cw: sexual assault
Andrea Abi-Karam ends a recounting of a disappointing fuck with a queer from the internet, on page seven of Villainy, “I should have gone for a run.” Stark, that pointed period, that grim hindsight: running as a way of unbecoming, a way of coming, that does not rely on another body, another’s confidence. Running to stop thinking about death: all you can think about is the ceaselessness of the blood inside of you, pumping away like an oil well (filthy and corrupt). Running is public masturbation of the masochistic variety. The silly variety. Runners: roaming the streets in neon muppethair shirts and self-flagellating with floggers made from fuzzy worms-on-strings.
“The Cure for What Ails You,” a poem by Cameron Awkward-Rich, continues its title’s thought, “is a good run,” and I read this just before reading the piece by Abi-Karam. A drunken evening alone in my apartment, feasting on Sour and Golden Monkey beers while the pipes bang: ceaseless energy. From me and from the building, my blood-well body pacing and packing to move and pausing for poetry. Awkward-Rich transitions from the suggestion of, “Have you tried going for a run? / You know, to clear your head,” to, “I’ll admit that when that man / became the president, before terrified I felt / relief,” and I am polar-bear-plunged into memories of inauguration day 2017, going for a run up and down my quiet Western Massachusetts street, sobbing off my leftover mascara, purple plastic keychain in the shape of a pitbull face—and in the manner of brass knuckles—clutched in my small fist.
Despite the filthy pervert power-generation of running, I felt powerless as a mime. My illusions of the potentially redemptive nature of electoral politics had not yet shattered in their entirety, and what remained chained my brain. Today instead I feel a powerlessness because we live in an undeniable, maybe even un-defy-able death cult. Today I feel a powerlessness because both of my ankles hurt too much for me to go for a run.
Trapped in this body like a mime in a box, is how I feel typing this after having a seizure and sobbing like I’m twenty-one and racing down asphalt, past wildflowers and lawns, sides catching sharp stitches and reeling them in. Tuck the pain close to you; clean it, gut it, feed on it. Teach a girl to fish for pain and she’ll grow into a man who feasts.
An ex-girlfriend once told me that this was how she conceptualized the way I did public vulnerability online: if it looks like a weakness, hold it up to the devouring, all-seeing fire, the less kind cousin of the light; see what burns and let it go; see what turns diamond-hard and clutch it tight.
Running kept me alive in high school. Balms for a pained brain: heightened hydration, strictly obeyed training schedules taped to my door, and the companionship of the grey-green Schuylkill River wending alongside my path. Eight-mile loop of asphalt, grass, beaten-down-dirt, geese and goose shit, other runners who let me be. Who allowed me to step out of the public vulnerability that was being a teenage girl, always on display, body up for verbal dissection and critique. My favorite time to run was the dead of winter: eleven-degree chill, a black sky like an oil slick, and a skin of ice crunching beneath my pink sneakers. Almost no other runners, typically only an elderly man in a fluorescent vest who yelled occasional words of encouragement.
In the summer, it was often too hot to run outside unless I caught the very early morning by the throat, so instead I’d run in circles around my dining room, laptop set up on the table to play music for me while my family slept above—One Direction, Marina & the Diamonds, Lana Del Rey, The Magnetic Fields—My heart’s runnin’ round like a chicken with its head cut off.
It happened between. It happened in the spring, the warm, the light. His body against my body. My resulting out-of-body experience.
“Hey, motherfucker, don’t touch me!” Skinfatmusclebonenerves whirled around to face the motherfucker in question, voice bursting leonine from the fact of my throat, its column certain and sturdy as if framing the entrance to the art museum only minutes back down the running path. Translucent renditions of my Nikes hovered about five feet and six inches off the ground, brushing the tangle of my sweat-drenched, chaotically bobby-pined hair, and I looked down upon the stuttery shapes of his thin lips around his apology, and then his flight from me, fast on rollerblades, in the direction that I came from, the direction of the art museum and also of my home.
Before had happened almost too fast to process. His body against my body. The trap of it, walling me in. His hand on my ass.
How I remember: I was running. Seventeen. Slim, sturdy, and sweaty. By the Schuylkill, in winternightblack leggings and a hot pink built-in-bra tank. Early on in the evening’s odyssey, I hadn’t even hit half a mile, and I intended to traverse three. In front of me cut a man in sweats, fast and flamingo-graceful on the narrow rows of wheels strapped to his feet.
A hormonal creature, I admired his thigh muscles making themselves known through thick fabric with the pump-sweep of his legs, like swinging on a playground, but untethered. Free to fly anywhere. I wanted those legs tangled with my own, or maybe simply wanted those legs as my own. Later, I would think because of this confused-erotic longing: I asked for it. Wishes on birthday candles are silent and secret, but they still count; they count extra for their secrecy.
