seeking opinions

[IJ]

Found this online, was looking for reactions.

Fragments
When you break a piece of china, you take a picture with your mind. There's that moment when the cup hovers and you can grab it back from the air. There's the crisp pop against the floor and the scattering of the pieces. There's the liquid smoothness to the surface of the porcelain and the rough grain along the fracture, and there's the bladed edge where they meet.

Ann gathers some larger pieces and puts them in the trash. Selecting one, she leans against the counter and examines the edge, running her finger along it and thinking of a scalpel blade. Images like these, all individual, crystal-clear polaroids, filled her day. Nothing but the acrid odor of a pencil, the texture of fabric, the sand roughness of concrete and its lonely rasp against women's shoes. They plagued her all day, following her from home to work to back and into her dreams. Abruptly, Anne slides against the cabinets onto the floor. She lies slouched on the linoleum, sleepless at 4 am, clutching a fragment of china.

The dream started with a restless pulse she could feel all through her head and chest. From shadows grew the image of an abandoned street lined with beech trees. The sidewalk curved past a thick tree whose roots had lifted and split the slabs of cement. At the curve there was a place on the ground where she knew every particle of dust, their scent, their silkiness on her cheek, and the way they would move if her breath passed over them. She knew individual veins in the blades of nearby grass, and the depth of the darkness, and the separate twisted elements of tobacco inside a cigarette butt. She understood the abrasive, cracked edge of the sidewalk as if it had been on her skin.

It was the first night marred by the complete dream. It started more than a month ago, as fragments too small to understand, emerging from memory as she woke. A cigarrette. The color of blood. Amber bits of sand in the concrete. About a week ago enough of the pieces came together to terrify her. She awoke clenched in a ball and wept quietly. When the fear was spent she stood and examined Jack, who still lay sound asleep. She studied his disheveled hair and the rounded muscle of his chest and shoulders, all marble-gray in the midnight dusting of light, lying motionless and cool in the night like a cadaver betrayed only by an occasional breath. Her hand fell paralyzed before it ever moved to wake him, her voice choked in a tight throat before words were ever formed. And then she returned to bed. Tonight, Jack is away on business, and Ann has no one to cry next to or talk to now that the memories have grown sharp. All she can do is repeat the horrible day in her mind, from the angry drone of the alarm clock....
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The morning is uneventful until the images start. As she eats her usual scrambled egg on a bagel, steam rises from the sandwich rises with vivid texture. The odors reach into her and the steam sensitizes every hair and pore on her hand. When she collects her papers to go to the hospital, she notices subtleties, woven fibers and silky ink.

As Kim arrives to pick her up, and Ann climbs in the car, she realizes the only thing to distinguish this late shift from all the others is that Kim cannot drive her home as she has for four months, and she must walk to the bus stop after her shift.

As Ann pushes the glass door out of the way to step into the ER, she feels briefly like a patient. The smooth surface of the door feels imperceptibly different, somehow like the one time she did come to the ER to be treated, not to work others. Perhaps it is because Dexter, an intern, is leaning against the check-in desk, watching the entrance the same way he did that night. But there's only his smile. No wide eyes, no dashing forward. Ann puts it out of her mind.

But later, the feelings return. Ann marks a final period on a note and examines the rounded tip of her pencil with her index finger. She takes it to the sharpener, and as she grinds, the rough, pungent wood odor pushes into her nostrils. Ann knows everything about sharpening the pencil; the subtle irregularities in the coat of paint, the specks of graphite dust on her hands, and the fresh-hewn grain of the wood fibers. She takes the pencil and goes back to work.

When her next patient comes in, she feels it again. Like everyone, she lives with fabric and never notices it. She forgets her medical green pajamas; she ignores cloth as she cuts through it searching for trauma, immune to the countless outfits of the patients she attends. Then she examines the lady who was thrown against the stickshift during a car crash. She grasps the lady's flowered dress with her left hand to lift it from the vicious bruise. The nature of her world changes. Sound drains away and she knows only the vibration of the threads as folds in the dress rub past each other. She stares past the pattern into individual fibers of cotton wound in spirals and meshed together, and she does not see how they interact to make flowers. In a second the feeling passes.

The strange feelings are not coherent enough to frighten her, not yet. And for a while they stop. Even when they do return, it's something that happens all the time: she recognizes a voice behind her.

