leap.
fourteen & your drawn-on eyebrows loom too dark on the moon of your face. you're relieved when you're sat in the shadows of the furthest booth, & he drapes his arm around your bony shoulders. in this darkness he says you look seventeen. fourteen & his closest friends drool over you. when he passes you his phone & you see getting some pussy tonight? all you understand is that you're wanted by men who drink beer & play golf. you feel the color bloom to your cheeks, & he grins. i like it when you blush. fourteen & he teaches you how to keep secrets from your parents. you're so happy to romeo-and-juliet it that the lies drip from your lips like molasses. suddenly, you're best friends with his younger sister, you're going to extra orchestra rehearsals, you're staying up late to work on a physics project, mom, let me finish. in the dead of night you let yourself journal about him, shiver at the permanence of inked secrets. i'd die for him, you pen into the dented notebook no one will read, then back it sinks into the depths of your closet. fourteen & your older sister worries for you. you're not sleeping, you're hardly eating; he's got you counting every chicken breast, spending hours whittling your face in the mirror. she's heard things through the grapevine, crossed paths with his friends one too many times. i didn't think he'd be your type, anna, he's older than me. something is burning in your chest, but you look away from her to the rows of young heroines on your bookshelf. you don't understand; this is love. fourteen & five days before your birthday he tells you he never loved you at all. you've misconstrued things, you're mistaken, maybe if you were older you'd understand. you want to say that you are older, in five days you'll be older, but you know these words make you all the more a child. in another lifetime, we'd end up together, he texts you, and you wonder: in this lifetime, why won't he try? fifteen & the absence of his birthday message on your phone hits you like a tidal wave. when, the next day, you wake up to happy late birthday, i miss you, you find yourself scattered among your soiled tissues, crumpled & lost on the floor. fifteen & he will string you along for the next four months until the pictures finally surface on your screen & you text him. you had a girlfriend this whole time? your phone highlights the last word he'll ever text you. yes. fifteen & you think your world has ended for the umpteenth time. you're convinced it was all your fault: stupidly, hopelessly romantic. gullible is written on the ceiling, your best friend teases, & though you laugh, the girl you thought you were is fracturing. how gullible you must have been, to believe that anyone could ever want you. how gullible, to believe that the beautiful lies he fed you would sustain. fifteen & as you watch him gallivant off to college, you swear off men. never again will you be reduced to this sniveling mess. sixteen & as time has not healed all wounds, you wonder if you'll ever love again. seventeen & you don't understand why on every first date you go on you're simply waiting for the red flags to surface. you mistake boredom for stability & immaturity for good intention, but as you grow older you know if anything at least you've learned caution. eighteen & as you near the end of your high school days you see the fourteen-year-olds congregate in the cafeteria & you know you'd never even think of them that way. you leaf through the dented notebook in the depths of your closet & you cry for that girl who didn't know better. you cry for the four-year-old tearstains already blurring the scribbled letters. you cry because it is the first time you can look back at this notebook without blaming yourself even a little bit. eighteen & you don't even know where he is at this point but that is not what this is about. at eighteen you want to write a letter to all the books & shows of your youth that romanticized age gaps, that told you that you were a means to an end, that painted you a gilded mirage of what it means to love. at eighteen you wonder why you have never seen love as gentle, have never learned to hold friendship & family love with as much fervent care, have never learned to hold yourself for the simple sake of only you. at eighteen, you are unlearning the obsessive, all-consuming love you were taught as a child; & someday past eighteen you'll realize that with love, there is no such thing as precocious. after Danez Smith
