oliveglass: Colossians 3:18“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in t

oliveglass: Colossians 3:18“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.”Quran 4:34 “Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property. So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.” You are a thirteen-year-old girl. You learned to ride your bike with your sister because your father has been selling meth for several years, and he’s never had the time to teach you. You believe in God but you think your mom is crazy when she says he talks to you. You have just started your first year of high school and you don’t know anyone, so you sit at a lunch table by yourself. This New Town has three thousand people, which is three times as large as your Old Town. You wish you didn’t have to move here, but your dad kind of screwed your mom over big time, and after the divorce, she had to move closer to her job. You had a hard enough time making friends at your Old School because you didn’t like to play sports and you had braces and long, thin hair that looked sad when you tried to put it up. You chopped off all your hair and you came to your New School wearing hairspray for the first time, hoping to God that here, you would have friends. Here, maybe they wouldn’t make fun of you. Maybe there were other people here that also didn’t play sports, and that had also just gotten glasses or chopped all their hair off. Maybe you won’t be invited to things as just the butt of some elaborate joke any more. Freshman year, you wear a lot of jackets zipped halfway up to hold your tummy pudge flat. You’ve always been thinner than your little sister and your grandma still calls you a twig, but you saw the girls on the volleyball team your first week here, and their stomachs were flatter than yours. You don’t wear makeup because it’s expensive and your mom won’t buy any of it or teach you how it’s used, but you told a girl today it was actually because it perpetuates harmful beauty standards of women in today’s society. You don’t know if you believe that yet, but you heard a woman say it on TV and it made her sound like she knew what she was talking about, even though she was wearing makeup herself. Freshman year, you meet Punk, who is in your grade but is one year older than you. Punk is thin and has long brown hair that goes past his shoulders. He has a patch of fuzz only on his chin because that’s the only place his beard will grow. He has bright blue eyes that are almost white and his whole face put together reminds you of those whitewashed portraits of Jesus. Punk is very laid back and has the typical Bad Boy look to him, and it appeals to you. Punk is your first friend and your first crush in your New School. You walk around your New Town during your free time. You have a lot of free time, and you’d like to lose a little bit of weight. Your New Town has brick roads mixed with paved roads in no particular pattern. There aren’t any lines painted on the roads and everyone sort of just parks wherever they want. You don’t have a car yet so you don’t understand the organized chaos, especially when cars are parked on both sides of the road and it doesn’t leave enough space in the middle for two headed opposite directions. The tallest buildings here are two stories high, and almost all of them are on the Square. Several of these have staircases and ladders around the back that allow access to the roof, but you’re pretty sure that’s trespassing and you don’t want to get arrested. Eventually, your walks around this New Town turn into walks to Punk’s house. It’s his grandparents’ house, but his grandpa is always at work and his grandma died of breast cancer last year. Punk watches shows on TV like Fantasy Factory and Sixteen and Pregnant. He introduces you to Grand Theft Auto, which you tell him you enjoy, and that’s the first time you’re ever told that you’re Not Like Other Girls. Rig Veda 8:33:17 “Lord Indra himself has said, ‘The mind of woman cannot be disciplined; she has very little intelligence.’” You are a fourteen-year-old girl. Your freshman year is almost over. At five-foot-two you have gone from 130lbs to 115, but you still don’t look any different. Your relationship with Punk took a turn one night last week when you were at his house watching a Nicolas Cage movie on the couch. Under the blankets, you felt his hand move on your thigh. Your heart hammered in your chest and your stomach knotted up with some kind of excitement that was foreign to you. You don’t know anything about sex, but you don’t think he did, either, because all he did was sort of paw at you for a few minutes. It felt pretty good, you guess, but you weren’t too broken up about it when he stopped. You thought it odd that he’s never even kissed you before, and he still didn’t. He was actually pretty upset that, within your two-minute time frame, you didn’t grab his junk, too. You didn’t know what to say, so you walked home and wondered if he’d text you later. He didn’t. Your First Kiss happens this summer with a new guy you’ve been talking to. He holds your face and tells you that you’re Not Like Other Girls, and then he kisses you and it feels like he’s trying to shove his tongue as far back in your throat as he possibly can. You don’t think the lower half of your face should be covered in saliva after your First Kiss is over. That’s not how it is in the movies. You break up with him because he is very handsy in public. You walk by a table of tall, athletic blond guys at lunch on the first day of your sophomore year. You hold your tray closer and try to