You want to become someone with a gentler brain.
The violation was bad, of course, but the way your mind drags it up is its own type of violation. It happens when someone stands too close to you; when men shout at you from their car windows; whenever you see the smallest hint of aggression in the creases of their face. Your mind reminds you, as minds tend to remind. The remembering is violent, and it shakes you, and in the end you know it is your own mind committing this act against itself, like a snake eating its tail. After it’s become habitual, you start thinking every violation is in some small way your fault.
You might not be a woman – or maybe you are, but not in body. You have a pussy, though. Everyone like you, who has seen the things you’ve seen, has a pussy. It’s that part of you that your violator thought was more valuable than the rest. It might be your breast, or your face, or your entire body. It’s anything and everything but you.
As time passes, you find yourself some happiness – maybe with a significant other, or friends, or family. It might not be as hard as everyone thinks it is, or it might be harder. You react and unfold to trauma in a way that’s integral to your being, to the point where it’s almost hard to tell which came first – have you had this strength in you all along, or did it change you? You find yourself thinking this, that maybe something good has developed, and you feel like your skin is harboring spiders. You exhale sharply.
You wish you could go back to the time before your mind started eating your body. You can’t, so you live with it. You choose to not be haunted, except for in those small moments where there is no choice.
Perhaps nothing like this happened to you at all. Perhaps you don’t know, or never could have imagined, what being touched without your permission feels like. Perhaps you can only feel outrage at the words of Donald Trump through the idea of your daughter, or your sister, or your friend. Or perhaps his words have no effect at all, and you accept his apology, and you move on without being changed.
Pretend that you’re not any of those people, though. Pretend that you have a pussy, and you are listening to a 60-year-old man laugh about grabbing it during a conversation with a reporter. It is not a strange woman, or your daughter – it is you. You feel a tightness in your throat and a heaviness in your chest as your mind reminds you, and drags. The reaction is involuntary, because your body is not your own. When he tells you that this is how most men talk about women behind closed doors, a small part of you believes he might be right.
You watch as people emerge to defend him. You watch as friends – people who you respect – announce their support. To you, it is unfathomable. To you, with the spiders and the snakes and the mind that eats your body, it is unforgivable. You wonder if you will ever be able to look them in the eye again.
Your mind was un-gentled, once, and it will never be gentle again. Donald Trump supports this practice; in fact, he believes it is his right to do that to you, given the chance. He would break you, if you were the type that could be broken.
(You aren’t, by the way.)
In the end, you with the mind that reminds and the fierceness despite it all have only one course of action:
You vote with your pussy.
