I was getting all geared up to write a prompt this morning when I visited a favorite site of mine, Writing Ourselves Whole, which is an uplifting site dedicated to the practice of writing in the midst of healing and transformation.
It had already been bookmarked for a while and this morning I read “Light Through the Layers of His Eyes,” and sat, stunned, afterward. Stunned, meaning, I was looking out the window for several minutes, finding the regular pattern to my breath. I wasn’t out of breath, but I don’t know how long I had been breathing so shallowly when I read this. It was written so honestly, with so much watercolor gentleness about such a brutal violation, that I felt I was there. With her. In that room.
I wanted this to be a poem but it’s just the same old story and I’m coming out as not quite ready to let go trying to tell you how it was. This is an awful memory: he was the one who taught me both the hatefulness and acceptability of queerness, the way he’d mock and cackle over gay men he knew, decry their mother issues, their obvious narcissism, and then later, mucfh later, in bed with me(and how much I need a phrase that incorporates the tender brutality of a forced and enforced consent into something as plain and bald as ‘rape’), he would detail his own bisexuality, he wanted to form an allegiance with me, but I couldn’t agree too easily, because of the doublethink and the nausea that caused.
And so, my friends, I, the editor, find myself prompted by someone else. There’s no need for me to write a prompt for today. Read the brave words of this brave woman. Reflect.
The Dear Sister Anthology 