stand a little taller when they all turn to look at you. As soon as you pass their table, you hear one of them groan, “Eeeww.” You try to convince yourself that it had nothing to do with you. It doesn’t work. Sophomore year is the year you start wearing makeup. You get up early this morning to stand in front of the mirror alone and poke at your eyelids with a black pencil. You cry a little because it hurts. You use concealer on your cheeks to hide the red spots. You cry a little more because of how frustrating it is when the brown crap cakes up in the lines of your face. You put on lipstick because you haven’t learned moderation yet and you think that’s what girls are supposed to do every day. The finished product is eighties-monster-movie Bad. You cry a little and black streaks run down your face until you dab most of your work off with a wet towel. Defeated, you leave for school with your makeup mostly on your hands. This year, you are dating a real Bad Boy. He has an actual criminal record and he won’t tell you about it but he has to do community service at the Rec and he meets with his probation officer once a week. Your mom is his probation officer, and one night after she gets off the phone with her divorce lawyer, she tells you, “There’s no such thing as bad people. Sometimes good people just do bad things.” So you give him a chance. He has a charming smile and dark hair that swoops to the side. He is in foster care. His ears are pierced and he says he likes your jackets. He is two months away from eighteen years old. You walk with him to the Rec after school every Tuesday. In the game room upstairs, where there’s a lot of empty space and one air hockey table, you’re alone, and he pins you up against the wall to kiss you. Your breathing loses its rhythm. Your face isn’t drenched when he’s done kissing you. You smile at each other and he tells you he Loves You. When you are watching Avatar with him for the first time at your house, it’s dark and you’re laying with your head in his lap. His fingers brush at a spot on your hip where a sliver of skin is exposed. You feel something hard on the back of your head. You don’t say anything. You don’t move. You are a fourteen year old girl and you don’t know how to feel. You eventually sit up and let him rest his arm on your shoulders instead. Bad Boy calls you a lot. He calls you every day after school to tell you that he misses you. He somehow works the same phrase into every conversation you have, and it makes you feel sick, but you suppose he means it to be sweet. The phrase is, “I would die without you.” You’ve noticed the little cuts on his wrists and forearms and you hope he didn’t give them to himself, but you know that he must have. You hope he wouldn’t kill himself. He tells you you’re all he has. It frightens you because you are all that you have. Punk is upset that you’re in a relationship with Bad Boy. He’s jealous even though he has no right to be. You aren’t his property. You are a Good Christian Girl, and you are a virgin. You are only fourteen years old and you are a child, but this has been on your mind a lot lately. You planned to wait until marriage, but you want someone to like you. You want someone to Love You. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, to which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found, then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not leave her for all his days.” You are a fifteen-year-old girl. Your father, to whom you have not spoken in over a year, texts you three days late to tell you Happy Birthday; this is the last time you speak to him. You work at your local Dairy Queen. You got your braces off and you stopped wearing hairspray. You have your driver’s permit and you are the proud owner of a 1988 Dodge Daytona in blue. You have been grounded for the first time. Bad Boy has Bad Friends and your mother warns you about getting too close to him. She tells you the Bad Thing he did involved some psychological issues he has and problems controlling his anger. “I think you need a more positive influence in your life,” she tells you. “I don’t want you seeing that Bad Boy any more.” You continue to see Bad Boy, of course. You have to support him. Your mother doesn’t know the whole story. She doesn’t know what might happen to Bad Boy if you left him. She doesn’t know what he might do to himself. You lie to your parents about what you’re doing after school and you go with Bad Boy and his Bad Friends to the library on a Monday. Bad Boy is in the stacks with you, just you, and he tells you he Loves You. He says that you are Not Like Other Girls, and he wants to Make Love to you before he graduates and moves away. He leads you to the girls’ bathroom by your left hand. This is not how you imagined your First Time. You are hesitant. “It will be fun,” he tells you. You follow him into the bathroom. He asks if you are ready while he flips the gold-painted lock on the door, and you shake your fifteen year old head. “No,” you say, and you take a small step towards the door. “I don’t want to do this.” He takes your left hand and presses it to his junk, making you hold him. “But I want to.” Bad Boy wants to, so you do. Sex doesn’t feel good. You feel sad and nauseous. Sex hurts. It doesn’t just hurt in the obvious there-was-a-lot-of-blood way, but it also hurts because you’re lying on your back on the cold linoleum floor of a public library bathroom. When he thrusts into you, your head hits the wall. You try to tell him that he’s hurting you, and he covers your mouth with his big hand. When he’s finished, Bad