by Amanda Cline

Do I forgive? Can I forget?

Not if you lust for four year olds still yet

Call me your sister, call me by name

I cannot respond as I drown in your shame

My gift to you was silence so deep like a knife

Rather than telling I gave up my life

Do you still want a sister? Do you still want to be connected?

Never again with these old memories resurrected

I am your violence objectified without cost

Fear not darling, it’s only my virginity’s loss

Where is my comfort? Where is my voice?

Did you forget these about consequences when you swallowed my choice?

I can’t sit alone in this dark cold room and pretend that I love you, because after all, you are the one who let me go on like this. By the same token, you gave me life and all of this that surrounds me and I am awed by your various living accomplishments. Sometimes I have felt so abandoned by you. You say you care for me deeply, but I bear this bulging weight alone on my shoulders, it seems. I am so fucked up and you seem to think that dealing me this package is for my own good.

The only thing that makes me think that I can trust you is the way you died. You were naked on that cross, and that makes me feel like you have been to the same place I have been — a land where someone is violated and exploited. Any yet you say that you can forgive, which is where I again become suspicious of your intentions. I can’t imagine forgiving someone who stripped me of every shred of dignity that I possess, so if you really endured what you did how can you forgive such things? Also, how can I trust you when you have a gender? Can a deity have a sex? And if you do have a sex, why isn’t it the one which has the least power on Earth? Wouldn’t that show us that you are capable of understanding even greater human suffering?

I care about you and I want you to love me, but how can you when I can’t fully love myself? Don’t you see where I have been? I have nothing but scraps and yet I tried to give those away. Remember that insecure young man from so long ago; I let him touch me because it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did. He asked me how far I wished to go and how could I say to him that it mattered? I had nothing left to keep sacred, nothing left to guard, for you allowed it all to be taken away. You can part the seas and heal the blind and even resurrect the dead, but you can’t keep one girl safe from harm. If I am your child and you are my father, where were you when I was frozen in that room, my room, while every violence in the world was unleashed upon my body? Where were you as I cried-where the fuck were you?

Tori Amos sings a song in which she proposes that there could be a heaven for screams-I don’t think that this is a heaven where you live. If you live in such a place, you have never allowed my screams to take shelter there because they’re still alive in me. Every day my heart screams so loudly that I can’t hear any other noise in the world. The screams make my heart black, twisted and gushing-this is not a place where you live.

*****

She truly was a dynamic girl. Everything that she did made me think that she was utterly perfect. In your book it says that you are to be first in my heart and my loved ones are to come second. Although most of the time you were first to me and Amy was mostly second, sometimes you would change places. Her joy for the music of the popular culture in the 1980’s made me love it as well because she was so much older and more mature that I was — and if she liked the music, there was no question in my mind that it was the best music in the world. She was so smart, too. Don’t you remember how she did so well on her assignments in school? Her vast intelligence allowed her to use so many large words that I could never grasp. Of course we were between seven and eight years younger than she was, but she was definitely smarter than Stephie and I could ever be. She was really good to us, too. She would dress Stephie and I up like miniature punk rockers sometimes and Daddy would glow as he snapped pictures of us. She even took us to the mall with her older friends and let us hear them share details about their boyfriends. I should thank you for such memories, but then I have to ask you why those memories are so faded and other less pleasant ones are not.

I remember how that room looked. The floral wallpapered room was otherwise free from decoration. It was before my hammock full of stuffed animals was erected over the bed; it was before my posters of Nelson and Spain dangled from the walls; it was even before I had my own television set. The desolate room only contained some items of furniture and clothing; among them was a large mirror where I could see the reflection of all my room’s contents. For vanity’s sake I loved how large and encompassing that mirror was; however, I would grow to hate that later for what it showed me. But you already know that. Maybe I can’t blame you for everything. I just can’t help but think that you created all that is and you alone possess the knowledge of the universe — with that kind of power you could have spared one person from suffering. Surely if you would have intervened I would have turned out much differently. Maybe that’s why you didn’t spare me.

We were being punished. Although they were not authoritarian parents, they did punish us just this once in my childhood. It must have been really bad for them to sentence us to our rooms, because Mom and Dad almost never took such sanctions. We three sisters piled up in my barren room and I remember that she was so mad at Steph and me. Her arms were folded, her mouth frowned and she would not speak. I kept trying to make her happy by asking her what I could do. Of all the horrible fates, having her lose a favorable impression of me was the worst. She told me that I should kiss her to make it up to her, and I did so by gently kissing her pallid cheek. And then she told me again that I should kiss her. Oh god, I was so frustrated with her. Doing what she wanted still didn’t satisfy her — she kept repeating her request over and over. Then she told me I wasn’t doing it right and then she showed me how to in a way that I never wanted to learn from her. And then she did much more to me, but you already knew that.

Years later, and I grew to depend on you. You never forgot to answer a prayer. All my trials were placed into your loving hands, and then I fell down. I realized that I had questions that you weren’t giving me answers to. You didn’t care that I wanted to know why and how — you ignored my prayers for the first time.