my first thought when i return home from stanford is that the world here is cast in a whole different color palette: mottled greens and earthy browns, muted tones shrouded in overcast gray. i think, no wonder twilight was shot with that depressive blue tint. this is it: overbearing, yet accurate. on visits home, i always pay my respects to the sprawling park that raised me, a five-minute walk away. here, the landscape is stark and brutally juvenile, as if rendered by a child: scribbles of green crayoned onto bulbous rock forms, bare trees jagged against the paper-white sky. i perch on the edge of what i like to call my dissociation bench, staring down at my murky reflection in the pond water. like me, this park is half wild thing, half contained creation. half stifled by home, half free and wandering. each time i return home spawns a deep reflection into who i was growing up, and how i continue to be shaped and defined by the places that surround me. every now and then, i'll catch myself slipping back into the throes of childhood: watching the width of my arms and thighs multiply in the glossy black water, feeling my tongue fumble and forget how to speak as i avoid eye contact at the cash register. something about being home reeks of the intense self-doubt that characterized my youth, and in a town as small and difficult to leave as ours, sometimes that scent feels impossible to escape. on a coffee date with one of my closest friends growing up, she told me she'd had a setback a few weeks ago. a mutual friend, with whom she'd had a fraught, often painful relationship, had re-entered her life and brought with her a spiral into the same emotions that had plagued her years ago. my friend told me how frightened she felt. she'd thought that she'd grown so much since then, had matured into an emotionally resilient woman secure in the beautiful and sustaining relationships she'd developed in her new home. it haunted her: what did that growth even mean, and how much did it even matter, when a few texts could send her sprawling right back into the person she'd once been? my friends and i would often joke, post-leaving, about how we'd finally made it out of issaquah. how it had been a gradual thing, each of us leaving one by one as our claustrophobia grew insurmountable. for one friend, admission to a private high school an hour away was the ticket out during eighth grade. for another, their family's move to a larger house brought with it an escape from issaquah's scrutiny in sophomore year. i was one of the few who remained until the last possible moment, caught in issaquah's grasp until i finally got into stanford. and some days, i resented that. when covid-19 struck, it brought with it my first reprieve from daily visits to issaquah high, and in that awful moment, i felt myself take a breath. i had gotten to a point of social anxiety where i would hide in the first-floor bathrooms every morning until the bell rang, to avoid being perceived as the unkempt nobody i felt i was. each time i passed by the glass case of trophies in the hallway would prompt an obsessive glimpse at my reflection, a harried pat-down of the flyaway hairs on my head, a long, resigned exhale. when 2020 came about, in the quietude of home i began finding moments of self-love; began the arduous journey toward feeling in tune with my body. later, it often felt like an important revelation that i'd needed to make it out of issaquah for my self-love to fully be realized. a few days ago, another close friend from home chatted with me late into the night about a conversation with a college friend who claimed to have never been dissatisfied with her own appearance. when our shared experiences of dysmorphia had functioned as such formative traumas in our adolescent lives, it felt almost inconceivable to have never looked in the mirror and feared what stared back, to have never looked at another woman and ached sorely to switch bodies. living in issaquah, we undoubtedly had our own fair share of privileges; but what a privilege that must have been, to grow up in a space that doesn't wear down at your insecurities until you're beaten to a pulp. when we discuss the ache of home, my friends and i often struggle to pinpoint what exactly made our experience living here feel so raw. was it issaquah itself, or just the normal growing pains of adolescence? were these pains intensified by the people and world around us? was this a unique struggle for our group of high-achieving peers, who shared the burdens of grappling with queer identity and cultural frictions while navigating grating academic pressures? did this pain end up serving a purpose—fulfilling that everything happens for a reason bullshit—and shaping us into stronger, more resilient people? yet why is it that some of our peers in college seem to have grown up never having experienced a similar kind of hurt? these kinds of conversations with the women who raised me are both grounding and jarring. after living in college with people who have only known this adult version of me for a year, it feels rare to find myself in the presence of people who truly get it. people who understand me in fewer words, who also feel the inward tug of deep-seated loneliness when they speak of their hometown. since coming to california, i've often felt like stanford is a place where sadness should not exist. with its campus decked out sunnily like a vacation resort, palm trees that can't help but look like plastic lining every street, stanford feels like this utopia where all the pieces fell into place and we are living out a long-held dream. a place where work hard, play hard is more a lived reality than an aspirational mantra. whenever my age-old insecurities inevitably creep back into consciousness at