Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

We sink to the bottom of each other’s oceans, drowning in shared silence.

I want to take off all my fingers like pen caps and write blood all over this room.

and you can always pull out if you need to. (Hehe, no pun intended!)

🤢

It’s not your fault. But healing your own pain does belong to you now.

You can’t live like this, Pear. Jumping in and out of your own grave.

“How can you go on living when you’re now being lived in? When you’ve been invaded? How can you tell a joke and enjoy laughter without hearing the one laugh that owns every root in you now?

How can you end your own suffering, without ending completely? How can you accept touch? Or walk through your life, a lived wound, forever avoiding some terrible, inevitable wind.”

If you’ve learned anything it’s that snow can’t be trusted.

Approximately 68 percent of all sexual assaults go unreported,

“The mind is the master and the body is the servant.”

I’ve learned how to make a meal out of pain, how to brand my sorrow.

People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek. Just long enough to take a picture before speeding off to their next fatality. We are a country that capitalizes on the fetishizing of felonies. A country that says “innocent until proven guilty,” even though the proving of assault is nearly impossible. Tell me how you prove coercion? How you prove the difference between being hit on and hunted? How you prove your arms were held down? Your body was touched? Your life was threatened if you ever told anyone? For people who have suffered violent sexual crimes, proof—the very act of proving—is more than just a burden. It is boundless bearing. An eternity of futility.

I am in a body. It is not the one I came here with, but it is the one I’ll leave here in. I will take care of it. It belongs to me now. My pain, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now. My heart, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now. My story, I will take care of it. It belongs to me now. I experienced death but I am not a ceasing.

a homeless man asks me for change, his dog tied to a pole by a handkerchief. Poor dog. I have money on me, but I’d rather keep it. I don’t mind his suffering. I prefer it.