Saturday, July 28, 2007

Toenails


Another old piece of prose from camp. This one's kinda gross, really. 

*triggers for gross mentions of feet, and other stuff*

I am a piece of toenail. If I swallowed myself, I would feel myself scratch against my esophagus, and my tongue would scream the taste of toe. I am a piece of sharp shell that once was alive and a part of me. When the sun comes out, toenails dance and separate themselves, leaving behind deserted homes: the empty, bloody sockets. But toenails are dead, perpetually death. They are a piece of life that failed and grew into a protective death-shell. Nothing tastes good on fifteen-year-old toenails; not mayonnaise, not guacamole, not whipped cream.
I am broken and ragged and sharp, a fragment of my shattered toe. I will visit reality, piece by piece. Life will mean more than broken nails. The world must accept this and refuse to put up with toe stubbing. Nails can hold the world together. Caked blood seals the crack between the fifteen-year-old toenail and the world.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Sticky situations.


I've been working through this story-telling sort of thing. This is about as far as I've gotten thus far. I wrote it about 3 years ago, probably some point in the summer of 2004, although I unfortunately didn't put the date on it.

TW for sexual assault

Feedback? (ok, so on an invisible blog I won't get any. But perchance?)

They always teach you at school how to be street-smart. What to do in a “sticky situation”. Everybody gets back their test papers at the end of the safety unit in health class; everybody’s passed, and even done really well. They’ve all filled in the blanks correctly: they know how to act, what to do, what to say. The teacher heaves  a sigh of relief. Another group of students headed off into the big scary world, and none of them would get into trouble, right? No, of course they won’t, the teacher assures herself; they all got an A on their test papers.
If only real life was about filling in the blanks.
Funny. I got an A in health class, and look where it’s landed me. No less lost than if I hadn’t taken the class at all. Maybe more lost. As I lie here and write this, I wonder how I’ll make it through the week; the weekend gave me just enough time alone to realize how scared I am. And everything I’m feeling right now goes against everything I’ve learned.

Let’s jump back to last September. I was your typical grade nine student; a little overwhelmed at the reality of being in high school, knowing that it was time to get a boyfriend, get into trouble, and that sort of thing. That was what everybody else did, right?
I met him at lunch, my third week at that school. All of my friend were off at a club that I hadn’t joined, and I was all alone. He came up to my table; he thought I was my twin sister, who he had met a couple of days earlier, and we started talking. He was a really sweet, great, funny guy, and pretty good-looking too. In fact, he was a model. He showed me some of his pictures. Without that spattering of acne he wore that day, this guy was gorgeous. Just for laughs, he showed me his driver’s license photo, which was very different from his modeling headshots. I knew, after seeing these photos, that I’d found a goldmine of a guy. Not only was he a model, but he was eighteen, and could drive!
From then on, he always joined me and my friends at our lunch table. One of my friends seemed just as infatuated with him as I was; she was always flirting with him. She had a better sense of humour than I did, and my sister was prettier. Still, even though he always joked around and flirted with them more, I was the one he always liked to talk to. Oddly, one of my other friends never spoke around him. Back then, I was really confused by this, but now I know that she knew something we never noticed; he wanted more than your average guy.
As the semester went on, we began to talk less and less about real stuff, and he started telling me more and more dirty jokes. We had used to talk about philosophy, and that sort of stuff, a lot; having just had a mental breakdown, I was really interested in the meaning of life. But philosophy was all over with him; that just wasn’t what he was interested in anymore.
By November, all he ever wanted to talk about was his sex fantasies, particularly one where he’d use strawberries and whipped cream as a sex toy with a helpless virgin. He seemed to like the whole ‘damsel in distress’ sort of idea. I found these fantasies to be rather disturbing, so I stopped hanging out with him. I started to spend my lunch hours in a corner of the library doing homework with my friends. I ate my lunch as quickly as I could in the bathroom, just before class started. I gave him the cold shoulder in the halls between classes. I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t like the way he talked; he’d think I was being a baby.
In February, I turned fifteen. I guess he thought that this made a real difference to how I would feel and act, because he started following me around again. I found this to be a little weird, but I really couldn’t care less. He was just another boy who liked me; creepier than some, sure, but after all, he did go to my school. I wouldn’t tell him where I lived or anything; I wasn’t that stupid. But he couldn’t do anything to me while we were at school, so I considered myself to be safe.
Safe from what, I don’t know. It never even bothered me that much that he persistently followed me, not even when, every so often, he would sneak up and grab me from behind. He’d just sort of pounce on me, then laugh. I never really expected it, and I’d generally shriek or squeal a little. He thought that this meant that I liked it, although I really really didn’t.
It was only when he started to try to grab my chest or reach down my pants that I realized that things were really wrong.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Bodies


