Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

The point is not their individual significance, but their commonality, all the people enabling a broken system.

conflict manager two years in a row; my job was to wear a green vest every recess, patrolling the playground.

Arastradero Preserve

(a small shoe symbol drawn if we were measured while wearing them).

It is terror swallowed inside silence.

If I signed on the line, would I become one? If I refused to sign, could I remain my regular self?

They tended to me like the birds in Cinderella, the tape measures and ribbons in their beaks, flitting around taking measurements for her gown.

Two long, wooden Q-tips were stuck inside my anus. The sailboat was doing its best.

Whatever was crawling into the corridors of my insides would be dragged out by the ankles.

primary feeling was warmth.

Welcome to the club, here’s your new uniform. In your folder you’ll find guidelines that will lay out the steps of trauma and recovery which may take your entire lifetime.

I watched the clear water stream over my skin, useless; everything I needed to clean was internal.

I looked down at my body, a thick, discolored bag, and thought, Somebody take this away too, I can’t be left alone with this.

Grandma Ann wrapped herself around me, told me I was ready.

As open as my parents are, much of their lives are unknowable to me.

I didn’t know that money could make the cell doors swing open.

I didn’t know this little yes would reopen my body, would rub the cuts raw, would pry my legs open for the public.

unlocked a future, one in which I would become twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five and twenty-six before the case would be closed.

said he was glad to see that I was okay. The way he said it made it sound like a miracle, like I had died and come to life.

She said, I have to say, you are very calm, you’re very . . . Are you usually that way?

did not know that at 11:00 P.M. the previous night, he had been released on $150,000 bail. Less than twenty-four hours after being arrested, he was already free.

Eichler

everybody has degrees and everybody recycles.

found it strange they had let us wander out into the fields while the cat was dead in a box in the closet.

What I had now was another dead cat.

Or I could say, I might have been raped, right near our home, and show them a box full of ashes. I decided there was no rush...

just be aware his team may be trying to contact you and your family disguising themselves as supporters

What kind of name is Brock?

The pounding metal made my teeth ache. I wanted to tell them, Be gentle, she’s in there.

I learned celebrating a life could ignite a death.

I knew I would show up again at work the next morning, the same way tires bumped over the tracks,

As she talked I realized surviving the assault had only been the first challenge.

They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability.

Why was she outside in a dress in the winter? I said, Winter in California you dunce, we hike in shorts on Christmas.

He’s already violating an unspoken rule, why would he suddenly decide to adhere to reason?

Why was passing out considered more reprehensible than fingering the passed-out person?

Situations are softened, stripped of severity and any kind of seriousness, any real punishment.

They were deciding whether I’d make a good victim:

Sex had always been a tender, sacred, monogamous thing. But that summer I learned it could be a slippery thing, a floppy thing. A wrinkly thing. A feel-nothing thing. A quick-as-a-blink thing. A terribly boring thing. An I-only-wanted-your-thing thing.

You can’t fawn over your coworker’s photos of Maui by morning, slip away to battle your rapist by noon.

I learned it was expensive to be assaulted.

There were hundreds in line before me, some kits kept so long they grew mold, some thrown out, the lucky ones refrigerated.

this was not fruit rotting, it was little pieces of us in each one, an indispensable story.

She was asking questions, pushing back, a hand reaching out in an attempt to lighten the heavy thing I’d been carrying.

One time I asked her why she’d left, and she said, I want to be who I am. It was sort of impossible to argue with that.

The woman in the admissions office was named Joy, just like the nurse.

She understood. She pulled back, looked me square in the face, and said, This is your opportunity.

I just moved here, for this class, from California, I quit my job. I like printmaking, I took a class in college, mainly relief printing. The teacher said, Okay! That’s exciting.

I wrote my name in all caps, CHANEL MILLER!!,

we must scan for signs of assault, rape, death, etc. We knew this. But the guy did not speak this language; he just saw a desk.