Article by Olivia Towlen Art by Isabella Hageman
I asked for a prompt. Brandon Shimoda asked: By what are you haunted?
I asked: Well, what does it mean to be haunted?
A quick Google search produces these two definitions: “frequented by a ghost” and “having or showing signs of mental anguish or torment.”
I was sitting, legs criss-cross applesauce, on the comfy brown leather couch in my therapist’s office. I would normally jump into the good things that had happened recently, but I couldn’t that day. I had written in my journal just 30 minutes before, “Even in my dreams I can’t receive sexual pleasure.” What does it take to heal?
I’ve seen my therapist 33 times over the course of a year, sometimes in person and sometimes over Zoom when I was away at school. This was the first time I ever took my shoes off and crossed my legs in her office. I always sit directly across from her even though the couch sits in an L shape tucked into the corner and I could face away. Sometimes I look her in the eyes when I speak and sometimes I don’t. I never grab the box of tissues myself when I start crying. She always gets up and hands them to me, and I always feel a little guilty for not thinking of it first. I always spread one tissue out on the couch next to me to pile my other used tissues on top of. But not that time. She got up and put the little trash bin in the corner next to me so I could throw them away without getting up. (Andrea, if you’re reading this, I appreciate you.)
She already knew about the sexual assault, but I had come to a different place since we last spoke. Some cascade let loose in my brain, uncovering a layer of my metaphysical onion so deep that the tears came instantly. I cried when I told her about the time when I was much younger. When my friend’s mother walked in on me and her daughter naked in bed, one of us performing cunnilingus on the other–this feels so vulgar, I feel so exposed, as if you, the reader, are walking in on it too. I want to cover it up–I forget who was giving and who was receiving. I remember being in so much trouble, sitting criss-cross applesauce on their living room floor, terrified as I waited for my parents to come pick me up.
I remember being in school and being called to the front office during gym class. The ladies at the front desk used to call me Trouble. They told my brother he didn’t have to answer any questions he didn’t want to, that he didn’t have to speak with this strange woman if he didn’t want to. They did not tell me that. So they put me in a room with her and closed the door and then she asked me questions about my life, about my family, about my brother, what my relationship with him was like, and I can’t remember the rest.
Pinching the wet edge of a tissue enclosing a hefty amount of snot I told my therapist about the first time I ever spoke to a therapist. After my parents found out about social services being called and the school visits that me and my brother had received. I remember going some place with my mother, knowing I was there to talk about what had happened. The only thing that I remember from that session with that lady I never saw again was having no answer to her question: “How do you feel?” I don’t know, I probably shrugged. I remember staring at a card with a little face drawn on it, with some expression I did not recognize, hearing the lady ask me, as she turned it over, if I felt embarrassed. And on the other side of the card there it was, spelled out for me: EMBARRASSED.
Some things come back with a jolt. I just remembered laying in my bed one night, in our old house, with my dad sitting at the edge of my bed and telling him through sobs and so much guilt and shame that it wasn’t just the one time, or the one friend. That it had been happening a lot before I got caught–I must have known before any of this that there had been something to hide, that there was something to be caught–and I think that I only told him because he had asked.
We never spoke about it as a family. And I felt like hiding it, so I did. Buried and put away, like it never even happened. A skeleton in my closet to haunt me in private. We ended up moving to the neighborhood where I got caught, and I have passed that house more times than I could try to count. That same house where my friend’s mother would put us naked in the bath together and leave us unsupervised. Where she finally walked in on it and was somehow surprised. Occasionally I would throw up a middle finger as I drove by in my teenage years, but I mostly just tried to forget.
Periodically, over the years as I grew up, when we were alone, my dad would tell me “You know, it’s ok if you like girls Olivia.” And I always said “I know,” but I didn’t. I said I only liked boys. And I’m pretty sure I believed it, too.
I never wanted to get in trouble again. I never wanted to be Trouble, again.
As I sat all crisscrossed and crying on that brown couch I tried to grapple with the fact that the only sexual experiences I have had with females have turned out traumatic for me. This recent exploitation shedding light on a past I had buried to my core. What I was hiding when I went out clubbing and someone asked if I like women, knowing the answer was yes as I said, I don’t know. The day I shaved my head and some random girl stood too close to me and told me I was beautiful. I’m sure she meant well but I completely shut down.
I write about this now not for pity, but to clarify, if only to myself, that the skeleton in my closet, the ghost wrapped around my shoulders, does not take the form of my first sexual experiences, a little girl with her head innocently tucked between another’s legs, for the sake of pursuing what felt good. It’s something far more dangerous than that. It’s guilt, and shame itself. Embarrassment that never should have been mine.