Ahead, the path curved, and stone walls cropped up, higher than me. But here’s where my memory falters, I now know: in my head, the walls went and went, bleeding into ceilinghood, blocking out the bright cobalt of a sky where the sun still lingered in wakefulness before hitting the hay. In my head, this is a tunnel. A portal. A privacy. In my head, I exited the beautifully exposed, open wound of the world, and that’s when it happened. The man whose thighs I admired doubled back sharply, paperweighting me against one stone wall with the bulk of his body, and his hands grabbed my ass in its leggings and squeezed.
Brain-tape skips.
I was no longer trapped, but facing him and floating. “Hey motherfucker, don’t touch me!”
Slapped-shocked: “I’m sorry,” and he fled, and in my memory, stone and shadows pressed in, a dark and muffling force. Once I pushed forward, exiting the place where he trapped and touched me, I too was slapped-shocked: to see that the sky was still bright. There were still people. Laughing, talking, running, pushing strollers. Life and light remained. How could I have not known this? I thought: I must not have known this because of the stones. The ceiling. The tunnel like a throat that had now vomited me up, grosser than how I went in.
It can’t, I told myself, have been something more ephemeral than that blocking out the sun. No monsters, no demons, no emotions. Only stone.
Back in the wondrous wound of the world, I walked. And then I ran. That is what I came here to do, and what were the man and his vicelike hands but a blip? I ran slowly, pulling my Blackberry out of my Velcro bicep-band pocket to text my best friend, telling her what happened, thumbs throwing a fit. And then I stowed the phone away and poured my focus into motion, into sneakers swallowing miles, but—
My chest heaved with almost-hyperventilation as tears congregated in my eyes, each hesitant to be the first to fall, a crowd of children uneasy braving the diving board for the first time. Until they all fell down. Plunk plunk plunk; ring around the rosie. I could not breathe, so I could not run.
Walking, but determined to still go the distance I set out to cover, tears streaming sure as the river beside me, I picked up a stick. About the length of one forearm, sharp at the end. I slipped it into the band of my bicep pocket. Holding protection tight to my skin. My head transformed into a carousel of violent revenge fantasies. Turning back and finding him still where I left him. Stabbing him with the stick. Poking it into his wheels. Shoving him down the grassy embankment, and finally, into the filthy water. I thought, He should be easy to tip over like a teapot, wheely as he is.
Wheely, weasely, easily dispatched from this Earth.
A statue of a fisherman used to perch on the Schuylkill’s banks. When I was five, a hurricane took him; a tree crashed upon his head and he disappeared into the rushing current. The same fate should await this man, a fisherman of sorts himself; he played catch-and-release with me; his thigh muscles were bait and his hands were hooks.
By the time I’d turned back and reached, once more, the spot where he hooked me, the sun had piled sand upon her eyelids. While streetlamps dotted the path, there was no more brilliant cobalt, and the life and laughter and exercise routines of others had similarly seeped away. I held the stick tight in my fist as I approached. Preparing like that scared-dark moment had maybe given birth to a haunting, a shimmering curtain of air where all who entered replayed, against their will, my molestation. Ghostly forces would marionette me into a re-enactment, and this time I would fight back. I would stab. I would push. He would drown. And I would feel not a single shred of remorse.
A figure emerged from the bushes, just past the stone walls, thick smear of dark green gaping open to reveal someone familiarly tall and thin, in the same grey-and-navy sweatsuit my attacker had worn, but with the hood pulled up, obscuring any facial recognition, rollerblades abandoned. This figure stalked toward me, registering in my brain as a mountain lion or a Terminator, something certain of how much blood it must shed, and whose, and when.
Now.
I ran faster than I ever had in my life. Faster, probably, than I ever have again. I was now the mountain lion or Terminator. Singlemindedly on the prowl, not for blood, but for safety. My own blood ringing in my ears. My own name imprinted in my brain as the object of my hunt. I felt something in my knee give out, something else in my ankle twist, but kept going, going, until the path opened up, widening to receive the city and a bevy of zooming vehicles, the art museum close at hand, my surroundings no longer so shadowy or reminiscent of enclosure.
I looked behind me; the figure was gone; I slowed to a walk. When I called my dad on my Blackberry, I could barely talk. Tears had returned for another trip off the diving board, buoyed with bravery from their first adventure, choking me. But I managed to say, “I need you to come meet me on Kelly Drive.”
When we were within speaking distance, I threw my stick to the grass beside me. I said, forcing down the garbling effect of my ecstatically diving tears, “I need a real weapon.”
The next time I returned to that spot, I had a “real” weapon: pastel pink plastic in the shape of a kitty cat face. Flimsier than my future purple pitbull, but the ears were still sharp, intended for stabbing, the eyeholes still empty for fingers, and I wore it like brass knuckles my entire time in speeding motion. Rain had recently fallen, and when I came to the right place, sun reflected off lazing puddles. Sun. Because this was no tunnel, no roofed thing. Sun had surrounded me the whole time his body surrounded me. There was no journey of leaving the world’s open wound for darkness, then back into the wound. It was all wound. Continuous as the running path itself, that eight-mile loop around the river.