stanford, i feel this sense of incongruity, this disjointedness. the visibility of my anxiety does not belong at this school where duck syndrome prevails, where i must keep up this work hard, play hard facade to hide the way i am paddling furiously beneath the surface. and the phenomenon of duck syndrome is real: sadness does exist, but more often than not it's swept under the rug, and people keep their struggles to themselves. what is visible, instead, is how differently we all grew up from each other, the layers of childhood privilege present in different pockets of the student body. the way some of our friends grew up with vibrant cultural communities their whole lives and now don't feel the same need to prove themselves worthy of a place where there was a gaping hole in the past. the way some of our friends never had to unearth an identity hidden deep within them and unlearn the heavily internalized shame threatening to rebury it. sometimes when i speak to my stanford friends about the ache of home, i can feel their good-hearted sympathy sprinkling down on me, like rain in a california drought. yet when i speak with my home friends about this ache, our empathy radiates between us like an embrace: a shelter we share within the cold. i do not write this to mean that i am dissatisfied with the friends i've made, or even with stanford as a whole. in california, i've had the space to grow into womanhood, and i'm grateful to have learned so much from the diverse upbringings of those around me. but when i sit on dissociation benches steeped in california sun, sometimes i long to be held by the people who truly know me, who can read my melancholy in a single glimpse and feel it echo in the chambers of their hearts. california, with your color palette of sapphire and gold, with your days of perpetual light—do you know this kind of warmth? not the glitter of a sun's rays, but the love that radiates from the chests of those who bore witness to their coming of age—of the only warm things for miles around? Ma hated the duck.
Hated its featherless skin, the way its bloodless limbs splayed in surrender. In the heating wok’s glow she felt a painful kinship with that derobed creature who existed to be stuffed with pearled rice and dressed in dark wine until one forgot the carcass plated before them. When, after an hour, Ba stalked in to bark, Where's dinner? her only answer was the doll-like bird-- skeletal wings clothed and sauced in gold until she could almost ignore how, once, she flew. Ma speaks of her childhood in cycles:
time marked not only by the passing of days but by the rows of seedlings sown into soil like children tucked into bed, asleep until the day swollen melons would burst from the earth, and, cleaved in half, would be spooned out and emptied by her brothers, tiny seeds expelled until they, too, could be sown into the ground. The end of my childhood spawned a new age marked by cycles. I circle the 5th of each month for the day my insides will be scooped out like a melon, metal spoon skimming off seeds as red juice runs down my jeans. As the week wanes my abdomen will pucker in angry pink, overripe, until swollen flesh yields to dormancy: seeds safe within the earth. When I speak of childhood Ma laughs at my time before cycles when a month was still a month, when my jeans would be stained only with mud as I romped about the playground. Before a month became a marker in the dirt of the days since germination and the days until once more I will lie, quietly, on a quilted heating pad and shed my membrane. TW: mentions of rape, violence, kidnapping
Ma, I'm still afraid to sleep at night. When I was small, I'd wedge myself into the crevice between bed and wall and watch the shadows converge into hulking figures. Swathed to my chin in blankets, I'd imagine the creatures that would nip at my toes should they escape my covers, imagine the porcelain doll on my bookshelf pinpointing me with her glass eyes. With my heart in my throat I'd come padding to your bedside and roll your earlobe between my fingers until you sat up and tucked me in beside you. In the crook of your arm I found safety. In the crook of your arm my breaths evened into slumber. As I grew, the shadows waxed and waned. When I became too big to fall asleep in your arms, you taught me a trick for irrational fears. Being afraid of something like this, mei, that's ridiculous. You have to learn to laugh at yourself, to say, 'that could never happen.' So when the silhouettes merged into a spindly-limbed demon, I needed only to remember that demons don't exist. When they formed the watery grin of a knife-wielding clown, I needed only to remember the improbability of his presence. I slept soundly for a few years; learned to quiet the nonsense that enveloped my brain. You laughed: Mei, remember when you would run to my bed? We laughed at the dolls, the clowns; we watched It and didn't turn away. Then, I came of age, and our laughter faded to shadow. When I turned sixteen, you gave me my first pepper spray. It came in a cheerful pink container, accompanied by your cautionary words: Mei, you must never walk