the great unclench: personal essay
TRIGGER WARNING: SA
November 20, 2021 Ocho Rios, Jamaica
I don’t know if the clenching was immediate or not. I remember now the dissociation because after the slice of Joe’s pizza and the short walk back to my dorm, I stepped into my room and my roommate asked me if it was cold outside. I didn’t know. I couldn’t feel my skin or my body’s reactions to stimuli. I never know I’m dissociating when it’s happening. It’s not until I conjure the memory, reconstruct the emotion in my sternum, and feel that floating, dream-like aura – the haziness – that I know I was dissociating. I don’t think I came back down into my body again until I flew off that cliff and sunk like an anchor to the center of that waterfall. I think that’s when my spirit returned and why I am so comforted by images of women under water and why I never feel freer and more myself than I do when completely submerged by water. Is there a difference between flying and swimming, sensationally speaking?
Of course, it wasn’t too long after that return that it was tested by the blackmail. I remember wanting to split off again but something told me no, not this time. And I think it’s still the thing I am most proud of. That me was strong. And she glided until the angel came with her manipulation tactics and psychological warfare and that made me drop all my defenses, allowing him to slip right through. I couldn’t see him in his camouflage as he hunted me.
For a long time, I just didn’t think about it. Rarely letting myself be alone with my mind, with him. And then he saw me. And he set off a flare. And I was prey again.
The dissociation on number two came in the exact moment his fingers coiled around my neck. I evaporated like my kindergarten science project. I became a CCTV recording every moment. Yet somehow, I still don’t always know what’s true. (Did the slap really happen or did I add it in post for a dramatic touch?) and I stayed bunched up in the corner of my dorm room ceiling, trying to run, trying to hide on the unused half of my friends’ beds, until I had a new dorm room to call home. And he saw me. And he set off a flare. And I was prey again.
That’s when the denial fled and the triggers set in. Remember how the “Till It Happens To You” music video sent you into a flashback so visceral, you could smell the cocoa butter lotion in real life? (I’m surprised the smell of cocoa butter isn’t in and of itself a trigger).
And that’s when the piece of me that once resided in my sternum, but who had relocated to the pit of my gut (witness protection, y’know) started trying to make its way back home and the journey filled me with such nausea, I didn’t learn to swallow again for five years.
For too long, I thought another’s touch could heal me. And I wish I could give the right kind of apology to everyone I put those expectations on. Or who put it on themselves because they wanted to save me. I’ve never been a charity case. If I was a little Irish girl named Mary, I too would have stayed silent and judged Francie for her lack of pride. I know it.
The thing is that it actually was one of them, in a way, that led me to the Great Unclench. I wanted so desperately for him to see me as art, that I began to take the pole classes and that’s how I learned to turn my body to water, the fluid state that I longed for, needed. And maybe that’s why his departure scorched me worse than any other. I believed he’d keep me liquid. But he, too, evaporated me. As a Communist, I believe in a stateless society, but I must bounce from state to state, solid to gas and back again, begging Poseidon to make me one of his own (go ‘head, ask me why Ariel is the worst Disney Princess).
Every winter, I refreeze. My mom always joked when we were children that when she died, she was leaving us the recipe for ice since we could never bother to refill the freezer trays. Oh Mama, we can just chip off my bark and make margaritas. But I’m learning how to swallow again. And when I swallow calories, I give myself warmth. Warmth to melt from the inside out and return to the rippling, waving, rescuing waters.
