I.
I have watched the blood of a young Black man fill the cracks in the sidewalk and then, viscous, not yet coagulated, overflow the curb and drain like a curtain of paint into the gutter, mixing with grit and oil and cigarette butts, down into the sewer. Later, a fire hose washed everything clean—except for the body of the young Black man which, at that time, I imagine, was lying on a tray in a fridge at the city morgue.
Later that month, a young White woman pulled up her short shorts and showed me a series of small round scars pockmarking her inner thighs. Nasty pink things, overlapping one another, too many to count all at once. She explained that her dad liked to smoke after sex. She was the ashtray. And the sex.
A few years later, I watched a client fold in on herself, a body collapsing around itself, a body no longer possessed by herself, a self no longer capable of sustaining a body, a self no longer itself, as she eventually managed to explain that she had just been raped in an alleyway one block away from where I worked. At the time that she was raped, I think I was eating potato chips in shift change and listening to a co-worker drone on and on and on and I thought maybe his drone was going to last forever. But it didn’t. Nothing does.
I don’t know how many of these stories to tell. I carry so many of them inside of me. I don’t know if I should tell any of them. Who deserves to read them? Who has the right to tell them?
A month ago, I was camping with a dear friend who was reeling from all the deaths of loved ones due to the current fentanyl-related crisis among people who use drugs (which is really a Rule of Law crisis, not a drug crisis). It seemed to me that his grief was overwhelming him, that he was barely keeping it together—and that’s when he was drunk. I’m not sure if being sober was even an option. Probably not for very long.
“You need to find a way to bury your dead,” I said to him. “You can’t carry them all around with you. Create your own rituals if the regular mourning practices don’t work for you. Find whatever works. You can’t carry them all. They’re too heavy. It’s too much. It will annihilate you.”
And, me? I’m pretty good at burying my dead. I’ve learned how to let my dead be dead. I just struggle with letting my raped be raped, my tortured be tortured, my abandoned be abandoned.