anywhere alone. Cover yourself. Never let your guard down. If there's a bad guy, use this. When I drifted to sleep that night, my monsters evolved with these words until they bore the faces of rapists and killers. I tried rational thinking: That's ridiculous. That could never happen. But this time, your words said otherwise. Daily, you told me the figures in the darkening news: five girls my age gone missing in a Seattle neighborhood. Bodies found bloated in the Green River, thirty minutes from my home. How improbable was it that the dark figure against the wall bore the face of a pedophilic stalker? Of Ted Bundy, who kidnapped girls from the Lake Sammamish parking lot where I picnicked? Sixteen-year-old girl disappears from Issaquah park. I was the demographic screaming across the headlines. I began shying away from dark streets and short skirts, pepper spray forever embedded in my pocket. On nighttime walks to check the mail, or release an intruding spider, my pepper spray remained clenched tightly in my fist. Even a ten-meter radius around my home was not enough security against the "bad guys" I feared were lurking in the shadows. Alone in my bedroom, I learned to drift to sleep with one eye open until I'd drained myself enough for it to finally fall shut. The second it did, the image of a man with a knife was imprinted on my eyelids. When Ba and you left me home alone for ten nights, this expanse of house, this expanse of bed, should have been the one place I felt safe. Instead it felt completely cut off from the world. On my first night alone, I tried rationality. I thought, Ted Bundy only lured girls from the lake in broad daylight. I'm safe here in my bed. Then my restless brain found me scrolling through grisly crime scene descriptions to find that he assaulted several girls in their homes as they slept. I grew attuned to silence. When I sneezed at night, I'd freeze for a full minute knowing that anyone in the house had been alerted to my precise location. Repetitively, I mapped the escape routes out the windows, considered whether I'd rather roll to the bone crush of asphalt or stay inside the house to be killed. How I'd run into the master bedroom because it's the only one that locks, and then the master bathroom deadbolts inside, the walk-in closet creating a final barricade: a three-fold barrier to slow down the killer as I opened the closet window and navigated the least bone-crushing path to the asphalt. When I resorted to sleeping only when humanly dire, the monsters found me again at daylight. One morning a stranger came to my door, selling me pest control before unblinkingly asking for a favor: a glass of water on a hot day. My tongue scrambled for a polite excuse and came up empty. I turned, grabbed a bottle, and sent him on his way. Only once the door was shut and bolted did I crumple to the floor and sob, mind flashing to Ted Bundy in the parking lot. My sailboat's stuck. Can you do me a favor? When the man returned thrice in the next two days, I hid behind the door, eyes flush against the peephole until he disappeared down the street. When the ten nights were up, you didn't know why I couldn't stop crying in your arms, why I began sleeping with my bedroom door open so I knew you were always there. At eighteen, I was one month away from moving out of this house and into my own place eight hundred miles away. Mei, in college I won't be around to help you anymore. Be aware of your surroundings. Hyper-aware of darkness, I tucked my pepper spray into my suitcase. Ma, I need a trick for rational fears. How do I quiet this terror that claws at my chest? How do I live alone when my own home feels like a morgue? When the shadows come I think the most frightening part is that there's no one to run to. Ma, I am a little girl again except I am untethered. How do I enter womanhood if I am still helpless without you cradling me in your arms? TW: racial violence
When the last fronds of Palm Drive recede into the valley we find our way to the back of the Caltrain and sit to the sound of discord. Voices thicken and sharpen, voices serrated like blades or bullets or maybe both until one rips through the air and they burst into view, sagging red-faced man spitting at a boy with dreads: "Who let a n—— on the train?" In front of us, a woman raises her phone and hits record. Hands move beyond their boundaries: men pushing at each other, men shaking back and forth with no headway, until suddenly one's fingers are locked around the other's throat and they are shuddering, shuddering, knocking back into the next seat. Behind them, a woman hastens her children to the next car. Red faces are redder still, breaths heavy, when they are pulled off of each other. Haggard man gesturing wildly at his fellow passengers, eyes wide in appeal. "Get off the train, man." "Get off the fucking train, you racist piece of shit." He lingers, pants heavily. Then slinks away, bike dragging behind him like a tail between his legs. The air is still sharpened, ripped apart as he recedes from view long after we return to our laptops. ma, i'm still afraid to kill with bare hands.
