Dear Reader(s),
While I expect Demon Time to be a space to confront debates and discourse about human sexuality with humanity and humor, I found myself unable to continue researching topics of sexuality without wanting to finish a journal entry about my rape. I stopped and started it many times months ago. Abandoned it. I had no intention of finishing my stream of thoughts, and no intention of sharing it publicly. But some odd, nagging thing pushed me towards a conclusion today that feels wholly unsatisfying at once, but also freeing in that I finally finally wrote about the worst day of my life. I also acknowledge that friends and family who subscribe might also learn about my experience for the first time here. I sincerely apologize. It is an experience I needed to only tell a few people and then never utter again. Currently, I don’t think I will write about it ever again.
-Jameka
1
I remember most clearly that my body was on fire. Not the kind of heat associated with a high fever, but something like the shredding searing fire of flesh, like spontaneous combustion. Tinder ignites and then the flames sweep up and out. It’s difficult to put language to this sensation. Of feeling like a river of ignited gasoline is racing up through you, inside you. From your crotch, through your guts, and deep into your chest. That pain was breathtaking.
Another thing, which I feel would cause a court to determine my memory is fragile, is that I don’t remember my rapist’s face very well. And I was sober. Which is another cause for concern. Couldn’t a sober woman recognize the signs of trouble? Or, shouldn’t a sober woman be better equipped to fight her attacker, and slip away? It doesn’t matter. I’m not taking this to court.
I had one drink, a Long Island Iced Tea, in an eight-ounce plastic cup, from the bar. A headache washed over me and dissipated quickly within minutes of taking two sips, and I tossed the drink. I don’t like Long Island Iced Teas and I told him to get whatever he’s drinking. (I keep a mental list of what I perceive were mistakes I made throughout the evening of November 3, 2019.)
By the time my date was raping me in the parking garage across the street from the Wild Hare, I was dead sober.
My rapist feels odd to type. Probably more weird to say aloud. To say the rapist feels as if not only am I distancing myself from the reality of the assault, removing evidence that I even was at the scene of the crime, but I’m also removing signifiers that would identify me as possessing the actor who performed my ruin. But to say the rapist feels like saying The King or The Boss, which feels worse to me as if the word “the” assigns a kind of reverence for the object. The possessive descriptor. Possession is what I’m hung up on. I own this person, and thus, I can do whatever I like with him. Like, stab him in my dreams. But the rapist feels distant and cold to me. It’s difficult to explain, which is the nature of this entire experience. Difficult. Illogical.
But why would I even want him to be a part of my story? Why do I want to own him?
MY rapist. MY assault. MY experience.
My whole body was on fire.
I don’t remember his face all that well because I was too busy being in fear and pain. During my rape, my eyes never met his. Not when he shoved my head into his crotch. Not when he stood me up and slapped me across the face, and pushed me over onto the concrete stairs. My eyes emptied and glazed over through it all, as if in a trance, taking my consciousness deep into the woods, far away from what was physically happening to me.
I remember his face most clearly afterward when he pushed me away seeing a film of blood had turned his penis red. Which also tells me that he wasn’t looking at me. He must’ve been looking at his penis that whole time. The memory of his face comes to me in simple lines and static snaps, like an elementary cartoon, like the Pain Scale chart with the yellow smiley faces in a patient’s hospital room. His face is an illustrated smiley face, meant to be understood by everyone, including children. His face is just a flat circle, with a line arched, the endpoints curved down in a frown, and two other curved lines above the black dot eyes to indicate eyebrows. Eyebrows arched in disgust.
I don’t do blood! I don’t do blood! He kept yelling. Gimmegimmegimme. I was so paralyzed with fear that I couldn’t understand his hand wagging at me frantically and his lips spasming. I was too slow to respond so he snatched my torn underwear out of my hand to use as a handkerchief to wipe his penis clean of my blood.
I don’t remember how my underwear got into my hand.
I don’t understand myself in less than stressful situations, but I certainly was a mystery to myself that night. Because he was momentarily distracted, spitting I don’t do blood, wiping his dick with my briefs preciously, and I didn’t fucking run. To ask me why I didn't run when he was distracted is to ask myself why I wasn't a conscious agent, a human being, at that moment. My feet felt sunk into quicksand or freshly poured concrete. My body was tired, muscles bruised in knots. I ached from the top of my head to my toes. A bomb was exploding inside me, as the blood dried sticky in between my thighs. I was dumbfounded. I remember vividly that I stared at the drops of blood on the concrete ground of the fourth level of the parking garage, evidently coming from me, blood the circumference of nickels and dimes. He could’ve very well pulled a gun, pressed it to my temple, and pulled the trigger, and I wouldn’t have seen a thing but my feet on the ground, little blood drops at my toes.
