I’m not just another v-word you’re too afraid to say

There is a place I can’t be touched.
A place that has been signed, a place with tactile recognition that won’t let me forget a memory  I wish I didn’t have.

It’s two years later and I think I’m alright, now,
finally.
The nightmares have stopped and I no longer need therapy.
I’m in love, again, and it’s a Saturday night at his apartment.
We’re about to do what all love struck couples do on a Saturday night,
undress and undulate, digressing slowly from the conversation
until we are left speaking with limbs.
It starts off innocently and never gets a chance to progress.

His fingers slide from my hair down to my ears and come to rest
at the place.
Even with a touch so soft that it can’t be mistaken for anything but love,
his hands on my neck send me reeling.
It sends off sirens through my sympathetic nervous system.
It sets off an uncontrollable deluge of fright, of flashbacks of feeling like I was breathing my very last few breaths.
They say women survivors of abuse have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than military personnel who have served in the Middle East.

And yes, I am shell shocked.
I am silenced once again against my will.
I am shaking like a seven-point-five on the Richter scale.
Using violence to silence those you want to oppress is the oldest war tactic in the book.
But violence was what taught me how to scream.
Violence is what taught me about love.
Violence was the cradle that rocked me to sleep every night from the age of ten until I was twenty-fucking-two.

So when I try to explain this to him,
when I tell him about the last time someone’s hands
were on my throat,
he holds me like I am a victim.
And I don’t know if that’s what I am.
I don’t know if I want to be called that.
I don’t know if that says something about me that
I don’t want to say.
Victims are vulnerable, they’re voiceless.
They’re visions of vicissitude dressed in rags holding an unwanted child on one hip, transformed from something desirable into “damaged goods.”
And that’s not what I want to be.

I am viscous, ebbing and flowing from one life lesson to the next.
I am vicious, loud and proud and ready to attack back.
I am victorious.
I am a vision.
I am valuable.