I. Freytag’s Pyramid
The clock on the wall says 1:33 in the afternoon. The trigger in my mind ticks like a small time-bomb, cratering my concentration with holes. For about two months since I ran away from home in June, I’ve hardly kept track of the numbers. Time. Which had narrowed into a clamp around nine days on the street, crossed out the past and future, reduced my nights to strip searches for housing, food, and structure.
But now I’m in a University English class being introduced to structures far less physical than the ones of summer.
Now the boy beside me laughs because instead of a pen, I write notes with a pen cartridge. Now I step out of the hole.
“It was cheaper,” I tell him.
“Like how much?”
“Like half as much.”
It’s not that I don’t have full pens. Because I do. Because when I left the youth shelter this August, the staff gave me food and toiletries. A box of school supplies: 20 thick-tipped pens, a box of pencils, yellow scissors, 3 notebooks, and a bottle of glue. I use the notebook now. And I drained the bottle of glue in my dorm room to make cardboard shelving. But the box of pens still sits unopened and unused under my bed incompatible with my handwriting.
My professor draws a pyramid on the whiteboard in thick marker.
“Does anyone know what this structure is?”
“Oh, it’s Freytag’s Pyramid” says the girl in front of me. She rubs her finger against her chin.
“Right. Though personally, I like to write my stories like this.” My professor makes a dot at the tip of the pyramid and erases the second half. “Either way is fine.”
I write this down in my notebook because it relates to a theory I’ve been trying to build about narrative and trauma. For a few months now, since I came to University in autumn, I’ve been trying to write an essay about the events before this summer. Any time my professors mention the words narrative, hole, or linear, I write the quote in my notebook. Between classes, I transfer those quotes into another notebook where I turn the words into drawings. One of the drawings is a graph with numbers stretching up to thirteen on an X-coordinate plane. Another is a girl staring into the cracks between the rising steps of the youth shelter. She pokes at the orange fungus between the concrete. She sticks her finger inside it. My theory is that the traumatic narrative is not a pyramid like Freytag’s structure but a hole.
*
When I first began writing about what happened before this summer, it was like trying to write a story swallowed inside a pit of quicksand. I kept reaching into the pit again and again, trying to hold onto words and images, but I couldn’t grab the scenes fast enough. Bits and pieces of sentences kept sliding through my fingers. Flashes of actions spun like wheels inside my head. I reached down into the pit to pull out language, but I pulled out logic, labels, outlines instead.
The thing about theories: no theory is absolute. Every force has an equal and opposite reaction. But pulled out of the context of science and into the context of violence, the same statement can’t be said.
In Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery she theorizes trauma as “an affliction of the powerless” and traumatic events as “extraordinary.” An affliction is a condition that relies on external causation, not self-identity. Trauma afflicts powerlessness by external actors: war, illness, death, rape—robbing control and autonomy. Traumatic events are extraordinary because they overwhelm the body. They shut down or slow parts of the brain in charge of speech and language. Words like affliction and infliction, of similar sound and rhythm blend into each other. Five years later, the sound of fireworks could be the sound of a gun. The sound of water gurgling, the sound of drowning.
Between the boxes of my graph paper notebook this year, I associate trauma with logic. I draw lines and slopes. I write stories with maximums and minimums. I draw a stick figure balancing on one leg on the number thirteen. I draw holes that expand into tunnel systems, snaking through neural pathways, empty streets. I write down quotes: “Nowhere is it written that the recovery process must follow a linear uninterrupted sequence” (Herman 174) and “As the narrative closes in on the most unbearable moments, the patient finds it more and more difficult to use words” (Herman 177).
On the whiteboard of our English classroom, Freytag’s pyramid rises. Freytag’s pyramid falls. It’s made up of lines: three points, two slopes, connected to each other by the movement of my professor’s marker. During math class at University, my professor says a line is about numbers and the transformation of those numbers into movement. Y =2x + 1 is straight. Y = sin(x) is a wave with multiple slopes. In 11th grade, when I took a physics class, my teacher put two balls on the table at the front of the classroom. He cleared off all his pens and papers, then pushed the first ball toward the second. This, he said, is what it means to move forward.