Boy doesn’t help you stand up. He tells you to get dressed, and he leaves. You feel like what just happened was wrong, but you don’t know why, and you figure you’re probably just being selfish anyway. You pull up your jeans and straighten your sweatshirt. When you look in the mirror, you feel like you are Less. You are a mural drawn in chalk. Your breath sticks in your throat and you feel like you’re going to cry. Wasn’t he supposed to say he Loves You? Why didn’t he kiss you? When you finally leave the bathroom, shaking chalk dust from your hair, Bad Boy and his Friends are gone. You drive away from the library by yourself, and you drive until you find Punk. He’s skating by the high school. He doesn’t know what happened, but he’s mad that you were out with Bad Boy, so when he sees you, he ignores you. You watch him skate for two hours. The sun goes down and he leaves without even looking in your direction. You sit in your car and you cry while the radio plays until almost midnight, and then you go home, and nobody asks where you’ve been all day. You tell a friend what happened and you trust her not to tell anybody, but her dad is a cop and Bad Boy gets arrested and goes to jail. He is arrested on his eighteenth birthday for indecent liberties with a minor. You don’t testify. You never speak to him again. There is a restraining order involved. You move on, and you still feel Less. In a town of three thousand people, everyone at this point knows what happened. They don’t know the whole story, but they know the gist of it. They know that you are the Victim and he is the Perpetrator. Bad Boy’s Friends blame you and they yell things like “Slut” and “Liar” out the windows of their cars when you pass them in town. You also blame yourself. Why did you let him do that, anyway? Why didn’t you stop him? You should have screamed or something! Why did you just lie there and take it! Whore! Your mother says that if you had listened to her and avoided that Bad Boy, this would not have happened. This is the first time your mother calls you a slut. Now you are dating a guy that is called Mac. He also has a lot of Bad Friends, and he is also several years older than you are, but he nods when you talk so you feel like he listens to you. Mac is friends with Punk and that’s how you met him. Punk buys pot from him. Mac is eighteen, almost nineteen. He drives a maroon Eagle Talon and you watch American History X together. He teaches you how to play Modern Warfare 2 for the Xbox and introduces you to being high. Being high is blurry and it makes you feel good. Sometimes you have nightmares about Bad Boy, but when you go to bed stoned, you don’t have dreams; it’s all just static, like when you turn the TV to a channel you can’t afford. Now you’re a fifteen year old girl that’s self-medicating with illegal narcotics. Mac takes you to his Friends’ houses to drink liquor with men twice your age. These men have tattoos of three dots in little triangles by their eyes and on the webbing between their sausage thumbs and forefingers. They wear bandanas and do heroin sometimes, but they won’t swear with you in the room because you are a Lady and it is indecent. Manusmriti 9:14-18. “Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth; ‘A man!’ they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly. By running after men like whores, by their fickle minds, and by their natural lack of affection, these women are unfaithful to their husbands even when they are zealously guarded here. Knowing that their very own nature is like this, as it was born at the creation by the Lord of Creatures (Prajapati), a man should make the utmost effort to guard them. The bed and the seat, jewelry, lust, anger, crookedness, a malicious nature, and bad conduct are what Manu assigned to women. There is no ritual with Vedic verses for women; this is a firmly established point of law. For women, who have no virile strength, and no Vedic verses, are falsehood; this is well established.” You are a sixteen-year-old girl. You got contacts this year and you know how to put on your makeup. You are still five-foot-two but you are now 86lbs. You don’t eat much and you don’t sleep much. You learned how to dye your hair with wet chalk. On your sixteenth birthday, while you are very high and trying to keep your dinner down, Mac surprises you with a threesome. You get a threesome for your birthday. You get to be brutally fucked by a guy that doesn’t know your middle name and another guy that probably doesn’t know your first name, for your birthday. The entire time, the second guy compliments your various holes on their tightness and wetness, but he’s not addressing you. He’s talking to Mac, because you aren’t a part of this. You are living, breathing pornography that swallows even if it doesn’t like the taste because that is all it is good for. And you let them do this to you, because you’re Not Like Other Girls. They tell you this, after, when you’re all sitting around drinking beer. Your throat is sore, and you don’t like the taste of beer, but you drink it anyway, because you want to get very, very drunk. A girl that was friends with Bad Boy drives by you the next day and informs you with an obscene hand gesture that “You Cried Rape.” She later feels bad and apologizes, but it doesn’t make you feel any better, and you don’t offer to be her partner in your science class any more. One night when it’s raining really heavily outside, you sneak out to walk to Mac’s house. It isn’t far and you don’t mind the rain. You keep your phone carefully zipped in a plastic baggie so it isn’t