Post-Traumatic

by Chantal V. Johnson

Whoever said beggars can’t be choosers has never experienced the glorious recalcitrance of the New York City homeless,

Vivian responded with a lecture, arguing that whenever women evaluated each other’s appearance—whether “her ashy elbows,” or “her perfect bikini body”—they were committing moral crimes, participating in the disciplinary project of controlling women’s bodies. These comments, though seemingly harmless in themselves, were corrosive to womankind in the aggregate, as they contributed to women equating their social value with their bodies, leading them to confuse a smooth, toned, dimpleless exterior with inner perfection, purity, or worthiness of love. But this was a fallacy, ergo, by making these comments, whether positive or negative, one was committing the most unethical, unfeminist act possible: reducing women back to their bodies, increasing their pain, and making them stupid.

The only things more oppressive than the eyes of an insecure woman were the eyes of an undesired man.

“Every day it’s the same. Poor, neglected, abused; poor, neglected, abused.” She looked at Vivian as if weighing the risk of what she wanted to say. “You know what? Sometimes I wish I had at least one of those ‘adverse childhood experiences.’ ” This is why you can’t hang out with white women, Vivian thought. She liked to bait them, though. “Why would you want that?” Paula took her final drag, tossed it, and said, “For the story.” It was the kind of comment that could make Vivian hate someone for all of eternity. As Vivian recalled the incident, she dwelled on the remark. It seemed emblematic of white opportunism and theft. They even want to colonize our experiences!

“Once we started seeing each other, I said ‘I love you’ to him in my head a hundred times a day. I knew he was married but I didn’t care. I just wanted to make him happy. So I dressed up like a little princess even though it’s not my style, you ever done that?” “Sure,” Vivian admitted, recalling a year she wore pink. “That’s what girls do, right?” Linda laughed. Vivian shifted in the cheap armchair. She didn’t like to think about it that way. “And I’d bring him other girls and watch him be with them. Then he started strangling me, sometimes with his bare hands, and once with a phone cord. He’d picked up an old landline phone and texted me a picture, saying he couldn’t wait to wrap it around my pretty neck. And I let him.” She shrugged. Vivian touched her own throat as she received this information. “Were you afraid?” she finally asked. Linda said, “Nah. I just thought, ‘Well, if I’m gonna die, at least it gets to be with him.’”

“Gay people cut their families off all the time.” “No. We get cut out of our families.” “That’s right. I’m sorry, you’re right.” “The Black family is under attack enough as it is,” Jane added. The air was sucked out of the room then. Allusions to racial solidarity will do that. Why was Jane being so deterministic about this? “So there’s just no consequences for bad behavior in The Black Family?” “I’m just saying that the extreme step, of giving up on your family altogether? It seems more like something white people do. And it makes sense, they have the privilege to do so. They don’t have our history of oppression. Family and, like, the church, were the only reliable structures Black people had for over a hundred years,” Jane said.

“I’m so scared of being caught listening to or watching something by someone who has been canceled, now I just Google everyone first before I consume anything.”

don’t care about my money supporting them,” Kurt replied. “Because the issue isn’t that abusers are artists. I mean abusers are everywhere. They do everything for a living. So you find yourself inevitably supporting them.”

There was a moment of expectant silence that comes when everyone in a group has given their opinion about a topic and they all want to be the one to say the next brilliant thing about it, the one interpretation, the one take that everyone can rally around.

“but at the very least, we all know toxic people who must be stopped. Do we stop them, though? I think we fixate on the ethics of aesthetic consumption because it’s easier than dealing with the moral trespasses of real life. It’s easier to denounce an artwork than a family member, right? Or a friend? So ultimately, for me, all this talk about whether we should watch Annie Hall or dance to ‘Ignition Remix’ or whatever is a distraction from the larger problem: How do we prevent the mass rape and abuse of women and children? And what do we do with the offenders?”

She would end her relationship with her family once and for all. It was taking them too long to die.