One of the key equity notions this year was giving agency, countering hegemonic oppression, thingification, and the erasure of history. When, then, do we keep referring to people with the term “bodies?” Yes, we are discussing oppression as it relates to how one’s body is treated and perceived, and this term recognizes the power of oppression that is perpetrated based on simple physical characteristics.
I feel, however, that this term works against a lot of what we strive for. It is a form of synecdoche, reducing people to their bodies. Without recognizing the individual who lives in a body, what is the point of doing this work? If people talked about my body, rather than about me as a whole person, I would feel medicalized and stripped of my identity.
Talking about people in relation to their bodies removes their histories, which are only complete when the human details – perceptions, thoughts, emotions – are included. If violence is committed against a body, regardless of its characteristics, it is a benign event. “Body” is just an object. As a word, it does not imply humanity. Bodies do not resist, because they are objects, not subjects. We talk about bodies passively, as though they do not belong to people who feel fear, pain, and anger. The body may be a physical manifestation of humanity, but it is not humanity itself.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

An old monologue


I wrote this at camp a couple years ago. Didn't post it online because it seemed...threatening, or something. It's totally fiction, don't worry. It was part of our stage combat scene. I was a character called Melissa, who was being bullied by her friends. Even though real-life-me sometimes wished I could be this bold...don't worry. I'm too sensible for that :)

******
I can’t stand them anymore. Get a boyfriend. Do my homework. Your clothes are ugly. Get a life. Yeah right. I like my clothes, I don’t want a boyfriend, why in God’s name would I do their homework? And I have a life. It’s just not like their lives. I’m myself. Sometimes I dream of just charging them with a big, huge stick. That would do it, right?

But the thing is, I’m not like that. When have I ever stood up for myself before? I never stand up for myself. I’ve lived here all my life in this house, and I don’t remember even begging to repaint my room. Yeah, I’m that boring. My room’s white and smooth – like a bathroom. I’m more green. They say I should be more pink, or baby blue. They say, they say, they say. I don’t care what they say anymore. People always said that I’d never learn to read and write, just because when I was little I was more interested in drawing pictures. But I learned. And now I do homework for my classmates. Go figure.


Yeah, I did it. I’m not going to say that I didn’t. I killed them, and honestly, I don’t fucking care. But you can call the police, they’ll come and arrest me, and I won’t tell them a thing.

Oh, you’re afraid of seeing your daughter’s face all smashed when you go upstairs? Well, at least you care. If you were a grown-up clone of her, you wouldn’t care about her face, you’d care about her fingernails. They were pink before. Silvery pink. For prom. Now they’re red with the blood that came from her eyes when I strangled her.

I hope you don’t care about your daughter. No, screw that, I hope you DO care. Then you can feel bad about raising such a psychotic monster. Fuck, now she’s not even a girl anymore. Just a mass of skin and hair and blood, with the devil’s eyes bugging out from between bits of blue skin. Go look. I dare you.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Bandaid solutions...


I wrote this in 2005, and just found it now. Kinda sad, now. And less real now.

I can feel it here. On my arms and shoulders, not in my head where the memories hurt, or the rest of my body, or anywhere else. Just here.
It’s easier like this – bandaids, blood, long sleeves. You can’t put a bandaid on your memories to make them go away; they haven’t invented that kind of brain surgery yet. You can’t bandage up my mouth to make the bad taste leave it. But you can clean up your arms, take care of yourself. Weird, just attacking myself more, but it’s the only real way to live my life; let it leak out with my blood, then smother it in a bandaid until it isn’t even real anymore; it’s not emotion, it’s matter. It’s blood. And it’s leaking out of me this way. I can talk like this for hours, because it isn’t really me. It’s a haunted voice in a bleeding broken body without a future. The real me went down the toilet with the bloody towel that I didn’t want anybody to see. The real me isn’t here anymore, this voice isn’t mine. The real me went somewhere, one day, into another world where it can enjoy things, and it left this flat and fractured soul in this bleeding, broken body on the earth to suffer but refuse to feel. Maybe the real me will come back to that body once the scars have faded away and the stars come out to replace them.