Kindling for Truth

It was a field trip day, and for my small private Christian school, that meant either three things: going to the symphony, visiting the nursing home next door, or walking a few feet further and spending the afternoon at the skating rink.

This day, we got to skate.

My mind wasn’t on skating though—not really. My mind was on him. My most recent crush, and a year ahead of me, I knew he would be going as well. We’d recently formed a casual sort of friendship with him being in band. I also knew his mother, who sometimes helped around school, and for the most part they felt like a normal family. Her, a quiet and submissive woman. Him, a quiet and observant 7th grader with whip smart sarcasm.

So my mind wasn’t on skating. No. It was on the thing that happens at every roller skating event; the thing so many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s recognize: the couple skate.

Rumor had it he was going to ask me.
Based on the nerves tumbling over themselves in my gut, I very much wanted this to happen.

So when the time came for the couple skate, somewhere in between playing four corners and a chaotic rendition of the Hokey Pokey, I sat on the carpeted bench with my skates jutting out from underneath me, waiting.

I can’t remember what song was playing—knowing the time period, it was probably I Swear or some ballad by Boys II Men. But the opening notes rang out on the speakers and I could feel my heart in my throat.

Would he ask me? Was this another trick of some sort?

I never saw him engage in the cruelty of some of my peers—the relentless laughter at the expense of another was common place and usually stemmed from the other girls my age. I’d grown up with them, some of them since elementary school, and the lore we shared was ripe with hurt feelings and backstabbing actions. For me to worry that this moment was another one of their schemes wasn’t off base.

I’ll never know if he actually planned on asking me, though—because right as the song began and people started pairing up and gingerly stepping onto the rink for their turn at coupled bliss, a shadow filled my vision. I looked up. One of our teachers, a middle aged man with a receding hairline and slacks too big for his frame, was leaning over me—his hand out stretched.

“Would you skate with me, Elora?”

A small smile played at the corner of his lips. There was a look in his eyes that made something inside of me shrivel up and hide. I swallowed, desperately looking around for the boy. He could fix this. He could interrupt this particular nightmare and it would make sense for me to turn down this grown man, hovering—waiting.

Something shifted in the air around us and I could feel this man’s body stiffen because of my hesitancy. Fear sliced through my thoughts, making everything dull. I had to answer him. I had to acquiesce. I had to let that small piece of me that had chipped away by the look in his eyes hide for the moment, now exiled in the recesses of my memory.

“Um. Sure.”

I took his hand, my own palms sweaty with nerves and embarrassment. It was seconds before people noticed and began to laugh, pointing at us.

“Ohmigosh look! Elora is skating with him.”
”Ew, Elora. Didn’t know you liked older men.”

No one stopped him. No one stopped me.
There were other adults present, and they smiled and pointed and laughed alongside the students. But for them, this was a grand gesture. An adult reaching down and lifting up a bullied girl.
A 40 something year old, holding the hand of a girl barely 11 years old, and skating in circles to a love song meant for couples.

I did not know I could say no.
I did not know how to say no.

By this time, my body was very much not my own. I’d been sexually abused by family members and neighborhood friends. My body had imprinted the touch of others, and many of these memories wouldn’t surface for another 30 years. To this day I will feel the hands of someone else—or suddenly feel the suffocating weight of another body on my own but have no anchor of memory to solidify the experience. It’s all somatic.

Which is why my heart tried to beat out of my chest when I felt the threat of this man standing over me.
Which is why I said yes, when everything within me wanted to scream no.

I tell this story to my therapist. I frame it as one of the memories that have recently resurfaced in the wake of the Epstein files being released. I have not gone searching for the contents of the emails or truth of what happened to these individuals, but social media is full of ad hoc posts that contain the most triggering instances of reminders. So it’s no surprise I’m circling back to moments where this systemic approval of pedophilia ran rampant within my childhood—where I was victim and prey.

I tell this story, pausing in between sentences because even now this memory brings a certain nausea with it. And as I am telling it, I watch her face. I watch her mouth curve into a smile. I watch her eyes take on a gentle, approving gaze. She thinks, at first, this moment is sweet. She does not see it immediately as the inappropriate engagement of a grown man with a little girl. Her, an abuse survivor, siding with the perpetrator. I pause.

“This is not something sweet. This is something that has caused me distress every time I think of it. I can feel my body separating from my mind and the disassociation begin. I can feel the somatic clues that something is amiss: a rapid heartbeat, heavy limbs, cloudy vision. He was a grown man. I was a child. This is not okay.”

Her face shifts imperceptibly, but the damage has been done.

And I think of all of the ways we have been complicit.
I think of all of the girls who saw that smile and assumed they were the broken ones—the messed up ones—the ones who made something out of nothing.

//

Twenty years after that moment at the skating rink, I am sitting at my desk. Because of the work I do with a writing community, I am constantly on Facebook. The sun is shining through my office window and the fan above me whirs its steady rhythm that sometimes reminds me of the crash of waves. I see a message come through, and without thinking, I click on the notification.

I am a friend of ______, the message says. I know what you said happened. She told me all about it.

My skin turns to ice and immediately I am hyperventilating. I do not know this man. From his picture, he looks to be in his 50s. His message seems innocent enough, but there is a certain malice to his words that rake over my body. My story, my trauma, is just that: mine. And to have a grown man drop into the inbox of someone he does not know to brag about knowing feels disgusting and cruel and malignant in nature. Without even thinking, my fingers start moving on their own.

Who are you? I ask. Why tell me this?

His response is immediate.

I’m a friend of _____, he repeats. And she has told me how devastated she is about these allegations. About what you said she did. I work with her, and we talk all the time.

He is a threat, and my body reacts accordingly. I slam my laptop shut, pushing against the desk to stand and create distance from those words. He sought me out. He heard my story and searched for me. I do not know him, but he knows things about me—about what’s been done to me.

I burst into tears and run to the bathroom to throw up.

//

In a recent post, Meggan Watterson shares this quote by Audre Lorde—

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes – everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

In her post, she states that for her, the world ended when she read the contents of the Epstein files.
This is the correct response. The world should end for all of us when we realize the ways in which childhood has been preyed on by so many powerful figures. For many of us, the world has ended time and time again when the hands of those who should have protected us decided to use us instead.

She ends her post by lighting the bonfire of her words with this kindling—

I believe Mary. Which is to say, I believe survivors. Which is to say, I believe in myself.
At long last, I have returned my faith to its just place, my own body. My own sacred knowing. My intrinsic, inviolable worth in the world.
One by one, and together, we will know our power.

I read these words and felt the the spark of her bonfire light something within me. I read these words and was reminded of my own so many years ago: write fire and watch the world catch the flame. I read these words and a knowing rage filled my veins.

Enough.

I have had enough of those who belittle or diminish the story of those who have been devastated by another drawing maplines across their skin to claim.
I have had enough of those who hear the laughter of comedians talking about being aroused while holding their infant children and say that “there has to be a deeper context here.”
I have had enough of my own words being caught in my throat because they’re anchored by the stones of fear and shame.

From here on out, I echo Watterson in her benediction. We writers howl and heal porcelain bone, but only when we are brave with our truth—even when it’s scathing and especially when it costs everything. I am done placating men’s behavior because they’re just being nice or it wasn’t meant that way or you’re being too sensitive.

I am sensitive because I know.
I know because I have experienced the way a moment will be exiled and regulated as do not enter, the memory lost to the ether.
And now is the time to call our exiled parts home—to let them know they’re safe.
They do not have to come, but I am building a bonfire out of the words I’ve held inside, sending out the smoke signal of awareness.

I am here, and I believe you.
Which is to say, I believe in myself.