This piece is a sequel to Facades and Fireflies - Trigger/Content Warning for r*pe, sexual assault, and mental illness.

By: Anonymous

Five things you can see. Trees heavy with dewdrops. Jasper the color of wine and honey. Early morning light shimmering on the river’s surface. A cardinal with plumage like fire, and violets pushing up from the ground with the quiet determination of Spring.

Four things you can hear. Robins, singing full-throated and joyful. A current whispering in the nearby creek. Wind sighing through wise old pines, and creaking branches warming up beneath the rising sun.

Three things you can smell. Soft, loamy soil, ripe with the hope of a new season. The sweet and spice of pinecones as they drip sap onto the ground below. Woodsmoke trailing from the house and finding its way down the hill, curling around me like a lover.

Two things you can touch. Myself. My body curled intimately in the welcoming shade, warm, present, complete in all that I am. The Earth, my mother, soft and strong and gentle all at once. She is full of secrets, full of songs.

One thing you can taste. Healing. Acrid against my teeth, and then it melts into sweetness on my tongue and fills my mouth with hope.

Trauma is a living thing. It turns time into a snake that eats its own tail, curling back into the same moment again and again. “When you start to feel panicked, or when the memories become too painful, remember - five, four, three, two, one. Remember where you are, not where you were.” This is the advice I nodded at while encased in the colors of a psychologist’s office, as if it were the simplest thing in the world to leave one time for another. One way of being for a brand new one. I did not understand how anything could take me out of that place where darkness eats light and your own thoughts become things with teeth and claws.

In ancient Greek and Medieval art, the ouroboros is a serpent eating her own tail. Rape is a thing that consumes, too. And so finally, I decide to return to where it happened, to turn time in on itself and go back to where this pain began - this journey I did not choose to undertake. I think that it will be like clawing my way out of myself. I think that it will be violent, quick, and unavoidable. I think it will be like it was.

It is not.

In the place where my body was violated, I find old friends, trees, and rhododendrons that have been missing me for years. They do not take from me, but rather give with all of the impossible generosity of nature. I sit on soft pine needles and look at roots that have been living here, growing here, since long before I arrived. They are still growing. I look at dewdrops which have formed again and again since I last lay on this ground and I think that I, too, have formed again and again since then. I am still growing. I am growing out of this moment, and I can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste it. It is real. It is not eating its own tail.

Healing often happens in the space between moments, and I have been occupying these spaces without realizing it. I do not know when I stopped outrunning my past and when I started outliving it, but here I am, surrounded by exuberant life in this place which I thought was filled only with dead moments, with sharpness and shadows. The shadows here are real, too, as are the thorns on the bramble bushes, and they are indeed sharp. But there are new buds forming even on these, the leaves soft as infants and just as innocent, as new. There are parts of me that are like this, too. And this is healing. This is the way that it is.

Perhaps you will not find yourself in the forest when it happens - perhaps your ouroboros lives somewhere else. It may be that you find her in very different moments, and I do not doubt that the claws your memories possess may be sharpened in ways I would not understand. And yet healing is not the dulling of these claws, just as it is not the simple act of returning to a place. Healing is not even a return to the person you were.

Healing tastes acrid at first. It is the fierceness of growing-over, the determination of shoots buried under loam and leaf. It is the mixing of thorns with buds that have never seen sharpness and so do not fear it. It is the dancing of light on a river whose face is veiled by shadows. You are not here to consume yourself, but instead to consume the rich honey of life, to fill yourself with yourself, whoever you may be now. These are the lessons I have seen, heard, scented, touched, and tasted. I cannot give them to you, but I can tell you that they are there.

Go out and find them. They have been waiting to welcome you home to yourself.

National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673

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