Ancient Stories

Things that happened long ago don’t seem like they happened yesterday. They seem like they happened long ago.

This morning’s writing check-in with a group of writers increasingly dear to me centered on a discussion of violence. One person was wrestling with how to handle violence in a piece he was writing. The wrestling with words and scenes gave way to a bigger match, stronger themes, more visceral and historic. And it was then that I recalled my own experience with violence and how I’d written about it years ago.

I wrote it almost as theater. There were three parts, as if in sharing my story in thirds, would keep each episode compact and digestible. This happened, and then this happened, and finally this is how it ended up. There was a neatness and art to the telling, a matter of factness that felt safe and distant to me.

It was written in the manner of an unveiling, an admission that I’d been a victim of violence, well, not so much actual violence, as a victim of fear. I was a victim of fear until the fear erupted in its conclusion which was actually violence but I’m loath to call it that because it seems to minimize so much violence that other people, other women have experienced, but yes, I found myself in a situation where my boyfriend of several years had his hands around my neck in a hotel room in Iowa, holding my neck with one hand while reaching in his pocket for his knife, and I escaped into the hallway because he was drunk and slow and I was terrified and wild for my life, screaming for help while people opened their doors and looked at me disturbing the peace.

It was all fine. I left. I was safe. I drove home. No. I stopped in another hotel and after I checked in, I moved the dresser across the room to block the door. And after I did that, it took twenty years for me to talk about it and then, as I said, I wrote about it as theater.

I thought of this today while my very wise and reflective writing friends were talking.

We each have our own ways of organizing our past.

No one before or after that night has ever laid a hand on me. So, I made this event like a car crash, an unavoidable collision. And it remains that way in my memory, an accident, a once in a lifetime event, the shame and terror notwithstanding. But it’s okay. It was a long time ago.

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