Living Dolls and Their Parts by Emma

TW: rape, violence

Without time, causation makes no sense. Measure time how you like. There's our biological clock and our everyday clocks. However you're clocked, it doesn't matter.

There's the thermodynamic clock. Disorder increasing over time.

There's the rest of the universe. Expanding from the heat of the big bang.

And, there are our memories.

All sadness comes from time’s flow. You can never go back.

But time also heals all wounds.

One day can change everything. But you heal.

Everything felt like it was closing around me. There was no going back.

Not yet 20. In torn fishnets, smeared mascara and dripping someone else out of me. I needed somewhere to crash as bad as I needed cash. I was rented.

At some point, I blacked out. joie and désespoir.

Everything was damaged. I felt a sharp pain. And, a more subtle one. I felt like cratering glass. Nothing more. The crater is always larger than the impact.

I blacked out. I was unconscious. I knew I was being penetrated and filled. Face down. Blacked out. Like I was never a person.

I thought about how I would explain myself and how I got used to all of this.

“Sometimes she has to give them head. Sometimes they’d ask for more. When you give up your dignity, it all washes over you.”

I didn't even have life dripping out of me. Like the nectar off a tree of decay. It felt like a fall from grace, without the grace. Everything else? Just the wreckage of memory, longing and my occasional lust.

The next days and weeks, I was sent photo after photo of me in various states of undress. opening. penetration. scission. Dripping .joie and désespoir.

The désespoir cascaded. repeated. spiralled. regression..

It took me months to get tested. I didn't want to know.

I heard talk, through the grapevine. I thought of Angels in America and how much I disliked it. I thought of the young man I met in Meadowvale who told me his life was over. I thought I'd never have a life after this. Everything was closing all around me. Even after I was tested and treated, I couldn't help but return.

I was a victim of raptus. rapere. raptum. Like Persephone.

Time felt like a black pool and the moon went black too. Measure time how you like.

I don't miss it.

But I miss the person I was. I wish they'd had an easier time.

But you can't live in the past. No matter how heavy it is. Time bends as it approaches enormous masses. Time bends with us.

However you're clocked, it doesn't matter.

Now, I stretch the tightest shirt I can over my tits. I thank the estradiol I get off the internet. And, I thank the eight boyfriends I lie about having to the Social Service agency. “We all share the same toothbrush, you see. So you’ll never find out.”

And, I think the person who went away, into the black, and came out as me.

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Emma is a trans writer and printer in Toronto. She wishes Hubert Selby Jr got to meet HER.

@3mt34