II. Approaching Trauma
On the seventh floor of Helen C. White Hall, my professor presses the cap back onto her blue marker. The clock on the wall still says 1:33 in the afternoon. Outside the window, the white dome of the capitol building carves a cave in the sky in the distance.
Late last night, I learned that a girl in the youth shelter attempted suicide. After hearing the news, I spent most of the night on the floor of my room and then in a ball in my closet. I opened my graph-paper notebook and made a drawing of a hole that I labeled “the present.” I drew a stick-figure girl staring into it. Inside the hole, I drew an image of an examination table. I drew an image of a bathroom. I drew a star-patterned blanket, a shelter floor reinforced with broken earrings, hair dye, crushed makeup, dead bugs, and dust.
On the whiteboard of our classroom, my professor writes down a prompt for two characters. She says, we will have Character A, Tammy B. Cat, who will have a sleeve of tattoos on her right arm, pink hair, and a pet goldfish. And then we will have Character B, her fishmonger boyfriend, Parker, who will vape the flavor “I love Watermelon Candy” at the end of a boardwalk.
“I want you to write a short scene where Tammy B. Cat and Parker interact.” My professor says. “You have one minute.”
Dead bugs and dust. Worth and worthlessness. In class, I try to will these memories away and focus. In my notebook, I begin writing an outline of Tammy B. Cat. She has a constellation of crossbone kittens tattooed to her right arm. In the distance, she sees Parker, who she cannot reach. She wills her feet to move forward across the boardwalk, but a chasm opens inside her conscious. A hand against her chest, a pit of quicksand beneath her feet. She stays rooted to the ground, paralyzed and unable to speak.
When I read Herman’s book last year, she said about the moment of trauma, that as the victim realizes no intellect from the past nor any rescue buoy from the future can save her, all and everything narrows in on the present. As she realizes resistance against the perpetrator will only result in further violence, she freezes. Her words and movements stop. Trauma paralyzes. Trauma kills. And when it does not kill, when I realized, five years ago, that it would not kill—
My legs twitch. The trigger in my mind taps like a small time bomb, halting the movement of my pen in my hand. I remember late last night, the image I drew in my notebook of the stick figure girl staring with her eyes wide and still into the hole. At the bottom of the hole, I’d drawn an image of an examination room. Inside the examination room, on top of the examination table, I’d drawn the image of another girl. On top of the examination tale, beneath her fingers, inside my clothing. I can see another image—
I focus on my pen and look out the window toward the capitol building two miles into the distance. Then, five months before, I am sitting in a tan interrogation room. A police officer has a radio in his front pocket and a gun in a holster. He searches my backpack, smooths down the backside of a parking ticket, then speaks.
*
Trauma, I thought once, could be tapped into like a root system. It could be tapped into, made into a hole and circled around, like a tree punctured by a spigot, or a vein dug deep with a needle. But once inside the puncture wound, the logic disappears behind a shield of emotion. The bleeding doesn’t stop. The blood oozes out of the hole into the open and oxidizes. The thick brown syrup drips from the tree and freezes inside the cold.
When I was thirteen-years-old, my father locked me in a bathroom with him for seven hours. I don’t remember the exact date, or the temperature, or the miles away from home. But I remember the outlines: it happened in the summer, on a family vacation in Jackson Hole Wyoming, less than a year before my parents divorced.
That night, my brother and sister cleared the table after dinner. The tap water in the kitchen ran over the hum of the oven. My dad had made pasta and garlic bread, but I hadn’t wanted to eat, so I’d run to the bathroom and locked myself inside. My dad knew this. He knew of the opportunity birthed by disobedience. He knocked once on the door, demanding entry. He knocked twice. I curled into a ball beside the sink, and my dad yelled for me to let him in or he would hurt me. I opened the door. I knew nothing about the definition of trauma. I knew even less about what to do, who could help me, if it happened.
