What a Shame

by Abigail Bergstrom

‘Well, if I could have any superpower it would be the ability to just look at a book and have read it. In that one look, I’d take in all its knowledge and feel every single emotion the author wanted to provoke in me. I’d live the story and afterwards I would remember it and carry it with me.’

If I were a sponge cake you would be in every grain of sugar, marching through me. You are sweet and salt, pain and perpetuity – inextricably linked to any semblance of hope.

The next day I had this feeling, but it’s like a chameleon – it won’t stay the same colour long enough for me to name it. The only way I can describe it is like sand. Yes, like sand. Like wet itchy sand between your fingers, when it’s so uncomfortable and irritating that it feels as though it might never go away. Like you might never experience the sensation of having soft, clean hands again.’

It was true: I hadn’t given consent. But the word ‘rape’ felt so loaded. It belonged to women worse off than me, to women who experienced violence and pain, to women with bloodied thighs who were attacked by strangers in dark alleys or coerced by obnoxious bosses at work.

Imperfection and broken pieces can define beauty. It became what it is because it was broken. Through its repair it is defined.’

For years I dismissed them, these fragments of memory. I strangled them with the bare hands of the men who loved me, wrapping them around my throat when the lights went out. I violently dismembered them in the back of my mouth with vodka that stung the edges of my lips.