My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.

photo taken. “You can say no,” he says, but I see the longing

men who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls.

Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.

“He was a grown man and you were fifteen,” she says. “What could you have possibly done to torture him?” For a moment I’m speechless, unable to come up with an answer besides, I walked into his classroom. I existed. I was born. Tipping my head back, I say, “He was so in love with me, he used to sit in my chair after I left the classroom. He’d put his face down on the table and try to breathe me in.” It’s a detail I’ve trotted out before, always meant as evidence of his uncontrollable love for me, but saying it

“Vanessa,” she says gently, “you didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to go to school.”

He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.

Maybe that’s what this has always been about—not wanting these men but wanting to be them.

This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction—once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.