The night my dad locked me in the bathroom with him for seven hours, my mom blocked out my crying and my father’s I’m-doing-this-because-I-love-yous by turning up the volume on the TV. She sat down in the living room, and when I cried for her to help, she came to the bathroom door, listened, breathed, then turned away. When she finally let me out seven hours later, because my dad still would not, I ran into the living room crying, kissed the wooden floor, and picked up the phone. The clock beside the window blinked past 1:00 in the morning. I pressed the first two numbers I knew to press in an emergency, but my fingers faltered over the third. My mom watched my fingers hover and said nothing because she knew everything I did not. She knew the rules I’d learned as a toddler. She knew about the emergencies I’d learned in school—fire and tornado drills, the definition of emergency, which we’d learned in school so diligently to mean life or death. The death I’d somehow just moments ago believed was imminent, was now over. I put the phone down. I did not speak.
In the English classroom, I can trace the outline of that hole in my memory. I can trace the outline of the capitol building in the distance, but its outline fades inside the searing clarity of an approaching trauma. The outline of that trauma becomes a shape, a circle, a hole that I step inside. The first movements of that night in the bathroom begin not with scene but with sound. The sound of crying, the sound of my dad’s hands against my chest, a ripple, a shock wave that travels throughout the present. I’m paralyzed, Like Tammy B. Cat, in a moment that has ripped open the folds of all other memories, expanded into all other areas of my life.
III. Grounding
In the first week of classes at University, my sociology professor, who teaches the sociology of race and ethnicity, circles. She traces. She explains an intersection of her identities, but says she will not reveal any more until the end of the semester, as she doesn’t want it to come as a form of judgement or shock. Her closure, her caution, allows me to open. During office hours, I come with a question about one of our readings about identity. I reveal that I’m a runaway youth coming out of a summer in a homeless shelter.
But I keep this identity an unknown outside of classroom, a full circle that otherwise acts as an absence, an empty vat of words unless a trigger brings it rising toward the surface.
During lecture in the fourth week of class, my professor puts on a video of Maya Angelou. The screen flickers and opens into a grey landscape. In the film, Dr. Angelou stands in front of a set of train tracks and describes the city as sliced down the middle. She tells the viewer about the line that marked the segregation. The train tracks. She stops in front of them. She shakes her head at the interviewer and tells him she does not want to go any further. The train tracks are a limit, a fence of barbed wire, a canyon between the past and present. The camera pans out to show the dirt road Dr. Angelou stands on, and then cuts to a close-up of her explaining, in another scene, “I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days, the man was killed. In my child’s mind—seven and a half years old—I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years” (“Full Show”).
In the classroom, I twitch. I try to focus on my pencil. Rape and silence. Dead bugs and dust. My father’s love and someone else—someone—my voice screeching to a halt, unable to control my own body’s limits.
I focus hard on my pencil. In the classroom, I name and label everything around me, recognize that the walls are tan and scratched, that the chairs are wooden, that the boy in front of me has a red hat and the girl beside me wears earbuds. To “ground” myself, I remind myself of my context outside of the hole, draw my body onto the life strung like an equation around me, so that I don’t fall completely into the past.
Yet grounding only works when ground exists. It only works when I’m outside the hole of trauma, my feet tiptoeing around the rims of the pit of quicksand, not yet in the bottomlessness of the inside. Inside the hole, the memory of trauma consumes the present like a match to pine needles. Words crash like falling lumber, and time moves by spinning through the same wheel of memories over and over again. In writing, I’ve tried to find a method to work around this, to circle and approach the hole without falling into it, to stretch my body like a plank or boardwalk over the hole so that I can look down but stay grounded. I must root myself on either side of the hole to lift myself out of the wordlessness of traumatic experience.
In writing, I create so much tension between the words, so much energy and sound that the words rise away from the hole and into music. The structure of writing about trauma, then, about writing around the hole without falling into it is not a pyramid like my English professor’s drawing, but a lyric. I write in song to distract myself. I focus on rhyme, sentence structure, and image to pull myself away from the pull of traumatic narrative. I resist energy by terminating the rhyme, sentence structure, and lyric. I manipulate energy by leaping to another topic.