All day, she ignores the constant buzz of conversation around her. Then a voice cuts through like car headlights through night; oh god, Jack's voice. It's Jack. She stops her scribbling in the chart and goes wandering; through the gap in the curtain around an examination bed she spots the man. But the nose is wrong, the eyes are wrong, the hair is too short. Her subject notices her and returns her examination from under bushy eyebrows. Ann walks away.

Of course, Jack would have come had she asked. He would not have left her for business if she asked him to stay. Months ago she saw that, after she grew late and he received the dreaded call and sped to the ER. He held his hand on her cheek and gently brushed the hair from her forehead to examine the rough wound. With wet eyes he studied that and the black eye and traced a scratch down her jaw, and forgave them all with an embrace. Ann saw love in his eyes, distilled by the hurt he shared with her, so yes, he would have stayed home if she had asked.

As his trip approached, she realized it would coincide with Kim's double shift and thought about asking him to stay and give her a ride. But days passed and she said nothing, suspecting, at first, that she lacked the strength to share her feelings with him. Then almost suddenly she realized that she wanted Jack to miss a business trip to spare her a three-block walk to a bus stop, and she felt anger at her frailness. Then she thought about staying home, or changing the route she walked, but the idiocy of that, too, was too great, and frustrated with growing upset over nothing, she put it all out of her mind.

Later, the action of the ER briefly dies down and finds Ann staring blankly into space at memories. She remembers the pasta dinner two days ago before Jack left, watching the candles reflected in his glasses. She thought about taking the bus home during his absence and her stomach turned while she watched him eat. He looked up at her, and she smiled back, and he stayed as innocent as when she woke from her nightmare and watched him sleep, the sheet draped loosely over his nude body, as the last tears dried coldly on her cheeks. "Tell me what you're thinking about," he said between bites, and she told him about a seven year-old who broke his wrist learning to ride a bike and bravely endured his ordeal at the ER.

"So tell me what you're thinking about, Anne?" Dexter asks, jerking Anne from the memory and back to her desk. "Hmm?" she asks, startled and brushing her arm into a can of pens and paper clips. "Oh, just things I keep dreaming about."

"Like what?"

"Images jumbled together, weird things. This feeling that I'm searching for something, but I don't know what it is. My fingers run over some notebook paper and the texture is really weird, really intense." Dexter nods. "Then I curl my hand around a pencil and I notice everything about it--the texture, the smell. Weird, huh?"

"A little. So what's it mean?"

"I dunno. Not really important, I guess," she says. Dexter shrugs before he leaves.

Scenes from the dream, revived, replay in her mind as he goes: She feels her dress moving in foreign hands, senses that she is falling, remembers the scent of dust. Emotionlessly, she recalls her pencil.

The sight of blood never bothers Ann. It never did, and it doesn't now. But, about to clean a jagged wound from a fall, she pauses. The flesh around the wound is bunched up and white, torn out, coloring with blood. She spends maybe five seconds watching the scarlet sneak into the irregular patches of the wound before she cleans it.

As she finishes her stitches, she feels Kim's hand on her shoulder. "Is it all right? Want me to ask around to see if anyone else leaving with you is free?”

"It's just a short walk. I'll be fine," Ann responds, as tension floods into her toes and fingers from her chest. Kim leaves with a shrug and a supportive smile. But after all, it is just a short walk, and again, Anne grows frustrated with herself.

The night stretches patiently into hours, bringing Ann a sprained ankle and a wheezing old man with white hairs in the hollow of his chest who is put on oxygen and hooked to a monitor. Ann forgets herself in her work until the end of her shift sneaks up behind her. On the face of the clock, the black hands snap into place. Four months ago she would have anticipated the end of the evening--sitting on her desk and watching the little hand march around to the twelve. She would have packed up her things, slung her purse on her right shoulder, held her books against her left side and marched out with Kim. Tonight she hears the click of the hands behind her. As she turns to look, the glass face catches her attention for a second. It reflects the regular arrangement of lights in the ceiling, gleaming like jelly before it is spread. Out of habit, she feels that she should wait for Kim, but knows she is leaving alone; she says goodbyes and pushes open the glass doors and leaves.