when i was small i'd shriek at the spindled legs cradling the walls as your hands crushed body against plaster, guts smeared across your palm. "just a bug," you'd say, rinsing its residue in the kitchen faucet. "foolish to be afraid of something so small." still, i wait and shudder when beetles hobble across tile. evade until they emaciate in the silence of a shut windowpane. in the tired morning light a thin crust of insects lines the sill, bodies frozen in search of a world just out of reach. foolish to be afraid of something so small: i know. foolish, i whisper to these hands that break away when clasped between the palms of another. foolish, i trace in the film of dust upon a love letter signed and never addressed. ma, i can't yet understand how to catch and hold it when a boy's attention blows my way like an errant dandelion seed. don't know how to stand still and cup a moment like water in my hands. somehow i'm still afraid my palms will be the means to a violent end. that a crush will leave a gutted smear. when the moment comes i let it drift by and wither: emaciate into an empty silence. ma, one day i'll close my fist around a beetle until it finds a home there. TW: gun violence
I learn to cower under my desk the way I learn my times table. When the low bell tolls, we scurry behind locked doors and fold our limbs into narrow cubbies, camouflage our bodies in yellow raincoats. Noses pressed to our shoes, the world smells of wet socks. Like a mnemonic we map the escape route in our heads, plot the path out the window and behind the portables. Plot the location of every kid scissor and sharpened pencil we can leverage. Run, hide, fight, we recite with our 4, 8, 12s. The words take on a singsong quality as we crayon them onto our worksheets. Run, hide, fight, like an age-old refrain. // The bell tolls still when we move into a new building, sixth grade bodies wedged into the Algebra I cabinets. Two stories up, the windows are no longer an option. Instead, Mr. Tonra teaches us to conglomerate a barricade of desks and chairs and thick-spined textbooks against the door, how to spray a man with a fire extinguisher until he drops his weapon. Run, hide, fight, we sigh at the linear regressions in our hands. Run, hide, fight, the age-old refrain. // When the bell tolls four years later, it comes without warning. A crowded lunchroom disperses like ants into whatever crevice they can find. Huddled behind the unlocked door to our calculus teacher's office, we shut the blinds and cradle ourselves as the next hour unfolds. Run, hide, fight, runs its course through our pounding heads. Why are we still saying run, hide, fight, this age-old refrain? In the dark of Ms. Hartman's office, my eyes study the pictures plastered across her wall. Study the tiny hands that grasp onto hers, the white sheen of a wedding veil caught in her husband's hands. Somewhere in the tangled web of chatrooms muttering he has a gun I text my family I love you. We jump when the loudspeaker erupts with an apology. In this silence, we know only breath and teardrop. Even once the intercom tells us it was just a man with a black umbrella our bodies only know run, hide, fight. In the aftermath we peel ourselves from the floor, return our sharpened pencils to their drawers. Return to half-listen to a lecture on Rolle's theorem we won't recall in an hour. When the bell rings to end the day we jolt from our seats and then joke about our impending doom. // The low bell will toll again twice this year. The next year, thrice. Each day afterwards, we return home to our math textbooks and dream of a day when getting an education does not mean learning to run, hide, fight. |
AuthorAnna Kiesewetter is an undergraduate student at Stanford University studying creative writing and human biology. A firm believer in the psychological nature of literature, she writes to explore human experience and perception. Archives
November 2023
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