In English class, as I pull away from memory, I focus my attention on spiraling over and over again on the scene of my professor’s marker. I think about approaching her hand from the left, which views the marker as a downward slope to the right. I think about approaching her hand from the bottom, which makes the tip of the marker slope up. I note the nuances of color. The different languages on the base of the pen—azul, bleu, blue because even though the pen is one object, one body in a single moment, it houses thousands of words that define it.
*
Five months ago, four years after my dad locked me in the bathroom with him for seven hours. Five months ago, two months before I ran away from home. Five months ago, four years after an image of my body lies still upon an examination table—
I sit in the back corner of a tan interrogation room with a police officer. The officer in front of me wears a tan uniform with a badge on his chest. On the interrogation table in front of us, the officer has smoothed down a small paper about the size of his palm. The front side of it reads “accident report,” which he then flips over to the back.
“Narrate what happened,” he says.
In this memory, I twitch. In this classroom, I flinch.
I look up at the officer. I try to push my voice over the barbed wire line separating past from present, but it’s like striking bedrock, like a needle that can’t find the vein.
“Look,” he says, “I’m not going to be able to help unless I know what happened.”
My legs shake. I push myself closer to the line and tell the officer the language I’ve said so many times that it’s become a summary without emotion, a statement that still exists rounded, thick-tipped, intact: there was a woman with black hair. I say I was in a psychiatric hospital at the time, in the examination room. On top of the examination table, beneath her fingers— in Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital, there was a woman with black hair.
“What was her height?” he pushes.
“I don’t know.”
“Tall?”
“I don’t know.”
“Medium?”
“I don’t know.”
“Short?”
“Medium, I guess.” He writes this down. There is movement.
“Why were you in the hospital?”
Again, I am pushed toward the image of my father. The seven hours in the bathroom. The silence of my mother.
“Why were you in the hospital?” The officer asks again.
“For an eating disorder,” I say.
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing else?”
“No,” I say. Breaking.
“Nothing?”
“No,” I say.
“Then could you tell me a bit about what happened in the examination room?”
I am not within the present. I say, no. She says yes, say yes or I won’t let you out of here. Take your clothes off. So I take my clothes off. Get on the examination table. So I get on the examination table. She says, get on the examination table.
So I see myself getting on the table, and as I see myself getting on the table, I see her hands. I see her face. I see it suddenly, clearly, everything in detail. But I cannot speak. I cannot scream. I cannot say stop because this is not the first time she’s done this. This is not the first time she’s done this. She did it before, and then, stop only—
In the interrogation room, I’ve started crying.
“Listen, I need to know what happened.” He grips his pencil like she gripped my wrists.
From in front of him, he pushes the flower-patterned tissue box to my side of the table. It screeches. I flinch. In the examination room, the woman throws a tissue box at me because I am crying.
“Listen—” He says again.
Listen.
He had the gun and I did not. He had the paper, the ability to write this narrative, and I had the tissue box. He had the authority of standing on the ground, around the hole while I could hardly speak from inside of it. He approached me from one angle: from above. He relied on linearity. An angle of domination. A direct line of causation. Why? He wanted to know. He wanted to be able to grab and hold the evidence between his fingers. He wanted the data points of my narrative to hit each other so he could trace a direct line to the perpetrator. He pushed the narrative ball forward, forward, but here I had fallen into a pit of quicksand with a rock inside my throat.
“Why did you wait four years to come forward?” he asked. But it was as if a wad of steel wool had wedged in my lungs. Still, I struggle to speak.
IV. A New Approach
In math class at University, six months after the police report, five years after I was sexually assaulted, my professor presses his chalk against the blackboard. The chalk squeaks in opposition. Says no. Stop. My professor twitches and drops the chalk against the tile. Cracking. Breaking. “Whoops,” he says. He picks up a new piece and continues drawing. When the first board he uses fills up, he reaches above him to pull down the second. He jumps to grab it but misses. He pulls out a chair from behind the podium and steps on it. “Sorry,” he says to the class, pulling the board down. “I’m too short. As you can see,” he continues. “The first step is to take the one-sided limit.”
Calculus is about algebra and geometry. It’s about the numbers: 2 plus 2. Y= mx +b and the translation of that equation into shape and movement.
