The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open for days. I hid them from my parents and grew out my hair, thinking that the weight dropping from my head would lighten the one inside of me. It worked—not by making anything lighter, no, but by making me feel more balanced, like one weight was pulling the other and the strain on me had been lessened. Perhaps I had just become the fulcrum, the point on which everything hinged, the turning. I don’t know. I just know that I hurt a little less with each inch of hair I refused to cut. Looking back, I really don’t know what I thought it was going to protect me from.

Love and Fury – A Memoir

four

“There is no way to say something out loud that you can't say to yourself first. And so I was silent. But the body knows what the mind doesn't, and it has its own ways of getting what it wants, and I had gone off the pill. I told Aiden it made me nauseous and that my breasts hurt, which was the truth. I said hormones made me blue and that was true too. I was blue. The tears I had not shed in South Africa had risen to the surface since I had been in London. They would appear when I rattled along the Underground to work.

We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.

I wanted to be elsewhere, but, trapped in the back of a hot truck, my only escape was to refuse to learn to identify the birds. I battened down the hatches of my mind and refused my father entry. Refused to know. Refused to catalogue those birds into categories of similarity and difference, to recall and compare, which gave my sister and my mother their bond with my father.

sixty-eight

“I had felt that if I moved, if I spoke, if I breathed, everything I valued and everyone I loved would be destroyed. But with my analyst’s belief in me, that suicide vest packed with the explosive that is shame started to loosen. The heaviness in my chest eased, and I drew breath. The weight had not only been despair, it had been rage. Frozen rage. The ice-fire of helplessness that I had finally turned into words, clumsy words, but because they had been spoken to a man who could hear them for me, a glacier shifted, moved by the melt of tears. It’s been said that there are no monuments to rape survivors. The only memorial I can build is this one, fashioned from words.