ruined. You get there and you drink tequila from a pint-sized bottle. You don’t chase it with Coke because that’s what Other Girls do. You drink it straight because it is impressive for a Girl to do. The bottle is half gone by the time you realize that Mac and his Friend haven’t had any. You feel dizzy so you lay down in Mac’s bed and plan on sleeping. The arms that wrap around your waist don’t belong to Mac, but you only know that because you can hear Mac say from the other room, “Don’t be too rough with her.” Mac’s Friend was a virgin, but now he is not. “Thank you,” he says sheepishly when he’s finished with you. “You are Not Like Other Girls.” Punk is glad that you called him tonight. He’s glad that you are done with Bad Boys. He holds you at about 4am while you cry for a while, and he lets you have a cigarette. You talk with him about God and how you don’t buy into all that crap any more. He says he’s felt that way for a long time, but in your Small Town, talk like that is off limits. In God We Trust is engraved on the high school itself in big letters, casting proud shadows over the football field. Your New Town wins regionals every year, you know. Later when you are sixteen, a guy named after a state buys you a pack of smokes to keep and lays next to you in the grass all night, talking about existence and the human condition. You can see the stars and galaxies through holes torn by the wind in the clouds. You don’t learn anything new from the stars, like reading a book that you already wrote. The grass is wet with dew but neither of you mind. You thank him for never trying to kiss you, and he thinks it’s odd that you would say that, but you smoke one last cigarette together before he moves to Colorado to major in business. Punk starts asking you for rides to school your junior year. He doesn’t have a car and he lives further away, and you figure you’re only being nice. One chilly, rainy morning, when you leave the house about 6am like he’d asked, Punk starts kissing you. This time, instead of reaching for you, he unbuttons his jeans right there in the passenger seat of your car, parked in his driveway behind his mom’s Jeep. He holds you by your hair and you want to stop. “You got me worked up. It hurts,” he tells you. “It’ll hurt all day unless you finish what you started.” Out of overwhelming guilt, you let him finish in your mouth, and then you drive him to school. When he gets out of the car, he gives you enough affirmation in his smile that ensures you he’d like to do this again sometime, perhaps tomorrow, but he doesn’t tell you that he Loves You like you were hoping. Instead of finding a place to park, you drive around town for an hour or two, puffing on Seneca Menthols. This is your first real pack of cigarettes, and you keep two flipped upside-down as your “luckies”, which you save for last. Sometimes you get a new pack and you collect your luckies instead of smoking them because you know that someday you will need more luck than you do today. When you have smoked half of your pack, you’re late getting back to school, but nobody comments on it. When you are sixteen, you date a guy, and the guy cheats on you. This is the first person you’ve ever punched in the face. It is also the first person you’ve ever knocked unconscious. This year, a girl in your grade sent a nude photo to her older boyfriend of three years. He then sent it to his friend, who sent it to his friends. Nobody was arrested for possession of child pornography, but the girl ended up having to switch schools because she could not walk down the hallway without being pushed or called a whore. This year, you meet a guy that you think is Different. He actually listens to you when you tell him things, rather than just waiting for his chance to talk. He is smart and laughs loudly. This is Redhead. He is twenty-two and dropped out of college a few years back because he was on a lot of drugs at the time. Redhead has problems with his temper and when he comes over to your house to play video games, this becomes a readily apparent issue. Over the course of this month alone, he has thrown two of your Xbox controllers ninety feet into the lake at the bottom of your driveway, and he has systematically dismantled one of your PS2 controllers, piece by piece, on your basement floor. He promises he’ll replace them but he really won’t because money is tight and you wouldn’t understand and he doesn’t have extra cash to be flushing down the toilet, silly girl. One night, you are watching KU basketball with Redhead in your room. You pretend to be interested when really you’re not because Other Girls don’t like sports and you’re Not Like Other Girls. You’ve been told that a million times. Redhead told you that just earlier today. You fall asleep. You feel safe enough around Redhead that you’re comfortable falling asleep here, next to him. He’s a good friend. He’s never expressed any sexual interest in you. This is a breath of fresh air. You feel so relieved, so free, right up to the moment you wake up to his big hand down the front of your sweatpants. You scream. You cry. You tell him to leave. He says he’s sorry and he leaves and you still don’t feel safe. Why does this keep happening to you? You’re the problem. That has to be it. Slut. You call Punk, again. You found out that he’s been sleeping with about six different girls on and off since you met him, but he’s nice to talk to, and  you don’t nag, because Other Girls nag, and you are Different. He pretends to care and you think it helps. It has to help. Something has to help. A week later you end up in his