I Closed My Eyes and I was Gone


I searched his eyes for kindness but saw that I had been right all along. He smiled at me, signaled at his long bag with his eyes and then looked back at me, exploring my face for hints of a breakdown. But I wasn’t going to break for him. Not yet.
As we rode down the dirty streets I remembered how he would watch me play piano. He would sit behind me and reach for to play with my hair, but I would get up and move away without looking at him thinking I could control the situation. Now his smiles only ever meant that he loved being in control of me – and everything I did.
On the streets were naked children, sleeping, dreaming of better things. I am surrounded by ugly hangovers of war poverty and corruption – and yet all I can do is feel sorry for myself. I take one last look at the skinny children and I decide that there are worse things then what I am about to face.
We’ve been driving around for hours in silence; I was screaming in my head, I wondered if he was too. I had an awful feeling that all his inside voice was doing was whistling. He parked his bike in the middle of an empty dirty road; it was dark, wet and dirty. I got off first, slowly moved a few steps back giving him room to place his bag between us.
“Open it” again, I desperately searched his eyes… looking for any humanity, I knew what was in it, I slowly unzipped and opened the bag and there it was, coming back to haunt me. “Excited?”
“Thrilled”
“Good… you’re going to do it to yourself”
I glared at him, and laughed nervously, “I can’t – It’s not possible”
He bent down and took it out of the bag, taking it out of its cellophane cover and pushed it into my stomach, he lowered his head slightly and dropt his vocals one octave, thinking he was being sexy-evil, “try.”
I took it into my hands and looked it at for a few long seconds, I looked back up at him and then at my feet. I ran my hand along its body, counting the inches,
“You’ll have to get your trousers off… honey”

**

“John, I can’t” I said, using every muscle that wasn’t going into my squat into not crying.
“Of course you can, - we’ve done this before”
“Its not meant for this – please, just – just do me yourself if you-”
He scowled and swore under his teeth, “It’s meant – for playing games… and I will do it myself – afterwards”
Only a few months ago my mother and I sat in what was a strangely personal conversation about our virginas where we both realized that like mother like daughter, we had the same gift of having virgin like virgins, despite us both having kids. It didn’t matter what went up or down, the next few days would always make our holes shrink. I felt like I was loosing my virginity to a baseball bat. Suddenly it wasn’t such a gift.
He bent down behind me and put her hands through mine, holding the bat with both hands, I tried to keep my balance, but I fell backwards onto his chest. That was going to be my only fall – I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to break for him.
Slowly, he pushed it inside me, easing it slightly from side to side to get it in. I bit my tongue in attempt to focus the pain elsewhere.
“You can scream” I said nothing. Everything inside me told me to close my eyes and look away… but I didn’t. Instead I watched as this long hard piece of wood slowly disappeared into my body. I was mesmerized by it… I almost stopped feeling the pain… “Does it hurt?” I said nothing. “Of course it hurts, look at you you’re practically ripping your lips off… here, let me help you refocus the pain – hold it in”
He spoke so casually as if it wasn’t just a game but as if I was a little girl who he was teaching it to, I understood the rules – I knew them by heart, John always won the game. That was rule one.
I took hold of the bat and kept it steady as he reached into his pocket, I looked over my shoulder but he grabbed my head. “Curious!?” I said nothing, “Keep pushing it in”
“It won’t go in anymore!”
Frustrated and angry at me he pulled out a knife from his pocket, ran it down my arms with one hand and pushed the bat in further with the other. “I know what you think, I know how you feel about me, crying is the worst thing that you can do – but I’m not trying to break you Duff, you’re already broken, I just want to have some fun”