From the fifth row of the lecture hall, I can hardly see through my glasses. I’ve had them for two years, but since I ran away from home in June, the prescription has faded. On the blackboard, I observe the outline of an image. It’s a graph, a polynomial equation. My professor has drawn the equation on an x/y coordinate plane and in the middle of it, an empty hole. Approaching this hole from the left and right, the lines are fluid. The lines curve up and down. Some cross over the X-axis.
“As you can see,” my professor says again, “Every time you perform one step, you get a little bit closer to the truth.”
I write this down. Like my professor’s pyramid in the English classroom. I write this down.
I can see it.
In mathematics, my professor explains, the process of taking this limit is two-sided. First you must take the limit from the left. Which may yield a value. Then you must take the limit from the right. Which may yield a different value. But in order for the limit to exist, the limiting value from the right and the limiting value from the left must equal each other. They must approach the same point. If they don’t approach a solid point, then they must approach the same hole, called a discontinuity.
In calculus, the process of approaching a hole from the left and right is called the limiting process. It’s also called taking the average rate of change. When the two points on either side of the limiting value become so infinitely close to each other, the average rate of change turns into an instantaneous rate of change. Like defining the shape of a ball by taking the distance between the two walls on either side of it. Like defining a canyon not by its depth, but by the bridge stretched across it, a limit defines a hole not by its value, but by its context.
Aha. I write this down in my notebook: trauma, as an affliction of the powerless but not an identity of the powerless, as an identity of no worth in a context, a life otherwise filled with worth, as a point whose value is defined by the shape of the narrative that surrounds it, as the breakage of ground in a single moment, whose devastating impact can be seen not by what happened but by how things changed, is not a pyramid, but a hole.
Unlike Freytag’s pyramid which relies on movement, traumatic narrative circles around the paralysis of a single moment. Like Tammy B. Cat whose feet cannot move forward. Like the hole I draw in front of the girl in my notebook, like the hole of words I cannot speak in the interrogation room.
In my sociology class, my professor stands in front of the class and recites a quote from Frederick Douglas. She repeats: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
In English class, my pen begins moving again as I realize Tammy B. Cat does not have to move forward.
In math class, my professor takes a sip of water. “If you fall into the hole, you go to hell,” he says. “Otherwise, you can call it negative infinity.”
V. Holes
In the Jackson Hole, Wyoming bathroom, my dad pushes me away from the bathroom door against the toilet. He whispers to me I’m doing this because I love you. I cry for help and say, “No, Daddy, I don’t love you, this isn’t love.” And he says, “One day, you will see. You will thank me for all I’ve done for you. You little bitch. You little freak. You will thank me.”
He threw me against the toilet and I cried for my mom to help me. She stood in front of the bathroom door, listened to me crying, breathed, then turned away. This is another hole, the one created by her absence, which expanded my hole to not just one moment but four years of silence.
I don’t know all she did outside the bathroom door that night, and I don’t know what she told my siblings. I don’t know the people who did not sleep through all of it. Who now carry the burden of forgetting, or never remembering, as the sounds of that night begins to blur into the sounds of all other nights like this, of which there were dozens.
In the psychiatric hospital, the black-haired woman who locked me in the examination room protected her guilt by remaining nameless. She stripped me of my clothes and forced me to lie naked on the examination table. She performed her procedure. Twice. The ones she said were required for intake. She crossed the limit of my skin and I could not regain my autonomy as it was reaffirmed that my value was worthless. She raped me but robbed me of the ability to say rape because she was a female.
But her words, more than her fingers, still, go deeper than the skin. And I remember what she said to me in that room, told me about my worthlessness: It won’t change a thing, take your clothes off, by god, she’s snotting all over herself. And I remember the actions that went along with these words, the actions that seemed to prove her point, that whatever I was to her, numerical data, patient stripped of context, I was something. Object. But anything but human.
A hole is deep. Some are endless. Some, like the ones my professor draws in math class, if you fall through, you fall to negative infinitum. Again, my math teacher explains, a hole, also called a discontinuity, can be approached infinitely close from both sides. This process, called taking the limit, yields a value only within the context of the point’s past and future.