mom’s RV, parked in her backyard, facedown, with Punk and one of his Older Friends taking turns fucking you. They high-five above your twiggy, naked body because you are a joke. You’re actually sober and it isn’t raining. You knew this was going to happen when you left your house. This is what always happens. You let it happen. You are a joke. Whore. On the walk home, you learn that a panic attack is not what a rich older woman has when she leaves her coffee on top of her suburban and drives off. A panic attack is being run over by a suburban. A panic attack is hot coffee searing your throat as you swallow, leaving you unable to breathe. A panic attack leaves you lying in the cold, wet grass, rubbing at your cold, wet eyes with little cold, white knuckles, sobbing in yelps and screams as you shake. Your mother finds out that Redhead, who had been at your house regularly for several months, is engaged, and he has been for nearly a year. This is the second time your mother calls you a slut. One of Mac’s friends is your friend and you call him and talk to him. He tells you to come over, so you do, and you knew where his house was because you used to smoke pot there when you were dating Mac. It was laced with PCP last time. Nobody knows how that happened. The guy greets you with a friendly embrace and you feel him smell your hair. He walks you to the sofa and sits closer than is comfortable for an acquaintance. He holds your hand in his and encourages you to speak. He wipes a tear from your face and leans towards you. When you say this was a bad idea and you stand to leave, he becomes angry. He calls you a tease and grabs your wrist. You jerk your arm away from him and stumble out of his front door, crying and tripping over an in-the-ground sprinkler on the way to your car. He calls you a bitch. He calls you a slut. You confide in a guy at work. You tell him everything that’s going on, looking for some sort of help, some kind of remedy. You tell him you don’t know what to do. You tell him you feel helpless. That same week, he gets upset with you, and he calls you a cheap whore. He tells you to stop fucking asking for it, and says he hopes you kill yourself. You feel like you are spinning. Now you understand why people hurt themselves. You don’t know what else to do. All of a sudden, you’re looking for objects in your everyday life that are sharp enough to break skin. You use an x-acto knife that you sterilize with your lighter in the bathroom during art class. You only draw blood on the sides of your thighs so that no one else will see it. Sometimes you go so deep you miss entire class periods because you’re sitting outside in your car, frantically trying to stop the bleeding on your own with an oil-stained tee-shirt. You ball up your hands into little fists and slam them into your steering wheel until you feel your bones pop out of place, and then, you do it harder. You hit walls until your tiny hands are stained sunset-yellow-purple-pink with uneven bruises. You snap thin rubber bands against the insides of your wrists, leaving streaky red welts. You take motion sickness pills to keep your head from spinning and it gives you a sad, heavy kind of high. You hate yourself. You suck. Fuck you. Quran 2:223 “Your women are a tilth for you to cultivate, so go to your tilth as ye will.” You’re a seventeen-year-old girl and you wake up on a roof on the north side of the Square. You smoke three Marlboro Menthols consecutively and hum “Happy Birthday” to yourself, watching the morning air comb through the smoke like running fingers through long hair. The sun started coming up just before you opened your eyes, and soft streaks of bright-orange chalk dusts the foggy-blue smear of the horizon. It’s been chilly all night and the smooth spots on the roof have collected frost. You have bits of it on your eyelashes. Your cheeks are hard from the cold, and from the tears last night. Your sweatshirt is too big for you but it hides your tiny body and keeps you warm. You have a fourth cigarette. You stare into the sun until your eyes ache. You were with your best friend at her house last night. She is older than you. You hang out with a lot of people who are older than you because everyone thinks you are Cool. You’re so glad that you’re Not Like Other Girls. Other Girls are squeamish and sickly. Other girls say no. You are Strong. You cried to your friend for a long time last night. She listened and she patted you on the back and hugged you and told you it would be Alright. She made you bacon and orange juice and brought them to you in her bedroom. You weren’t hungry. You cried more. She leaned in and kissed you full on the mouth. Her lips were thin but soft. It didn’t make you feel better like she thought it would. You walked out of her house without taking any of your things with you. You left without a word and slept on a roof, alone, with nobody’s hands down the front of your pants. You kept your motion sickness medicine in your jacket pocket just in case, because you knew all this would happen. You always know, and you always go anyway, because you are Different, and you are okay, so long as everyone around you is happy. You snatched the pill bottle out of the blue-plastic tub your mom has kept in a cabinet above the toilet since long before you were thirteen. You figure that if five of these bitter little chalky-white tabs would keep your head holding your feet on the ground, heavy as a bowling ball, ten would lay you flat on your back, making cracks in the lane next to the foul line. If eight would speed up your heart, pitter-pattering