**

After he cut me, pressing the cold metal against my skin hard enough so that it would sting, not enough to scar, he ran it through my hair… he was playing. Once again transfixed in my breaking body, I looked at it lying on the floor as if it was not mine. The piece of wood became smaller in vision and though I knew of the harm it must have been causing my insides, I felt strangely loose and relaxed. I looked up at him, happy to finally be getting what he had wanted, exactly the way he had wanted it. Perhaps this was the end.
My mind and body had separated, my thoughts were clean and civilized, I was cool calm and collected, I began to look around at the houses and markets in the distance, I ignored my aching my body. I was only brought to release the pain when in one short yank, he pulled it out of me. Ripping me inside.
I stretched out in pain, closing my eyes for the first time as if not seeing meant not feeling. He got up and as he had promised, he used himself as well. Not for long, just enough for him to be able to say he had done it. I don’t think he enjoyed it.
I curled my body and held myself expecting him to laugh or spit on me, but he didn’t. He did nothing; he didn’t even look at me. He went to cover his precious weapon with the cellophane once more, put it back in his black bag and put the bag over his shoulder. He got on the motorbike; I thought he was going to leave me there. I watched as he sat there, revving up the bike. He was waiting for me.
I put my hands flat on the floor beneath me, tried to pick myself up. I felt his patience shrink… but I didn’t want him to come and get me, - I didn’t want to need him to stay. But I had no money, and no way home. I was in a foreign country, volunteering. My job was to help women who had been, or in danger of being abused… I was in a third world country, helping. I thought suddenly, that perhaps I was just running away. Perhaps somewhere inside me I had realized that the fire could never be put out but that I could blow the flame in a different direction. Whatever thought it was that brought me here, I was wrong if I had believed I could get away from him. And I was a fool for thinking that I could escape from myself.
I reached for my knickers, my trousers, forgetting that he had cut the skin on my arms, I wondered why they were in pain, they felt heavy. I felt heavy. I couldn’t get up.
“I’m waiting sweetheart…” Sweetheart. Well any name that he called me wouldn’t have fitted, for a moment there, I had lost myself, I was tired and in pain, my head felt light, it fell and I couldn’t lift it. My eyes were closed but I heard him… his slow footsteps towards me, he thought he was saving me; he probably got off on it.
He picked me up and did my trousers up, smiling at me. In the distance were the small wooden houses that the people of Cambodia lived in. As a child, I had thought they were romantic, “they’re so cute” I had thought, it’s only now that I work here that I know of the hard life the people who live there must face.
As he carried me to the bike I saw a young girl, couldn’t have been more then five, look at us. John smiled at her, she smiled back, probably thinking… how romantic, he’s carrying her… I wondered if she would ever get to the age of truth. I wished with everything I had that by the time she was my age this life wouldn’t be the truth and that bad things like this didn’t happen.
I sat on the motorbike, my legs spread across the seat, my thighs, my everything, throbbing. When I turned to look back at the girl, I saw the puddle of blood that I had left. She was writing her name in it. She smiled at me, and we drove off.

**

He drove me back to work; somehow I had managed to guide him there. I sat at my desk for about five minutes staring at my computer; I made myself a cup of tea… and went to talk to my English colleagues. I got on with my work… I forgot.
“What on earth has happened to you?”
“What?”
“You’re arms!”
“Oh,” laughing I told them that some cat had attacked me; I reminded them jokingly that I had always said I was more of a dog person. They told me I was crazy, they changed the subject; they spoke about one of the girls that had been rescued last week and put in the shelter home so that no more harm could come to her.
I felt blood trickle through my trousers. I said I felt sick and went home, I called the Orphanage and said I wasn’t going to go in, I felt sick. I went home and took a cold shower, it’s overrated, it does nothing, the only way to rid the dirt where he touched me is to rip of my skin, but I’m not broken yet.
She came over at 12.30.
“So, why’s he here? Did you go see him?” I didn’t say much. “…Did something awful happen?” I nodded my head but I didn’t look at her, I did want to talk about it but I was afraid that it would come out all wrong. “Oh my god… you’re just a little girl”
My arms stung, my eyes stung, I just wanted to cry – not on my own, perhaps with her, I wasn’t sure – I sensed she had to go, she didn’t know what she was doing asking all these questions. She was moving a rock that had covered it all for so long. But that wall was built for a reason; I wasn’t ready to lose it.
“Bad things happen, you just have to suck it up, and get on with life” had I just said that? Did those words just come out of my mouth… I wasn’t sure until she replied…
“Suck it up? Bad things happen so suck it up? Fuck that”
I remembered his words… those exact words that he had said, “I’m not trying to break you, you’re already broken” I wondered… after she left, when I went back into the shower, whether he was right. I remembered looking at my body as if it wasn’t mine, or there at all. Even now, I don’t see myself as a victim, I’m not like those girls I work for, they have to go to shelter homes, I don’t – I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I wondered… if that’s what it means to be broken.