it’s hard to maintain the balance. how much of yourself you can give, without losing yourself completely. you give yourself to someone completely, and they leave you—you’re decimated. left to re-build, yourself, from the ground up. i have to preserve my self. if i don’t, if i don’t stay sane, what good am i to anyone else? i try to do the right things, say the right words, but i’m never sure. i’m not sure where the boundaries lay, not sure where self-preservation ends and selfishness begins. i don’t always know what side i’m on.

                i wonder what i’m so afraid of. Being hurt. Physical pain terrifies me. Mental pain, that i can get around: i can go to sleep, make it stop. But physical pain is inescapable. so much that it just doesn’t seem fair, dammit.
                i am afraid of being taunted, followed, beat up, raped and killed. i hate that i can’t walk down a short alley, near my home, in broad daylight, without being paralyzed with fear when three teenage boys walk into the alley behind me. In all likelihood, they’re just like me, just taking a short cut from here to there. Yet once the paralysis passes, i have to squelch the urge to run, flee, shout ‘get the fuck away from me!’ i meant to take a self-defense class for women this summer, but i put it off. What the fuck am i doing? This could be my life here, and i put it off? i could be raped and killed tonight because i wasn’t organized enough the call the class ahead.
                Somehow i feel like i’m invulnerable. Not in the way all teenagers are supposed to feel, but because i’m not very sexy or attractive. Like, who’d want to rape me? Then i have to reconsider the mind of an attacker and view myself as a thing, a female object the same as any other. There are people who meet you and judge you by the likelihood of you having agreeing to have sex with them. Or not even agreeing. As if it makes a difference to them. “Sluts, all sluts, yes or no, it’s all the same.” Sylvia Plath’s protagonist fought off a woman-hater. Could i? Would i ever be in that situation? I’m sick of being scared of any strange male i see when i’m alone. i hate having to sit in the hot sun by the river downtown because the dirty old men haunt the shady seats. i’m afraid of everything. i don’t want to live in a place where i have to assume that everyone’s out to hurt me in order to survive. But it happens to so many people. Too many.

                i am one of the lucky ones. Having made it to young adulthood free of abuse. i know i’ve been lucky. How can i not know? i’m constantly reminded when i look at the people i care about.
                There’s a horrible helpless feeling that comes when a friend confesses abuse. There’s guilt, because you couldn’t protect them, because it never happened to you; there’s hurt on their behalf; there’s the inevitable sense of disgust and wrongness. A feeling deep down in your stomach and around your heart, a dull ache that makes you feel so sick that all you can do is take deep breaths and try to forget. But of course you can’t. And that’s the worst part. The helplessness. The silence. You want to help, but they know you wouldn’t understand. All you can do is try and be there for them, because if it’s making you feel hurt and confused, it must be a million times worse for them.
                It first happened when i was twelve. the first time a friend haltingly spoke a secret to me. i remember that feeling, the awful choked feeling. The feeling of wanting to kill that man so he’d never lay so much as a finger on my friend again. It was a feeling that would return, over and over again throughout my life.
                Different people. Different ages, races, genders. Assault. Date rape. Gang rape. Child molestation. Incest. It never stops.
                i find myself writing a list again and again, memorizing it, shaping the words like a prayer. At least ten names on the list now, and always growing, always more. Ten people i care about. And those are just the ones i know about. How many more would there be, if i could count the ones who keep it secret, or the ones that are just acquaintances? Twenty, maybe, or thirty-five? Fifty? How many more?
                Ten names, over and over again. Ten names and counting.

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