loud but weak like little baby bird wings, twenty would squeeze the poor thing until it burst– bang, all confetti and glitter and feathers and blood. If twelve would rattle your skull around with every small movement until your memories shook loose and fell out like cracked teeth onto the ground where someone would surely step on them, crunching them smaller and smaller into the pavement, forty could hand you the proverbial clean slate, squeaky and blank as the day you were born. At fifty, you lose your short-term memory and you start to hallucinate. The dryness in your mouth and the bitterness you taste when you move your tongue doesn’t quite line up with how quickly you seem to be moving. You can feel the bones in your arms and your legs when they move with your ligaments and tendons and muscles. The joints grind and it’s too quiet for you to have ever heard before now. Your phone rings but when you check it, there is nothing. This happens a few times. A metronome ticks inside your chest. You move slowly, but the metronome ticks so fast. You are too slow to tap your foot to the beat. You are trying to enjoy the music. Symphonies play inside your head, and you hum along. The metronome doesn’t match the tune. You kick your feet out away from you because you need some space and you knock a little white bottle over. It is empty. It rolls down the slant on the mostly-flat rooftop and the skittering noise almost matches up to the beat of the metronome. You are tired. You feel warm but your little nose is red and your little knuckles are white. You can see your breath. The sun is coming up but you are warm from the inside, not from the sun. You remember a man on a bicycle that used to drive by your house and hit on your mom. You remember your mother reading you Bible verses and teaching you about God before bed. You remember the girl who switched schools after her boyfriend leaked her photos. You remember the boy that first broke up with you in fourth grade because he had to move away. You remember he gave you a necklace and you wonder what you did with it. Are you still wearing it? No. Not for years. Where is it? You are tired. You make a phone call but the phone never rings. You send a text but it does not send. There is no record of any activity on your phone at all in the past hour, two hours, seven hours. You fall asleep as the metronome begins to slow, and the symphony that plays in your head matches the ringtone you set for your phone. Titus 2:4-5 “Teach the young women to be obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.” You are still a seventeen-year-old girl, but today you wake up in a bed. It isn’t your bed, but there are no greedy sausage hands down the front of your pants, so that’s a start. Your mom doesn’t know it, but you remember what she told you in the car outside. Punk’s mother called; she was concerned that you were pregnant because she found out that Punk had not been using protection. Your mother said she didn’t think any of your “boyfriends” had been. A lot was said, really, but you remember that it was the third time that she has called you a slut. It was the first time she’s told you you’re crazy. You were crying and she told you that you were too upset. “Nobody cries this hard unless somebody’s died,” she told you. “Stop making this such a big deal. Not everything is all about you.” When you got here, they took away your necklace, makeup, cell phone, and shoelaces. All the doors in this wing of the building are locked from the outside, which you’re pretty sure is a fire hazard, but you suppose the nurses here are more concerned with Suicide than with Death by Burning Building. There is an hour here, every day, where patients are confined to their rooms. You sit, hugging your knees, on your side of the carpet line that separates your room from the hallway, and you stare at the green Exit sign at the end of the hall, whose door is undoubtedly locked. You’ve been drawing with bright-colored chalk on black mat-board lately because you like the contrast. The girls rooming with one another across the hall from you stare from their carpet lines and ask, “What are you in for?”, like they have something to be proud of. You shrug and smudge your chalk-girl drawing’s hair back. You sleep by yourself on your first night, across the room from an empty bed. The next morning, you are assigned a roommate that is a girl with a boy’s name. Her last name is Green and she’s been running a tiny stub of dull pencil up and down the inside of her forearm for half an hour. They let her keep it because she said she’d be using it to draw, because she is an artist, and the nurses like artists. Artists have already found their Creative Outlet and they’re easier to rehabilitate. The nurses practically beat each other up trying to give Green this goddamn pencil. When they find out what she’s been using the pencil for (because the nurses check your entire naked body every morning for scrapes, bruises, welts, cuts, hickeys, and more), the nurses sigh sadly and confiscate Green’s pencil. Green has been scratching her fingernails up and down the same probably-infected graphite-smeared gash in her arm for ten minutes when she tells you, “Erasers work really well too. It burns, even after you stop.” On your second night, you wake up to very loud sobbing and wailing in the bed next to you. Green has bled all over the sheets. She is dragged to the real hospital by the nurse that showed you card tricks yesterday. The other patients stand at their doorways and watch, knowing none of you will probably ever see Green again. This