2
The only thing that I find funny about this whole thing (and I understand that is controversial to say) is that he had church in the morning. On the phone, about an hour or so before he picked me up to go on our first (and last) date, we chatted about our interests and hobbies. What do you do for a living? I’m a musician. I’m a baker. Do you like to dance? I’m not very good. Wear something nice. And before he hung up he said he would drive over and pick me up from my apartment, but first, he had to press his outfit for church service in the morning.
I don’t care about the nature of his faith. I don’t care about his soul. Everyone I’ve gone on dates with before seemed vaguely Christian or Christian-adjacent. But now and then, to make myself laugh to keep from crying my lungs raw, I wonder if he actually went to church the next day. I wonder if his church requires him to make confessions.
What else is funny is that if he hadn’t raped me, this still was the worse date I’ve experienced. The stereotype is that dating online is often embarrassingly dreadful, or worse, dangerous. One should expect nothing but maniacs and menaces because everyone online is lying about who they are. And it pains me, but sometimes, genuinely makes me giggle, that my bad Tinder date is exactly the stuff of nightmares that fuel the stigmas associated with online dating. I am now a “case in point.”
From beginning to end this man was awful. He was self-obsessed. Throughout the night, he badgered me to answer questions about him. Do you like my hair? Do you like my shoes? Do you like me? Do you like me? He was obnoxiously corny. And oversexed. Too many times he pulled my hand from my purse or my side to make me grope at his hard-on. I ended the date quickly, hiding in the bathroom to text my sister how to politely end the date, and eventually emerging to feign a headache. I felt ill, and uneasy, and asked him to drive me back home. (Red flags everywhere. Mistakes being made.)
(Why am I even telling you all of this? Why am I even re-traumatizing myself? You have to laugh to keep from crying, my mother always says.)
3
French writer Édouard Louis investigates his rape with clinical precision in History of Violence. Shocking to read how keen his memory of the event is: the details of the physical pain, how he meticulously cleaned the crime scene himself, the facial characteristics of the body of his lover (turned rapist), where his rapist dropped his underwear or placed a glass of water, the clearly expressed circumstances of the evening before and the days afterward. I feel ashamed to consider how confident I am in my memory of the experience of rape, but not the details. And the experience, unfortunately, after traumatization, does not share the same anatomy as the reality of the event.
I find myself, when my mind wanders away from my carefully constructed routines and distractions, remembering details that wouldn’t save me psychologically, nor would they bring me justice in the court of law. I don’t remember my rapist’s car at all despite having been inside of it for a considerable amount of time on the way to the location of our date. I could tell you what color coat he had on (a camel-colored peacoat), but by now, so many years later, that information wouldn’t serve me in any way. I second-guess myself often. Was it camel-colored? Or a darker brown? How tall was he? I couldn’t tell you everything, beat by beat, beginning to end, not because I simply do not remember, but because I no longer trust myself. Looking back, I feel as if I conjured spotty amnesia or odd details because I still hate myself for even agreeing to go on a date with a guy I had only just spoken to a couple of days before.
4
To hate myself is shockingly easy. I didn’t like myself much before. I was bullied in elementary school. But who wasn’t? I’m a know-it-all. A showoff. Overweight. Only 5’5”. My hair is not very long and I wish it was. I wish I were smarter, and I pretend to enjoy things and conversations to keep people from hating me. Living not only with myself (my memories), but within an abused body is an ugly, often disturbing arrangement of irrational anxiety, distrustfulness, self-denial, and wilful subjugation to negative psychology or negative actions. After I was raped, I did not report it to the police. Arguably, a betrayal of other survivors and women who could come across this man in the future. (A good friend of mine, who I confided in about this, emphasized that I’d be “saving” these hypothetical women if I made a report). I only told anyone when the bleeding continued for days, despite not having my period. And who I told wasn’t the police. It was my OB/GYN.
I ate sporadically, sometimes gorging, sometimes denying how hungry I was for days. I stopped sleeping. I showered infrequently. Oddly, I continued to date almost immediately afterward, even inviting men into my apartment, where once again I was just as isolated and alone as I was in that parking garage. And this, despite the cultural consensus that to be believed as a survivor, you must abstain from everything that is even remotely related to the conditions of your assault. You must certainly abstain from engagement with men until someone believes you.