*****

Sitting in that blue stain glassed church I thought that I was there on behalf of my mother. She had been raped twenty-five years earlier in a bank at gunpoint, and I was there to support her struggle although she was not at my college to attend the vigil. All my life I had been participating in such events though I knew not why. I had volunteered at a women’s shelter where the women were battered by their spouses; I worked as a court advocate for abused and displaced women and children; I changed my major as a freshman from Psychology to Social Work. I never understood this pattern emerging in my decisions before. But you did.

As I listened to those solemn speakers in that dimly illuminated church on the corner of Main Street I felt calm. The women mournfully recounted their tales of horror — some recalled being beaten by their rapists while others focused on the agony they faced living with their perpetrators. Still yet I felt calm. Then politicians spoke and tried to convince their audience that they cared so much about rape and its victims, and then they asked us to vote for them. Of course I felt calm. Then Dr. Robin Armstrong rose to the podium; her traditional brightly colored vest and dark pants signified her arrival. On many occasions I had spoken to Robin about the issues we were studying in her World Music class outside of that arena and I had felt comfortable in her presence. She was well informed and sensitive and hilarious — and now she was an advocate for rape victims. At the podium she introduced the musical selection for the evening, Me and a Gun by Tori Amos. I felt calm.

The soft archipelago ballad echoed throughout the church. As I gazed around the room, I caught no glimpse of sobbing faces. The people in the building may not have been unaffected by this song, but they were not moved to visible emotion due to its graphic description of rape. I was not either. The song describes Amos’s rape by several unknown men in an undisclosed location, and it reminded me of my mother. Mom was raped randomly by a man with whom she had no prior affiliation; this was the essence of the song, I thought. A moment after my cognition of Mother’s rape emerged another thought entered my consciousness: this song is not only about being raped by a stranger, it is about the aftermath of being violated regardless of circumstance. For the first time in six years, I realized that the song was about me.

*****

I think I was watching Oprah. It was a beautiful spring day and the woods encasing my house were absolutely glowing with a warm radiation. I could not observe this right away, though, because I was inside glued to the television set. On it was a panel of women speaking to Oprah about their sexual abuses, and I was fully aware of my interest in the subject. The language that these women used to vocalize what had happened to them was so powerful for me. It was the first time I had ever heard these terms used to describe what I had gone through. At age thirteen this was the first time I ever had a name for what she did to me.

The majesty of the wooded area in my backyard was the only place I found a shelter for the tears that surfaced after watching this show. I felt totally helpless — where could I go from that point? I had to tell someone, but if I did would they be mad at me? I told my story to you, I pleaded to you, I begged to you to take me away, but you didn’t answer me. I had to tell someone. Daddy wasn’t at his office in the basement and mommy was getting home from work soon, so I had to find a way to tell them before we were all together.

As I reentered my house and grabbed the phone I felt a surge of nervous adrenaline pulsate through my veins. I dialed an 800 number from the self-help listing in a magazine; the phone rang, my heart raced. The woman spoke up on the other end by greeting me and asking me what my reason for calling was. My opportunity to speak about my experience was here — to this unknown source I could purge my guilt and shame, and she would never know who I was. She would never know my name the way that you do. But I was scared. Could I say these words, these horrifying words, these words which connote every fear I’ve ever known, these words which now define my existence? I told her I was sad; I told her I didn’t know why; I told her I had to go. And then I heard Mom.

Her heavy feet hit the stairs of the porch like a yellow streak of lightning smacking into a tree. She opened the door to the living room where my body stood motionless and stained with thick tears. When she asked what was wrong I employed the new words in my vocabulary to respond.

Amy raped me. That’s all, Mom, god, whoever the fuck cares. My sister raped me.

These three simple words uttered in the security of my living room seemed to crash into my mother’s whole body. I think she told me I was crazy. My imagination is vivid, she told me, so I must have just thought that this was real. But how could I make it up? Why would I invent an apocalypse for myself and my family?

Her words were sharp and loud, but my heart’s torture was the only sound I could hear. As I ran out the door into the deep forest behind my house, I told myself it was a dream. Mom was right. My imagination’s activity level was always high, and this was probably just another one of its products. It didn’t happen, and because it didn’t happen that meant I never had to live with it. Every day this dream drifted further and further away until it became just another nebulous vision in my subconscious. Six years later I woke up.

*****

Since the vigil last year my life has changed, as you know. You were the only one I trusted for a while, and then I called you on your bluff. You told me that you would shepherd me, but I have not felt your presence guarding my life. Instead every day feels like someone is ripping my entrails out. No area of my life is untouched by this event; this drama screams and kicks while riding on my back wherever I go. It is my constant companion.

I know that I don’t trust you, but I know that it is you and you alone who gives me hope because I know that you love me still. You, you who is my creator still has an unyielding love for me despite the tarnished package I inhabit — this is valid to me. I know that you love me not because of any intellectual proof that you have afforded me — I know it because I have survived, and I think that fact that can be attributed to you.

I don’t know where I stand with you; I’m not always sure where I stand with myself. The only thing I know for certain is that I will not merely survive this affliction anymore; I will no longer let this rape define me. Whether or not you will fit into that equation anymore remains unbeknownst to me, but somewhere in your plan you know these things. Of course, you always have.