In Two Weeks...

...I shall have graduated from college.

While I still have a lot of work to do over the summer--finishing my senior seminar paper (topic: rape as a subject in Young Adult (YA) literature), comparing jobs for the next year or so (many part-time vs. 1 part-time and 1 full-time), and figuring out grad school--my heart is already set on finishing this chapter of my life.

A few weeks ago I was set on entirely finishing my life. This past Wednesday--the 21st--was two weeks ago to the day--Wednesday, April 7th--that I made that decision. It's a decision I've been cat-and-mousing with myself ever since I was raped and met my own mortality. I thought for so long that death was only for great-grandmothers. (It sounds like a hobby, doesn't it? Well, that's one thing we all have in common.) After I was strangled, and Mr. Cain was beating me up pretty awfully, I was screaming. I didn't know I was screaming I don't think, though I did hope someone would hear me, anyone, even my dogs tied up out back. But Mr. Cain knew I was screaming, and probably right in his face too, and he told me to stop. I guess I didn't. He proceeded to inform me that if I didn't stop screaming, that he would kill me. Something in me stopped frozen in time at that very moment for nearly eleven years. Thank God I won't be spending the next decade after I was raped struggling, like a bat, in this moment.

Not because the moment is past, but because I'm letting it fall away from my present. I've been holding onto it for so long. I can still remember the frozen feeling I had after he made that threat. As I didn't know that I was screaming, I don't think I knew that I had stopped. He didn't kill me. I don't know if he would've gone through with it anyway--no one was really nearby enough to have heard me--but for ten years of my life I had wished he had killed me. I realized I was angry at God--if God was a merciful God--for not allowing me to die that day in June. And while I'm thankful to be outliving thirteen, it's not been easy. But then again, I sure haven't allowed it to be.

I am a planner. I am a perfectionist. I like things to be in their place, otherwise I can't stop thinking about them, even if I'm doing something else completely disassociated, I still think of the other incomplete things. I was doing this with my suicide attempt. In my logic, that had been twisting for a little over a year at least, that I am cognizant of, I was planning a final act of love. I was sure my suicide would bring people together. My uncle would come around, whom I've missed very much since he left my aunt. Sexual violence would clearly end, as would human trafficking. Israel and Palestine would be friends. All because everyone else would realize how valuable life is, because of my death. I didn't want to be alive.

I do now. I do, not because my life is without worry--which it is not, but worry is largely a choice--nor because it is without anxiety--for my body reminds myself every morning when I first wake up that there's much to be anxious about--but because there is Love. I realized that the people in my life would not see my suicide as an act of love at all. They would feel responsible, even though I included in my will and last words that they were not. I realized it would hurt them, and while I believe hurt is an inevitable part of life, this was a hurt they would never overcome. Instead of bringing people together, it may have even made people separate. (Perhaps even worse, it may have done nothing at all.) And suicide was not an act of hurt to me. I love, LOVE, the people in my life. I love people, even if I can't trust them, so I know my love is not full, but it is certainly, nonetheless, LOVE. If I couldn't live with hurting anyone intentionally, I sure as fuck couldn't die that way either.

And that's exactly what I thought while I was showering the hairs off my body from cutting them all off, all but my eyebrows, which were next (and thankfully last). Fuck. I can't do this. I've missed class all week, because it frustrated and hurt me that I would go and couldn't concentrate. That I would try to work on my schoolwork, and couldn't concentrate. That I would try to write a poem, and couldn't concentrate. That I would try to read a book--any damn book--and I couldn't concentrate. My phantom was following me, and do you know what she was? She was the part of me that was dead. My doppelganger, and I nearly let her have the living part of me, and I'm glad I didn't give her the satisfaction. While I'm not completely sure she's gone, I know I'll not give in to her ever again.

I didn't want to be pretty. I hated being a woman, but I didn't want to be a man either. I didn't want to be human. Why couldn't I have been a cat, or a dog, or a squirrel, or a bird? Why did I have to be a human. I don't know why, except that I am me, and I wouldn't be who I am with me the way that I am. And it's good to accept this, and move past the questions of why, and the statements that this is unfair, or even trying to make rationality out of the irrational, reason out of the unreasonable.

So I'll still read about rape, and write about rape, and learn about rape, and talk to others about rape, and live and breath rape. But I'll live and breath other things too. Fulfilling romantic love, perhaps, and enjoying life, connecting with life, with another human being. Serving others--and myself, because when we serve others we're also serving ourselves--in any way I am able. Making my own toiletries and cleaning products. Preparing beet pancakes one day. Skydiving. Loving.

And while I am fighting feelings of guilt and shame--I want to tell everyone I'm sorry all the time, so I haven't thought as much about suicide lately as I have in ten years, if you can believe--I know that I have overcome. I'm retracing my thoughts, and disciplining my mind. Change is in the air.