My Voice by Amethyst Freibott

This is what silence sounds like:

Your fingers pinching and pulling at tender skin, rubbing raw the trails of desire that web from my stomach to my collarbones and beneath the wire that cages my breasts. Your hands, calloused and warm, reaching for my body in the damp light of the desert. It is the taste of the words “touch it” when they leave your lips, cracked and salty. It is the feeling of your jeans, the zipper undone in the public park, your fingers woven into mine, when you press our fingers against the limp flesh that rests against your thigh, and the smell of lust as your skin seeps pleas into my fingers. It is the sound of the empty alley when I tell you I want to go home. It is your chest crushing mine as you back me into the cinder block walls that divide us from the nuclear suburbs. It is your fingers stamping purple into the veins that throb in my wrists, tender and trapped at my sides when you laugh at my wet eyes and push my hand down your pants and tell me that it’s what I want. Silence is the passersby that watch us in the shadows but say nothing. It is the taste of the words “I love you” that burn my tongue.

Silence sounds like the empty night, your breath twisted into mine when you tell me that if I loved you then I would have sex with you. If I loved you, then it was okay to enter my name as “friends with benefits” in your phone, but only if you put enough space between my real name and the title so that your mom couldn’t see it when she did her weekly phone check. It is the moment that you trapped me against the sink and shut the door to the bathroom at your birthday party and the feeling of the zipper on your Wranglers when you pushed your dick at me again, and the way that your arms felt when I broke them off me. It is the taste of pine needles and the cold cabin walls where you pressed my body into nothing until I agreed not to tell anyone how you touched me. It is every girl I pretended to be to survive.

Silence is my bones rattling against each other in the middle of the night when you are sleeping silently across the world, and the shame that keeps me from saying anything. It is the bricks that you laid on my chest that anchor me to you, and your mother’s tears when she learns about the man you’ve become under the suffocation of her parenting. It is the goosebumps that litter my skin the first time I let a boy touch me again. It is choking up poison when you tell me that you love me after you’ve taught me to hate myself.

Silence sounds like my mother changing the subject when I tell her what happened to me. Silence is the first phone call I made from half-way across the world when I said “it wasn’t rape” and you said “it could have been worse” and the taste of those words that stuck on the roof of my mouth when I begged for sympathy. It is all the times I walked through awareness displays and lost my own narrative. Silence is wondering if my waist was slimmer and my ass was thicker and my hair was blonder and my face was prettier, if you would care about what happened to me, because if I was packaged nicer then the pill would be easier to swallow. It is my empty stomach ready to be purged again. It is wondering if you ever think about me when I can’t stop thinking about you.

Silence is the taste of your laugh when you tell me that my accent is too thick and I pronounce words like “lasso” the wrong way. It is the feeling of your belt loops against my back as you push me against the pool table and teach me to play billiards by aiming for me. It is the alcohol blurring the lines together until I can’t stand upright on the cobblestone street, your hand covering mine when you tell me that you want me. It is the taste of your breath full of French fries and beer when you invite me to the club and the clear bottle of liquid that the bouncer gives us and the small glasses that you pour it into before you try to kiss me and I say no. It is the sound of your hands undoing the buttons on my shirt in the middle of the club and the wet lips that you run over my body after I tell you no again and again. It is the moment that your best friend asks me if I like you and I don’t know what to say, so he tells me that it’s fine if I don’t fancy you because I’m just another girl and you can find one of those anywhere. It is the second that I realize that after all this time, the scar tissue I’ve built has mocked my story more than it has memorialized it. It is the moment that I understand that my “no” is a lit-up vacancy sign. It is the taste of your tongue throbbing against my lips when I won’t let you in and the feeling of the words “your body” as you scrape them across my skin. It is a dirty bathroom stall that I lock myself in after your eyes lingered too long on my body. It is every lie you wrote about what a whore I was after the night that we never spent together.

Silence is the twist of my arm when you grab me in the middle of the club until my friend punches you off. It is the feeling of your 40-year-old fingers pressed against my thighs in the middle of the bar, fighting denim for your 30 seconds of numbness. It is every one of you who followed me down the streets to prove to your friends that you’re a man. It is your knee against mine on the subway and the way that you bit your lip before handing me your phone number, and the language barrier when I said no but you followed me off the train and I spent the whole day in Paris watching over my shoulder for you instead of exploring the Louvre. It is every hello that I’ve spoken in good faith that was mistaken for an invitation. It is all of the moments that I hate my vagina for making me a woman. It is all of the times I have been too afraid to walk to my car in the dark because you hid in the shadows. It is all of the times that I was told to stop thinking about you and rebuild my life. It is apologizing for things that I have a right to feel. It is the time that I wore an outfit that actually fit and your only comment was about how, after all this time, you never knew that I just had big boobs and wasn’t fat after all. It is the boy at the back of the bus who called me a fat-ass and convinced me I wasn’t desirable enough to be loved. It is every man who has ever taken up the torch of justice for the survivors only to drop it when the flame burned too brightly.

Silence is where you told me to build my life after you taught me to hate my body. Silence is the fear that — because of what you did to me — I am too soiled to be loved. The fear I only talk about when I’ve had too much red wine and my heart is beating too fast to stop the words from escaping my facade.

But this is what my voice sounds like:

Me too.

My voice is the embrace of my friends when they tell me they understand, the tears we share when they utter those words: “Me too.” It is Fearless. Courageous. Whole. It is all the times you tried to silence me but I survived. It is the weight on my chest that makes me sorry for you.

My voice is calloused knees of prayer that beg the Lord to transform you into a man who doesn’t need his mom to scold him to believe in the dignity of women and transform my heart from its prison. It is your relationship status on Facebook and the daughters you will raise to speak out against men like you. It is waking up again, and breathing again, and believing again that even though you tried to strip the future from my dry bones, I have a purpose bigger than the bruises you left.

This is what my voice sounds like:

I forgive you.