The bright light from the ER spills onto the rough pavement outside and keeps her warm for a few seconds. But she walks on and must rely on the street lights. They are far between, far enough that each one is worthy of study as it approaches. She notes their hum, the moths they attract, the way the asphalt looks wet in little seas of light beneath them.

She turns onto a smaller street and experiences an intimacy with the rows of trees and the color of grass at night, with remote, unlit windows and the uneven patchwork of repair on the street. The dark mosaic of leaves above has strange depth.

She walks closer and closer to the little bend in the sidewalk as it curves past the thick beech tree, approaching it for the first time in four months. Movement drains from the world and intensity rushes in to take its place. She feels utterly alone and simultaneously watched from all sides. The stillness becomes jittery, then begins to vibrate, and begins to hum. The bend in the sidewalk surges forward as her steps lengthen; her head tilts to acknowledge the scene. Her eyes take in the warped root and the gray dust and a cigarette butt and the way the shadow spreads the jagged gash in the sidewalk. She feels the rasp of hurried steps across the abrasive cement course through her whole body, and she feels the drum of her heart reach a crescendo and fall away. She begins to slow down before she ever really begins to run, stops the sound in her throat before it really begins to come out.

After the bus ride, she hurries into her dark home, drops her bag, gratefully pushes the door shut with her back, and heads straight to her bedroom. She struggles out of her clothes and hurries into bed, falling into a quick but unsatisfying sleep. She has the whole dream, in its whole violence. Back at the curve in the sidewalk she falls gracelessly with legs spread, closing them hurriedly, but the snicker has already changed. She suffocates under hot breath and a sweat-moistened face coarse with stubble but clawing for anything she seizes a pencil and there, sickened, she wakes.

She searches the sheets for Jack but he has slipped away on business. She stumbles to the kitchen to make tea, sets water to boil, pours a cupful. The frail cup jumps from her hand and explodes on the floor. She gathers some fragments, examines one, slides onto the floor. She sits with the piece cupped in her hand and looks at the scattered fragments on the linoleum; she draws one leg close to her body, then the other, and buries her head in her knees, as a shudder courses down her spine.

[Le Haggard]

Hey Ian,

Interesting piece. It is a pretty good description of some kinds of PTSD I think. Everyone is different of course, but I think it misses the automatic jump and twitch reaction though..the automatic gutt instinctual flinch and panic attack that has the flashback feeling triggered. I wonder how many women who have these kinds of nightmares and experiences actually have people around that even know what they are going through past the first days, weeks, even months or years...or if there are people around who know..do they actually want to understand and help? I'm a cynic...I have my doubts.

Its an interesting way of talking about how her partner "dealt" with her initial injuries ..That he "forgave them all" ... as if it were her fault somehow and requiring that she be forgiven for what someone else did to her...And he is obviously clueless that anything traumatic should still be going on a mere 4 months(?) later after the physical injuries have healed.

They say "time heals all wounds." (Whomever that nebulous 'they' refers to) But of course, like this piece shows, that's a lie. I think women in particular are taught to just get better at hiding the wounds and keeping it all to themselves while having to go on with life.

Interesting piece...What was your question about it?

LeAnn

[IJ]

I was curious about what people thought of the portrayal of the woman and her reaction to the assault, mostly because the person who wrote this had no experience speaking to, or being, a woman who had experienced assault.

[Le Haggard]

Well, some of the basics are there. Every assault and every woman is difference of course. I could go on about what I know but I don't know how relevant it would be to other women's experiences. If you are looking for specific and want to discuss it more in depth on AIM or via Email, though... That's another option. I'm not sure how relevant that would be to an MA forum.

Maybe one aspect of people not knowing/understanding is because it's not something discussed in "polite" situations or even friendly ones in most cases. It's also a topic that depresses and upsets others, as well as the one discussing it. I've known many women to be labled as "man haters" or said to be "male bashing" because of their reactions and feelings about what has happened to them. Such name calling is not exactly condusive to open communication or to healing. I've heard many times that its a viscious cycle: Traumatic experiences create stress and tension....which creates negative reactions from others and only attracts the kind of people that would be abusive...which creates more traumatic situations that reinforce the feelings from the past experiences...and on the spiral goes down.

What do you think? Do you think women get victimized again by the unwillingness of society to openly encourage them to discuss and deal with these issues? Or do you think society and men in particular want to understand and more importantly help? Do you think MA can help women like "Ann" in the story?