facility houses minors from three counties, and there’s no way she’s coming back. You don’t even know where she was from. You are all strangers, tossed together by mere coincidence, and by your respective parents, who put you here. You are moved to another room so they can replace the mattress of the bed next to yours, which they won’t do until the morning. You fall back asleep and when you wake up, you have another new roommate. You don’t know how long she’s been in the bed next to you, but she is shaking, letting out little whimpers. Her curly black hair bounces when she shivers against her pillow. You realize you haven’t said a word to anyone since you arrived, and you wonder if you should talk to this girl. She must have arrived late last night. When the nurses come in to wake you up at 7am sharp, they let the girl stay in bed. You hope she is okay, but you know she must really not be, because they don’t let anybody else stay in bed. In the living room area, there are couches and chairs circled up around an old television set. You’re actually surprised that it plays in color and is capable of hooking up to a DVD player. You sit with all the other inmates in the commons and you watch UP. You cried when you first watched this movie, at the part where Ellie finds out she can’t get pregnant. It was a beautiful little love story that ended in tragedy, which you found easily relatable, oddly enough. Today, you don’t cry. You watch the movie between two eight-year-old kids having a dance battle in the center of the wacko circle. They’re actually pretty good, and you’re glad they can find happiness in a place with three-inch-thick windows and metal bars on the doors. Rule Number One in this terrible place is that you shouldn’t talk about why you’re in here (or why other kids are in here) unless you are talking to your counselor about yourself. Naturally, though, word got out about some of the serious cases–the kids that can’t stay here and are being transferred to Kansas City soon. Molly is three years old. She skinned her cat until it died and she burned half of her house down. Her parents don’t know what to do with her, and word is, she belongs to the State now. They don’t know what to do with her either. David is seventeen. He went through a very messy breakup last month with a long-term girlfriend and overdosed on barbiturates at school. He was released only today from the real hospital. Fifteen-year-old Lawrence’s parents found out he’s gay and they sent him here to think about what he’s done and to repent for his sins. His next stop is a Catholic boarding school. The tall, skinny girl with the dark, curly hair that’s been rooming with you doesn’t seem to have a story. She is very quiet. She’s like you; she doesn’t even talk to her doctors. Your sister cried for a long time when she found out you tried to kill yourself. She hugged you in the kitchen and cried on your shoulder. She was scared to lose her big sister. 1 Timothy 2:11-15 “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing.” You are still a seventeen-year-old girl, and today you wake up in your own bed. You are still having nightmares and you are still self-harming. The doctors have diagnosed you with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which evidently isn’t just a sickness reserved exclusively for old soldiers. You have a therapist named Jeanie, and your mother makes you go to your appointments, even though you don’t talk to Jeanie (or to your mother) when you are there. Jeanie tells you that you have been raped. This is the first time that this word has been used to describe anything that’s happened to you, by anyone, including yourself. She says that you have been taken advantage of, and that you have been sexually assaulted. You have had no positive relationships with men. This assessment makes you uncomfortable. You know what love looks like. You leave her office early that day to go home and take a nap. For several weeks, you fight with yourself. Those words don’t sound right. “Rape.” You think back to Bad Boy and you recall the phrases “statutory rape” and “indecent liberties with a minor.” Redhead was twenty-two when you first met, and since girls matured faster, he just saw you as mature for your age, right? Touching you while you were asleep wasn’t “sexual assault.” Mac did not take “advantage of you” when you were so high that you threw up, and his friend did not “rape” you when he gave you his virginity while you were drunk in Mac’s bed. They were all very nice to you when they weren’t trying to fuck you. Right? At another visit, Jeanie brings up something called “grooming.” She says that this is what happened to you. You don’t like it when someone else tells you, “This is what happened to you.” Despite your mother’s protests, you stop seeing Jeanie. The months before your birthday are tired and foggy. You stop self-harming, but it is because you can barely be bothered to move. Some days, you do not leave your bed. Your mother is worried, still, but not quite worried enough to hospitalize you again. “At least she’s not around those Bad Boys,” she says. “At least she is home.” Too fatigued to cut your own flesh or beat your tiny fists into the walls, you sleep a lot. When you do leave your bed, you draw on the unfinished drywall in your basement bedroom in chalk. You draw night skies and angels and portraits. You write poems next to giant birds and a big moon and an extinguished sun. Your mother says, “At least she is home.” You meet another Boy. He is 23 years old, and he is a virgin. He lives with his mother. You tell