On the seventh floor of Helen C. White, staring at my writing professor’s blue-lined pyramid, reminded of a girl’s suicide attempt in the shelter, the seven hours locked in the bathroom, the futility of my police report, I ask myself: Can I think about the process of speaking about trauma as taking a limit? Can I think about trauma as a moment, or a hole of moments whose definition, whose value in isolation--in its brutality, in its plunge to hell--is infinite? As the moment that stripped me of value, robbed me of definition, isolated me from the context of everything I knew then, but only regains its value by being brought into the context of the past and future? Can I approach trauma from either side until I get infinitely close to it? Can I define my trauma not by what happened, but by how I changed because of it?
Less than a year after my father locked me with him for seven hours in a bathroom, he left our family for a 22-year-old girlfriend. He took his desk, his clothes, his dresser. His life emptied out on the street like a mouth opening at the end of a riverbed. He left a hole in our house where his room had been.
One week after discharge from the hospital, I ran away from home. My father chased after me down the street. I kicked off my shoes because I could not run with them. The gravel, which made holes in the bottom of my soles that night, remained a hole in my consciousness far after the holes in my skin healed.
Wandering the streets for nine days and nights after I graduated high school remains a hole in my gut. Hunger burrows into my stomach while I curl into a ball on the broken concrete steps on the side of a Chicago alleyway. In English class, a hole lodges deep in my concentration. The hole in the wall, where the clock no longer ticks. The feeling of dust caked into my lungs as I cough into the folds of the shelter’s star-patterned blanket.
A hole is dark. A hole is deep. The walls of a hole—I dig myself far into this earth—are made of dirt. The sides of the hole are filled with worms, roots, maggots. Inside the hole, the only hope of survival is from above, a rope ladder, or a light. The definition of a hole is the definition of trauma because the plunge into trauma and its aftermath are endless. The walls are dark. The losses infinite. In isolation, the value of trauma renders the identity worthless. It’s only by bringing trauma into the context of the ground above it, past and future, left and right, that I redefine my life after violence.
*
When I returned to school after trauma, four thousand nine hundred fifty-six days after I was born, three months after my dad locked me in a bathroom for seven hours, one-and-a-half weeks into October—
I hardly spoke. On the first day back at my middle school after the hospital, I came in early. I walked up the staircase and opened my red metal locker. The hinges creaked and shivered. I thought to myself, feeling the metal beneath my fingers, this can’t be real.
Two weeks later, in my eighth grade English class, my teacher asked us to write an essay about a moment that had completely altered our lives. One student wrote about his grandmother’s death. The second wrote about a soccer tournament. They stood up and read their essays at the class podium. When it was my turn, I clutched the essay firmly between my fingers. I did not speak.
One month after discharge from the hospital, I spoke, but it was only to buy boxes of milk at lunch, answer to orders. It was November. I stood in the shower at home underneath hot water. I wrapped a towel around my shoulders and slipped into my room to change into my clothing. I took off my towel. As I rubbed lotion onto my legs, I heard a knock on the door, a pop of the lock. My father stepped in.
Two months after getting out of the hospital, I took a knife from the kitchen and put it under a pile of books in my desk. I took the memory of my father’s multiple intrusions, the memory of the black-haired woman’s abuse, and snuck out of the house at night. Outside, all the leaves had fallen off the trees. The streetlamps hung halos against the sidewalk.
I walked the mile to my school building and stood on the front steps looking into the entryway at the school mascot on the front carpet. I looked up at the walls in front of me, the brick and ivy, so unlike the metal beneath my back, and thought to myself, this can’t be real. It couldn’t be. But the lights in the building still glowed, and inside the front windows, I could still see the ground hard and steady.
So I turned around, real as it was, and put my back to it. I pulled a folded paper out of my coat pocket and smoothed it against my leg. Sitting on the front steps that night, I read my English essay to the empty street. When I finished, I curled up and slept on the front steps of the school building. No one heard me crying.
