The Bruises on my Arms
My mind escaped my body when I was sexually assaulted. I spent years finding my way back.
When I got raped, my brain ran away, slipped out the back door. Such a petulant thing, the mind, it analyzed the situation and was like Nope, I’m not having this. Bye losers. It’s for the best because I don’t know if I could have survived if I had experienced the assault fully. If I had felt it all, I would have broken apart, imploded, never got up from the cold, muddy ground he pinned me to. Later, I look at the bruises on my arms and wonder where they came from.
I didn’t go very far, of course. I floated above my body and watched as though it was happening to someone else. I observed every thrust, heard every grunt. I even tried to scream, but no sound came out.
“Dissociative shock,” a therapist later tells me. She recommends that I put ghee on my feet before going to sleep and writes me a prescription for homeopathic sugar tablets.
I don’t need some sciencey term or new-age medicine to understand what happened, though. The way I see it, I did what lizards do. Someone caught me by the tail, so I split in two. I sacrificed my less important half: my body. I have spent years trying to get it back.