him all that has happened with you and you explain why, sometimes, your eyes freeze over like a pond in the winter and you are unable to breathe from all the cold. You read him your Preface and ask politely if he’s interested in thumbing through the rest of your dusty pages. The Boy smiles sweetly enough that you finally smile back. You move in with this Boy and you are still 86lbs. You drink only water and eat only ice. You try to run to see if you can push yourself into the Negative Calorie Zone, but because of all the smoking, running is hard. You smoke about a pack a day, stocking up your luckies and using them for your Bad Days. This Boy does not help your Bad Days go away, but you don’t mind. It lets you shrink in on yourself, becoming Less and Less. You are 84lbs. You know for sure, because you weigh yourself twice a day. This Boy does not notice that you are not eating. You take his virginity and he tells you he Loves You. Puffing on a Marlboro Red in his mother’s spare room in the bed next to you, he tells you that you are Not Like Other Girls. You shudder a little at his word choice, but you move to a bigger city with him anyway and hope that things get better.Deuteronomy 22:20-21 “If, however the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death.” 1 Corinthians 11:2-10 “For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.” You are an eighteen year old girl. You have stretched your ears to show that you are growing. You wear spacers you can see through to scare off the boys who only like you for your looks. You have been with this Boy for a year, now, and he still does not have his driver’s license. He is twenty-four and lives with you now instead of his mother. “Isn’t that an improvement,” you say. “He’s making such progress,” you say. You come home to your apartment in the biggest city you’ve ever lived in, and you find this Boy in bed, plugged into your Xbox. You are having a Bad Day. Your friends at work and school have told you that this Boy is No Good. He’s a Dead End. “Have you been reading your driver’s handbook?” you ask him. “I thought we’d planned to go to the DMV tomorrow.” He does not look up from his game. “I couldn’t find it,” he says. You walk into the living room and it is on the coffee table. You toss it to his feet and leave the apartment. You thought that this was what love looked like. You’ve thought this before. Today, though, you realize, you can’t know what love looks like, because you have never seen it. You thought that love was in the Fridays that Mac didn’t steal your paychecks to buy drugs. You thought that love was Redhead promising he’d marry you someday, even though he’d already promised another girl your age the same thing. You thought that love was wanting to fuck you, just once, before Bad Boy moved away. You thought that love was about letting Punk do whatever he wanted with you, whether you wanted to or not. You thought love meant being Different and proving that you’re Not Like Other Girls. Maybe Jeanie was right. Maybe all those people you told shouldn’t have stayed friends with the men who hurt you, after they found out about it. Maybe you shouldn’t still be friends with the men who hurt you on Facebook, watching them find new girls and buy new cars and learn new song lyrics. It’s always kind of hurt, seeing them go on like nothing’s happened, hasn’t it? Isn’t it hard having them interact with you as if they’ve never done a thing to harm you? The key to long-term abuse, you’ve discovered, is convincing the victim that everything was her idea in the first place. When Redhead said, “You’re cute, but you’re too young for me,” it was a challenge. He wanted you to prove to him that you were mature enough to handle an older man. There was always an imbalance of power between the two of you. He used you. A coworker has been asking how you’re doing, and you don’t know how to answer him. You’d rather talk about other things, like the human condition. You want somebody you can lie next to in the wet grass and thank for not kissing you. There has always been pressure, and finally, you’re done giving in. Your coworker gives you his number on a piece of paper and asks if you’ll text him. You smile and say, “We’ll see.” When you text your coworker, it’s different than before, but this time, it’s different because you choose to text him. When you make plans, it’s different, because you choose to make plans. You choose to go to Ihop in the middle of the night, after you both got off work. You choose to invite him over. He asks what movie you’d like to watch, and you get to choose The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Then you choose Fight Club. With every scene, you scoot closer to one another on the sofa, under your biggest, warmest blanket. You choose to brush your pinky against his. You decide when to lay your head on his shoulder. You can feel his heart hammering in his chest. He has the most pleasant scent, and you’re amazed at how comfy you are. You could easily fall asleep, right here, against his chest… so you do. When you wake up, your head is still on his shoulder. He’s kissing the top of your head, and you can feel that his lips are curled in a smile. You smile, too, and fall back asleep. In the morning, you’re lying in front of him on the sofa. The TV is still on but it’s been blank for several hours. It’s a chilly November evening and you forgot to switch the heat on, but you’re warm, under your blanket with him. His scent has filled your apartment. For now, you’re alright. -- source link
Tumblr Blog : oliveglass.tumblr.com

More pics about