My heartbeat picked up for reasons besides cardio. This is wrong. I must be wrong. I ran back and forth, seeking the structure of my memory, but there was nothing, just this wall open to sky. With the pulse of a rabbit afraid for its life, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t run. The combination of revisiting my haunted stretch of asphalt and of suddenly being unable to trust my own brain cut me off at the sweaty-backed knees.
Each run, each time I returned to this location, that wrong, rabbity, cut-off sensation dulled another degree. Through exposure, I chiseled my way back to my once-upon-a-time abilities, re-learned to surge forward, kicking up clouds of dirt-dust in my wake. But always somewhere in me: fear. He was still out there. My dad had called the cops when I could finally articulate an explanation, but when he told me I’d have to talk to them, to make a report, I declined. I didn’t believe in cops and I didn’t believe in retraumatizing myself by telling them my story.
He was still out there. The man who trapped me, squeezed me. Waited for me in the bushes. Still out there and still in here with me. Shadowing my memory, emptying it of very real light.
That fisherman statue, officially named, “Celebration of Water” stayed lost, submerged, for years. Finally, divers found him downstream and pulled him free, putting him back where he came from, sat on his rock. But as of June 2021, the fisherman has once more exited the frame, along with my breasts in their hot pink tank, leaving me more present and cemented in my body. “Hey, motherfucker, don’t touch me,” may be the only words I’ve ever spoken while fully outside myself, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been fully inside myself this whole time instead. Not in a way made of cement, solid and sure. Not in a way with roots. Too fluid; too waterlogged like a book dropped in the bath, made bloated and illegible.
In past moments of writing about sexual assault, I’ve turned consistently to describing my internal experience as one of drowning, and the same could be said of my experience of womanhood, high-pressure as deep water. Breathless and wordless; slow and heavy.
Atlas Obscura reports that all that remains is the fisherman’s lunchbox, left with no one to feed. While the site details even the size—sixty feet—of the tree that first plummeted the fisherman from his home, no explanation is present of why he’s gone once more. Why he repeats his tribulations, taking me back to being five, walking to kindergarten along the river and picking up fallen chestnuts in their spiky exoskeletons. My favorite activity was to roll them between my palms until they cracked, presenting me with their glossy, dark innards. Their secret selves plucked from privacy and made visible to the wonderful wound of the world, like a fisherman pulled by divers from a river’s most shadowy depths. Like a teenage girl in a faulty memory, surviving. Surviving to one day emerge from her spiky exoskeleton not a girl at all.
After my friends Kate and Aeryn visited Lost River Cave in Kentucky, they mailed me a souvenir t-shirt: oversized and navy, with a fisherman silhouetted on the back against sunrise. Caption: I’D RATHER BE STANDING HERE FISHING AND THINKING ABOUT GOD THAN SITTING IN CHURCH AND THINKING ABOUT FISHING.
My only experience of fishing was as a small child, maybe eight, with a friend and her dad, in the shadows of the Schuylkill, on the brightness of the banks. Regardless, the words resonate. Running, for me, was a spiritual practice. To be by the water, to feel beneath me the reality of dirt, for my blood to rush like the river in a storm and my muscles to moan like they were the trampled earth. Let there be light in my memory; I go in with the jaws of life, prying open the lid of that invented tunnel, opening a can of worms that wriggle gleefully in the damp; “Let me see,” I whisper, craning my ghostly, hovering neck up to the sun.
Teach a girl to fish for pain and she’ll grow into a man who feasts. Whose teeth bash back; who swallows up the dark.
As I ran down my Western Massachusetts street and sobbed mascara tracks down my cheeks, the ex-girlfriend who praised my fiery online vulnerability was at a Women’s March in New York, where she lived—where I do live now as well—and I longed to walk alongside her, in protest against grabbing. Now, I think if I had been there, my overwhelming afterthought would be: I should have gone for a run. I should have unbecome and come, a single body pulsing pervily with oil.
It is Friday in 2022. Winter, bright. A different terrible man holds the presidential office, and I do not ever perform the slapstick public masturbation of running, but today I will pump myself full of oily hormones. Hormones: the thing I blame for my wanting my attacker, which I blamed for my attack for a long time. I invite them into me now, saying, “Let’s do this over, huh?” The cure for what ails me is a good stab in the thigh. That puncture wound is how the light gets into my body, keeps me here, tethered. Fuck untethered swinging, flight to anywhere you want. Yes, I feel mime-trapped; yes my seizures and my joints paperweight me terribly; yes I will settle into that weightnedness like sediment settling to a riverbottom. A fisherman statue settling to a riverbottom. I make peace. I make home.