One could argue these actions are not illogical because they are ultimately the result of traumatization, but what is most important to remember is that there was a self that made sense to you before — and didn’t have to make sense to anyone else. Your actions and behaviors had meaning to you. I felt confident that I was growing to understand myself better and know what was good for me, as all young adults grow to do. Now, that growth was stunted. And self-hatred is born out of the misery that one has lost the ability to understand one’s own mind, one’s own desires or decisions, which justifies that one has died to one’s self.
5
I never consented. Nor did I verbalize no. It is easy to blame victims for their trauma, and I wonder, the way that haunted people do, if I verbally said no would he have let me go.
We know, for many people, non-verbalization in sexual situations is not understood as a refusal at all. People interpret such a “non-response” (your silence or neutrality) as an opening, a door that is slightly closed but absolutely not shut or locked.
The way he treated me throughout the date confirms how much his ego and his desires were fed by my silencing. He never asked about my hobbies or my job. He barely let me speak at all. The entire date was a sales pitch; his hackneyed rendition of the spoken bridge of a ‘90s R&B song, begging me to want him as much as he wanted me. The conversation (I relent to call our talk a “conversation”) was only focused on him. Coming on too strong. Forcing my hand to his crotch. I do believe he recognized that I was not interested in him; I was not that obtuse. My headache was an excuse to exit whatever perceived contract he felt was between us. The laziest, most detached engagement with this man was enough for him to say yes, you will sleep with me. Because why even leave your house to meet me if you weren’t going to let me fuck?
This is an elementary, unrealized, and shallow concept of his sexuality and the sexuality of any potential partners. When he picks a woman, she has no choice but to desire him. My headache was a rejection. He raped me in the parking garage because he didn’t want to drive me home. In his words, he would lose his parking pass. He left me at the garage and he returned to the club. Ostensibly, to find another woman who wouldn’t make him work so hard for it. He had no intention of taking me back to my apartment to sleep off a frustrating headache. With this man, there were no other options but to sleep with him. You would consent and go back to his place. Or you would get back to his place and change your mind and he’d rape you there. Or you’d end the date at the club and get raped in the parking garage.
6
I’ve never written about my rape in prose until now.
There is one poem I’ve written around the rape in my forthcoming debut, American Sex Tape. I say “around” but I really mean I tried to write through the rape, by not visualizing it at all, but distracting myself (and the reader) with brackets, asides, and redactions, the philosophy of Julia Kristeva, a Penn and Teller magic trick, and a Chekhov’s gun. All in service of the fantasy that I could ever undo the damage, un-remember the assault. I devote only two lines to my rape in another poem. And that is it.
Here is where I tell you that I have no ending for this essay. Now you know that I have survived rape. What now? Why did I write this? I’ve told you what you already know about rape culture and the nature of trauma after a sexual violation. All the usual suspects of post-traumatic stress are present. Depression and anxiety. Questioning and doubt. So why write trauma? Why devote language to pain?
Well, to write our pain — to respect it with the highest of artforms and the wholeness of our emotional and intellectual energy — is a means of participating in one of our most mysterious, and in my opinion, most misunderstood emotions: that is grieving. We try to avoid grief as much as we can. It hurts and that is more than understandable; it is human. And yet there are cultures here in the US and globally who have made mourning rituals so embodied as a means to commune beyond the limits of the flesh, as a means to fortify one’s sense of value and the power of community. I quote Kristeva in my poem “My Sister Says (“Everyone Can Catch This Smoke”). Feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva says “Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components—that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.” To name and exalt — to hold in high regard, to respect — our experience of pain is one of the most powerful things we can do as conscious beings.
To name something not only gives that object (here it is the story and trauma of rape, my rape) definition and importance, but it in turn exalts its opposite, its antagonist. To write one’s grief, to mourn the pain is to celebrate survival through language. It is also to acknowledge and exalt the light that breaks from the dark. To say this is rape is also to say what rape is not. Rape is inhuman. Rape is cowardly. Rape is antithetical to life. I will end with exaltation. I’ve named suffering and by doing so I will name its enemy, which is the acknowledgment of a blessing. My suffering is wholly meaningless beyond this one truth: mourning one’s pain is a shield against the collapse of self, the loss of one’s sense of value as a person.