How Pretty the Trigger Sits Idle in the Weapon

photo by Dewald Van Rensburg

This summer, while I was sweating in a Wisconsin dorm room and chewing watermelon- flavored Double Bubble, masturbating to fantasies of J not noticing my fifteen-pound weight gain at the hands of the camp cafeteria’s pasta bar, my mom texted me: S died. I just found out, cancer. The ellipsis bubble hovered on my phone screen. He was my first…you know what I mean? The man my mother began dating the day she, my sister and I moved to Texas after her divorce from my father, a man who shared the same name as my father, who lived with us (as all her boyfriends lived with us) in tenseness punctuated by blow-out shouting matches for a little over a year—my mom’s once-high school sweetheart—was dead. Rather than the last words he left her with, a slimy-drunken voicemail on our home phone threatening to kill himself, the fact that she had lost her virginity to him won out in her memory. That he was someone she had loved, before she didn’t. The two S’s in my life, both lost now, she said.

When I consider my mother’s relationship to men—my father, S, a string of others, and my now-stepdad—I believe her to be the subject of a kind of violence, though she would never describe herself that way. Though I’ve never known her to be hit by any of them, I remember how she worked twelve hours a day and came home as if tip-toeing over nails to wash my stepdad’s oil-stained jeans, cook some kind of dinner he would eat, and end up out in the garage getting yelled at anyway. I remember how my stepdad never hit her, but he threw a knife at the wall so hard it got stuck in the cheap plaster, how he cornered us against the stairs, red-faced and screaming, and dented our front door, just over my mother’s shoulder, when he threw a baby bottle in her direction as she stood holding my infant sister. Now that I am older, I feel sorry for my mother. I have tried to become the opposite of her, but to be any kind of woman is to be violence-adjacent, no matter where you live or what job or degrees you have or whether or not you choose to have children.

A few nights ago, I was lying in bed with J and told him, tentatively, politely, that I would prefer he not choke me during sex anymore. It was something I’d asked for when we first started dating, and something he had grown to like, so I felt guilty about taking it away. Guilty about asking for anything to be different than it was. He, of course, agreed completely, but wanted to understand why. I thought about it, and the only word that felt right, even though it didn’t feel like mine to use, was triggered. I qualified my answer, telling him: It feels silly to say it that way, though. I mean, nothing has ever happened to me.

I am the only woman I know who has never been raped. In a grotesque way, I add a silent yet to that sentence, am always waiting for it to show up like some horrible marker of womanhood, just as we once waited patiently for our turn as our friends descended one by one into the secret cult of menstruation. This struck me for the first time during the Kavanagh hearings, that I had no way to understand the terror and shame coming through my female friends’ eyes and social media posts, that I had no #MeToo to add. But also feeling the terror, the shame, that yes, in some way, if not in this specific way, Me Too.

When we were together a few weeks ago in Arkansas, I told my best friend, L, about the only time I remember my mom lifting a punishment: I was grounded from going to the seventh-grade school dance, but tearfully told her that my boyfriend would break up with me if I wasn’t there, and she immediately told me to get dressed and drove me there. L pointed out the many problems with what this would teach a daughter about men, one of which being: if a boy threatens absence, you come running, no matter what the cost.

L told me once that attention is not the same as kindness, but I have spent more lifetimes than I can count confusing the two, and hoping if they showed up together they would alchemize into love: that prized mirage sealed away for beautiful, thin girls who could pull off middle bangs and had never been so desperate as to consider writing poetry.

For a long time (and maybe even now), though I knew sex was not synonymous with love, it was at least the same as attention. It was the same when, backstage at the high school play, an older boy I’d never spoken to cornered me alone by the dark stairwell and, so close I could smell the gum on his breath, reached into my bra. It was the same when I offered to drive an acquaintance the forty-five minutes home when his car got towed, and he insisted on fingering me, despite my polite and gentle protests, to “thank” me. It was the same when my stepdad’s friend, the only adult who I felt had treated me like a full human by listening intently to the story of my eighth-grade heartbreak, got too drunk one night and bent down in the kitchen to demand I let him kiss me, sour breath all over my face. It was the same when only a little over a year ago on that Mississippi porch, I handed N a knife and drunkenly begged him to cut me open.

What counts as a lifetime of violence?

And what if the violence is something we ask for, something we use others as a tool to inflict on ourselves? The last time J choked me during sex, it didn’t freak me out because it felt violent, or felt it could lead to violence, but because I realized that I didn’t want to have the same kind of destructive sex with him that I’d had with others. Those others, faceless dick-forward blurs inching in a swarm toward my heart like ants toward a smashed cupcake, couldn’t hurt me because I never hoped anything of them. But with J, the stakes are real. The trigger already cocked, even if no one’s hand has reached for it yet.

Because I spent last week visiting his family for Thanksgiving, and in the sweet moment while watching a movie, when I realized that he and his mom and sister all have the same-shaped toes, and briefly wondered if one day my child will also have those toes, I thought about my mother telling me the story of her first Thanksgiving with my dad’s family, and I wondered if she thought some version of the same thing, and all these years later, her S’s lost. Because half of the moments I have loved J the most are curtained with a layer of dread that if I choose him—that anyone I choose—will end up murdered like my dad, another ghost jammed in the machine of the story. And if that’s what it means to be with me, to be threaded into this morose familial karma, shouldn’t I save him from it by letting him leave me before he can no longer escape? Because for many years, I believed that to love at all is to hand your body over to be weaponized against you, or to choose to become the weapon.

It is here that I’ll admit when I write these essays, I’m usually trying to avoid whatever I’m writing my way around: this week I’m supposed to tackle a major book revision on my memoir, and my agent has asked me to write about gun violence. I don’t feel I have that authority, although my dad was killed by a gun in the hand of a person he loved enough to marry, though my mother keeps a loaded handgun in the kitchen island, though each time I walk into a gas station I scan the aisles for the safest place to hide if someone were to walk in and open fire, though each time a news story about another shooting pops up on my phone I rolodex in my mind the names of everyone I love who might live there, of anyone someone I love loves who might live there. I guess the impact of gun violence on my life can be summarized as: I am always trying to avoid letting myself love anything too much.