*
It is now five years after the black-haired woman’s abuse, the 7 hours in the bathroom, the front steps of the school building. These numbers, I can remember. These numbers, at 5:30 in the evening, are numbers I re-count when telling a part of my story five years later. On Thursday night at University, I have begun going to weekly survivor support groups after my creative writing class.
At the end of each hour and a half, I am asked to write down the number of sessions I’ve attended, but unlike the number 13-years-old, 5 years since—5 years which will soon expand into seven, six—the time I’ve spent at this school is an array of numbers I cannot remember. So I make a guess. I base my guess on the amount of leaves fallen since the first session, on the amount of midterms taken, on how things have changed.
“I write,” I say one night when asked what I’ve done to reclaim my identity after violence. “I write because it gives me authority to make something out of what made me nothing.”
Because it’s my proof. My witness. Because one year of violence compounds into a million seconds of ramifications. Because trauma doesn’t end after the affliction of powerlessness.
In sociology, my professor explains that Black feminist thought, which relies on data collection in the form of storytelling and lived experience, is often seen by rigid, scientific thinkers as an invalid form of truth.
Officer Johnson, in the tan interrogation room, wanted my proof. He asked about what had happened at a single moment. He didn’t ask about how my value had changed because of it. He asked about the size of the circles the black-haired woman made with her hands when she touched me on my chest. He asked how many points on my body, for how long and how hard, and how deep.
But what neither Officer Johnson nor any scientific thinker has ever asked or cared to ask is how I changed because of trauma. They ask about the hole and the hole only. They reduce my status to victim by failing to view me in the context of my victimization: my survival.
As many words as I have written to tell this story, those who have the power to rewrite it, only ask for my story in the form of explanation. Summary, which relies on the ability to shorten time, reduces me to three sentences during shelter intake. Reduces me to a case number when I make a police report.
The officer who interrogated me, by asking only about the moment of trauma, wanted holes, and holes only. He dug deep into that hole, a hole where no evidence existed because, like the dozens of child sexual abuse victims who take decades to come forward, the evidence was five years expired from my body. The marks on my skin were gone. The mark on my memories, and evidence of how my life had changed was not.
Approaching this hole from before and after, including how I changed because of it, unlike some evidence that disappears in the traumatic moment, can be documented from the moment of trauma until now. It is a method that is expansive, not reductive. It regrounds the body in language outside the wordless. In mathematics, after all, this process is called taking the limit. But beyond that, it’s also called a proof.
*
In English class on the seventh floor, my professor calls for time to stop. She asks us to put our pens down and leave our characters wherever they’re at, however unfinished.
I have a problem though, with leaving this story where it’s at. With leaving Tammy B. Cat paralyzed before her wants on the boardwalk. With writing stories that move and grow, rather than spiral, over and over again, on a puncture wound, deep and dark, filled with words that rupture and fragment: stop crying, get on the examination table, by god, she’s snotting all over herself.
As many times as I have tried to smooth this story into linearity, it’s worth and worthlessness, resurfaces everywhere. In new iterations. In the form of a star-patterned blanket in the youth shelter. In the form of glasses that can only see the outlines of images. In the form of failed police reports, unfinished sentences, long days.
It resurfaces on the screen in my sociology lecture, on the whiteboard in my English workshop, in the lines my math professor draws in calculus.
On the wall of my classroom, the clock says 1:34 in the afternoon. It’s been a minute since we first began our exercise, which, in some systems, is only one-sixtieth of an hour. In other forms, a series of seconds. In yet others, millions.
The girl in front of me, still, has her finger on her chin. The boy beside me, however, in this moment, has shifted his position. My professor asks who would like to volunteer to read their exercises. At first, I say nothing. Then I break out of the hole by raising my hand, my voice. Rising out of the paralyzing moment.
Works Cited
"Full Show: Going Home with Maya Angelou." Youtube, uploaded by Moyers & Company, 7 Aug. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY4w1qW1L6w.
Herman, Judith. "Terror." Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Violence to Political Terror, Basic Books, 1992.
Annie Erlyn is a university student, writer, and artist. She is writing this under a pseudonym for safety purposes.
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