When a new wound opens, the old ones sing, dissolving time:
A girl grips my arm in the dark. Everyone else is playing in another room. I can’t go, can’t return to them: she says so, holding me fast. This started as a game. She's smaller than me but I'm afraid to pull away.
I don't argue.
I don't strike.
I say nothing at all.
I’m hunched on the floor of a shower whose heat I can’t feel. I have no thoughts, no instincts left to trust. I’m told they’re wrong and I’m broken — but he can fix me.
He swears only he can fix me.
I’m screaming at a woman who treats people like dolls. At last, I've found my voice. I should shake the house with my exit, leave the screen door trembling and after that, a great silence. Within months, I take this advice and never regret it.
Life is easier when you accept apologies you never received, I once read, but my fantasies are unconvincing, and the real, unrepentant perpetrators are free to strike again.
To that point, the speaker in Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth announces:
"I do not forgive and forget
I Protect and Prevent
Make them eat shame and repent
I forgive me."
Each new wound is a chance to remember, and react. To raise a voice, or a hand, if only to reshape the person who will emerge from this moment; to ask them, “What are you willing to accept?”
