Page 55 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

returned me to several life events during which had I left my body. The dream, which I titled “Re-

membering,” allowed me to finally feel and integrate those moments of dissociation.

A bear comes and gives me explicit instructions for reclaiming lost parts of myself: “Go back to

the woods. Go back to the water.” I return to the scene of a frightening and painful betrayal in

the beloved woods of my childhood home. Pinned beneath a trusted friend like small prey, my

face in a bed of dead leaves, I feel confusion and terror, the threat of violence, as he mockingly

thrusts himself against me from behind. I hear his dry laughter when he finally releases me, as

though it was all a game. I want to flee from him, from our friend who witnessed and also

laughed, and the flood of embarrassment, hurt and fury that fills me. Then, separate from the

memory, I hear, “I wandered out of the woods and got lost.”

Next, I am in the hospital pool after the surgery for necrotizing fasciitis, where each day, my

wounds are debrided in bleach water. I lie on my back as the nurse moves me around the pool,

doing her work of cleaning the surgical site. My flimsy hospital gown floats up around my chest,

exposing the rest of me. Looking up, I am mortified to see that through a window above the

pool, I am being observed by a large group of residents. They see the most private parts of my

ruined body, the body that even before the surgery was a perpetual source of disappointment

and shame. I feel the violation of their unannounced invasion of my privacy, their detached,

clinical regard for their “subject,” the nurse’s failure to cover me or turn me away from their

gaze. Then I am alone in my hospital room. I slide out of bed and position myself in front of the

mirror. Defying the doctors’ recommendations, I undo my bandages, and for the first time since

the emergency surgery some two months earlier, look at my body, willing my eyes not to leave

the mirror. It is not my body, not the one I remember. Spanning the entire width of me is a deep,

raw, gaping space where the smooth white skin of my belly used to be. Gone is the line of

peach fuzz that led from my belly button down to the curly dark triangle of womanhood—and

$"

Page 53 of 218