The art gallery in my head.
There is an art gallery in my head. In this quiet corner of my mind. Hung on its bare, smooth, grey walls is a single painting. Slightly fraying in its edges, covered in a coat of fine dust, it hangs silently in its gilded gold frame. The painting captures the exact moment that a man is trying to force himself on a girl. From the shocked and wide-eyed look in her eyes, you could tell that she is caught completely by surprise, the clenched jaw and the strain of her neck muscles show the extreme duress she must have been under.
When I look at the thick jabs of paint, layered frantically upon each other to show the pale thighs of the woman being spread open, I can feel the bile rising to my mouth. The glazed cynical look in her attacker’s eyes and the smirk playing on the edges of his lips reveals how much he enjoyed seeing her this way.
Sometimes, I find myself slipping away from the real world, to enter this phantom art gallery and find my gaze lost in this painting. My nose scrunched up in scrutiny, trying to process my feelings about it.
At times, I am hot with rage at how unjust it was that the girl found herself in such miserable circumstances when she clearly didn't deserve it. Other times, I feel guilt and sadness for what happened to her. Sometimes I am irritable that the girl was stupid enough to wander into such an unfortunate fold of events. Sometimes I am disgusted that human beings can turn out to be so vile.
This ladies and gentleman, is the story of the girl in the painting. Let's call her Tina. Tina was your regular wide-eyed 24-year-old girl. One day she happened to reconnect with an old work colleague online. Let's call him Chris. Tina had known Chris for over almost 2 years, when they worked in the same company. She had thought him to be nice enough. It was clear that Tina and Chris were both coming out of bad relationships and rebounding hard. Tina found comfort in Chris company.
Chris was a charmer, derived from the fact that he sold overpriced software to chumps day after day. He knew Tina needed comfort, he could see beneath the outer wrapping of false bravado the heavy scent of vulnerability shrouded her.
A scent, that Tina thought could be cleverly hidden under enough cherry blossom from body shop and a cutting, no fucks given sarcastic tone.
The more they hung out, over countless coffee’s, brunch dates and road trips, she found his company to be a soothing balm to rub over her emotional wounds. And slowly and surely she found herself letting her guard down around him. So it came as no surprise that when Chris asked Tina out, she decided to throw all sense of caution out the window, along with the kitchen sink, and said yes. After all he from the outside he seemed to be the epitome of normal he had a decent job, no piercings, all his toes and fingers.
It was an uneventful 2 months, lost in innocent peanut butter milkshakes, slapstick humor, sappy poetry, and declarations of “love”. Tina, dazed in a happy hour cocktail of dopamine, oxytocin, and actual alcohol surrendered herself to infatuation, impatient to ride into her romantic sunset even if Chris was a toxic and mediocre way to it.
The painting in my head, however, is the result of one particular evening 2 months into their story. Chris was out of town on work and Tina had flown in to surprise him for the long weekend. On this trip, Tina had felt the relationship had started to sour. Chris was acting paranoid and rude. He would nitpick over Tina’s outfits and subtly try to manipulate her into behaving or dressing the way he wanted her to. He even forced her to come to an after-hours workplace gathering to parade around to his friends like she was some new shiny toy he had bought.
On the night she was meant to leave, they had got into a terrible row. Chris had suddenly declared that they needed “space’ and decided it would be best if they maintained physical and emotional boundaries. Tina was livid. After spending two months treating her body as his wonderland. She clearly felt used. “Your nothing but an asshole! You just used me!” she screamed lividly at him, as hot tears of realisation poured down her face. Chris moved toward her and started apologising, he embraced her and started stroking her hair and kissing her. In the process, he pushed her onto the mattress on the floor.
In one swift motion, he yanked her track pants off. “Hey, what are you doing?” Tina asked uncomfortably. Chris didn’t stop. He held her arms down and told her to relax. “This, isn’t funny. Get off me” said Tina more forcefully this time, still squirming under him. Chris’s breath started coming in ragged excited breaths as he took his pants off. Tina could barely hear it, over the sound of her heart beating wildly in her ribcage. Its only when Tina felt something brush against her inner thighs, that she started screaming hysterically. “STOOOOOP IT, GET OFF ME”
Chris jolted by her screaming, and conscious of the fact that someone might hear her from his tiny airless, one-bedroom flat, jumped to up on his feet and hastily pulled his pants back on. Tina sat up dazed, trying to process what had happened. Chris in a brisk and business-like manner looked her straight in the eyes and with a small smirk said “ Now you know, what happens when you don’t listen to me, I told you we needed space.” “Besides, I was just pranking you, I didn’t mean anything by it” he added as a casual afterthought. The next hour passed with her just sitting crossed-legged on the floor, until it was time for her to leave for the airport.
Though it was 3 am, and she was in a strange city, Tina was happy to be taking the auto ride to the airport alone. Chris had said that he had a bad “back” and couldn't possibly accompany her to the airport, “but don't worry ill be with you on the phone the entire time.” he added thoughtfully because he was caring like that.
Tina found she was self gaslighting. “ Did this really happen to me?” she wondered. When she landed on familiar soil, she went home, had a hot shower, and cried herself to sleep. Though she didn't feel quite herself the next few days and was extremely shaken, Tina quietly locked the memory into a black box in her head and simply threw the key away.
It would be months later, when in therapy for something else that she would haphazardly open this box to her therapist and narrate the whole ordeal.
“Tina, you know this counts as sexual assault, right? the therapist would ask, concerned. “ Whaaaat, no!” Tina would say. “It's not like, I was actually violated physically,” Tina said defensively. “I can't compare what I went through, to something like a Syrian sex slave, who is kidnapped by members of ISIS and gang-raped every day. That's sexual assault! That's ‘real’ pain.” Tina would say, almost hysterically. She would storm out of her session and refuse to talk about this anymore. Tina would spend a lot of her time being mad. Mad at herself for not fighting back. For not giving Chris a black eye before she left. Mad at God. Mad at the world in general.
It would be almost one and a half years later before she would really make peace with it. Where one evening, lying on the chest of a good man. A man she truly loved, and whom she knew loved her, watching the evening sunset. She would look into his eyes and say “I need to tell you something.”
Though her voice would quiver slightly she would tell his man the whole story, watching her reflection in his hazel eyes, which were growing slightly moist as she finished her story. Once she was done with her story. He didn’t threaten to hunt Chris down and beat him up. “The world is filled with creeps” he would say. He held her in a tight embrace and said “Tina, more than anything, you need to forgive YOURSELF for what happened. It wasn't your fault. It's okay that you didn't fight back. It's okay that you didn't give him a black eye. Sometimes courage isn't the lack of fear, but the ability to move forward in spite of fear.”
That day Tina chose to liberate herself. She forgive herself for what had happened.
I write this, because, like me, I’m sure all of you have this art gallery in your heads. Some with several portraits. Some lucky enough to have none. Some, so fresh you can smell a coat of varnish off them or some so old that it is hard to even know what they represent except a dull memory that aches now and again.
