"I think maturity is accepting duality, accepting contradiction.
Someone who does terrible things is not a
(she says a word in yiedish here. It sounds like a small explosion)
Do you know what that means? It means, the worst of the worst.
We all have both parts of us,"
says the rebitzen
at "Tea and Torah."
We are sitting around a table at a nice b&b near the beach, a few blocks from my house.
I came once before for the alliteration and free pastries,
but I found myself fed by the torah.
I've heard there are receptors in the brain shaped like chemicals,
so the chemicals fit into the holes in children's blocks,
and create feelings.
Well, I think there is an ancient part of me
designed to recieve torah.
Today, for an hour before I walked in,
I paced the gardens outside,
on the phone with a friend of the man who assaulted me this past summer.
It is hard for me to write assault without filling the rest of the page with caveats--
that thing that felt like assault to me, only to me.
Because that night our experience split in 2,
like a tree struck by lightening,
not just his and mine,
but the part that was only mine split too.
That night, there were many of me,
and one of them was only made of sound.
Right now, I am writing
next to the ocean,
and on the bike ride here, I thought,
assault is a form of communication.
It is a form of speech.
It tells a story.
But what is it saying?
I think it is saying,
I don't believe you exist.
I don't believe there is anything that matters
inside your body,
just a body.
To me, you are only skin.
That is what it said and I believed it,
because my heart flew away.
My insides became a person,
a person without flesh,
a person, who, without flesh,
cannot exist.
and, not-existing,
I went home
I looked for home.
The rebitzen said,
"The ocean always represents torah."
I learned in feminist classes that before judaism,
the ocean meant female power,
darkness,
womb.
And Moses split the ocean in two
And the rebbitzen said,
And Hashem said,
"just go forward. don't even pray."
And I am ocean.
Ocean has no skin.
And I wrote letters.
"I am here to mediate,"
says his friend on the phone.
"I don't want mediation. I was very clear about that in the letter."
"Well, the thing is--he lost the letter," she says. "You know he has a problem with forgetting things."
I do too.
I used to question how it happened, if he meant to hurt me,
but now I'm pretty sure he just forgot me,
forgot to ask if I was okay,
forgot to notice
I am person
(in body.)
And what of the rest?
Have they all forgotten?
Perhaps a poem is not a place for rape statistics,
and maybe you already know them,
so I will just say,
there are too many people split into 2, and into many.
and those people have ghosts without skin,
and those people are my ancestors.
And Hashem said, "just go forward. don't even pray."
And my grandma, we poured in the ocean,
but what of the part of her that was torn from her body,
not just when she was raped,
but when she raped my father?
and where is his
heart?
I think they go into my mouth
when I cry or remember.
I think they are made of sound.
I think there is a part of me designed to recieve them.
And how do I, at the end of the story,
mend bodies that are just ashes in oceans?
I write letters
I send them again, when they are lost.
I go forward.
I don't even pray.
