Thanks, Jesse.

It took me two days to report my rape and three more to get to Victim Services. In the office, Michelle bustled around, looking up business cards. “It’s your legal right,” she said, “to get reimbursed from this fund for any bills. Counseling, to a certain point. Work missed because of effects of the assault.”  While she was away at the filing cabinet, I leaned over her desk to peer at my file. Jesse Young, it said. So they had been to his house. It was the first time he had a last name for me.

Next to his name, the box had already been checked: prosecution denied.

I reported on a Saturday night. I was supposed to go straight from work to a wedding. Instead, I waited in the empty police station until a young officer escorted me across the street into the court building. There, we stared at each other in a too-big room.  He didn’t know what to make of me. I had every detail down.

“I have never taken testimony from someone with such a specific memory,” he said.

I nearly laughed out loud.

In the tub, pressed against the edge until my neck bled, I’d ascended above myself for a split second. Watched myself, the girl in the pool. Then some part of me hissed, “Get the fuck back in there.”

You will remember everything, I told myself. You must remember everything. It will be all you have.

And did. I told the cop evenly, carefully, without hope. Watched him blink at points at the language I had to use telling it.

At the end, he put his notebook down quietly. “Why did you report this?” he said. “Two days after. You’ve showered. There’s going to be little we can do.”

“So you will go to his house,” I said. “I know nothing will happen. I knew that before. But I want him to open his door to the police. I want him to be fucking scared.”  The cop nodded.  “He deserves a policeman at his door.”

“Okay,” the officer said. He looked at me evenly, with something like respect. “That’s all.”

He gave me the brochure for Victim Services. The next week, I found Michelle, in the office with yellow walls, sarcastic and sad as she recommended therapists specializing in “this sort of thing.” She was the first person to tell me what I needed to do.  The Community Safety Network. Western Wyoming Family Planning.  A plan: relief. Then she gave me more than that.

“It’s a shit, isn’t it?” she said, all of a sudden. “Wyoming law. It’s archaic.”

“I’d have been better off on my college campus,” I admitted.

“Yes, you would have,” she said. She slipped a rubber band around the brochures. “And when you take your six-month HIV test, you know what you can say? Thanks, Jesse. When you can’t sleep at night. When you’re trying to explain this to your next lover. Thanks, Jesse.” She was grinning. There was an edge to her that was almost hysterical.

“When I have to see his friend at work,” I said.

“Thanks, Jesse!” she shouted, grinning giant and fake. “You should make a fucking shirt,” she said, and then we were laughing, holding the desks.

“Coca-cola lettering, that’s what I’m picturing,” I said, through tears, grinning, crying. “Thanks, Jesse.”

“Yeah. Big fucking thanks for this,” Michelle said. Then, “C’mere, hon,” and her hug was giant and warm, and the last one I’d feel for a long time.

I meant to go back there. She was such a comfort to me. But I never did. At Western Wyoming Family Planning, I tried to tell them what I needed and burst into tears. The receptionist, unsure of herself, guided me into the back room. I peed in a cup, took deep breaths. When I came out, she told me the tests would be free, and gave me a big box of Trojans. They sat in the car that whole year; as though if I were raped again, I could at least get them to use a condom.

“Thanks, Jesse,” I said quietly, in my car.

Alice Sebold wrote something like, “Rape is that which ruins everything.” Since I heard it, I’ve never been able to find the quote. There are days when I am less lenient with myself. When I tell myself, you could have fought harder. You could have climbed that fence. You could have kicked him in the goddamn junk. Then, out of nowhere, I taste what is ruined. Last week, the man I sleep with leaned over me without a condom. I asserted myself once, then twice. On the third time, I burst into tears, and he lay back aghast, apologizing profusely.

It’s not you, I tried to say.

I thought it was hot when you asserted yourself, he said.

Even aware of my history, there’s no way he could have known. There’s no way I could have known.

The body carries stories sewn into its skin, pulped into the organs, traced onto the lines of its limbs.  Rape is that which ruins everything, secretly, in sudden ways. Out of nowhere, the feeling rushes in: you asshole. How could you doubt. You were raped.

It’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I’ve been silent, thinking of what to say. The month slowly ticked by. 1 in 4 of us—if not goddamn more—do not want to think about it. But it lives in our bodies. We give thanks, from time to time. We lift up our hands. We live the giant Fuck You.

Chiricahua.

Before me, long red and green cliffs stagger out of the dusty mountains.  Beside me, emerald hummingbirds zag under greening trees. In my hand, a cold Hefeweizen homebrew.

I am in heaven: Portal, Arizona.

The last time I was in Arizona, I was nineteen, studying the border with a class. We went down in a big white van to the migrant centers in Agua Prieta and Nogales. We interviewed the Border Patrol, slept in the slums.  I drank a lot of cheap, sugary coffee out of styrofoam cups and fumbled through in Spanish.

On the last day, we drove the stretch of desert where so many die, thinking of the men we’d met.  As we stepped into showers in Tucson, they were creeping north of Sasabe. They were hiding from Border Patrol in the brush. They were sipping Coke bottles filled with water, trying to make them last. And they were hoping they could keep their children from starving.  NAFTA had razed the economies of southern Mexico; in many villages, they told us, the only option was to leave.

The men I met were lawyers, psychologists. They would take work picking stawberries or digging trenches. Maybe they would be deported. Or maybe they would die before they got there.

This time—six years later—I am walking around the loveliest garden, waiting for a wedding. There will be local Arizona wine and a sandwich bar. There will be women in floral dresses laughing and fixing each other’s hair. Around me, trees bend with fresh spring leaves. In ways, it seems impossible that I’m so close to that border.

But I am.

I got into Tucson late last night, past ten-thirty, and drove the rental car blindly east.   I played games with myself to see how far I could make it before pulling over to sleep. “After I’m off the interstate,” I said aloud.  I dreamed of a pullout with a flat patch of ground, where I could throw down a tarp and sleeping pad and crawl into my bag.  But once I turned south onto 80, a slow uneasiness grew in me: I knew what this landscape held. Once, twice, then a third time, I passed the parked cars of Border Patrol. The place was crawling with them. Saw a flashlight in a field. Watched a van idling on a side road—loading or unloading?

All this time, the fear in me grew. I thought of coyotes, those brutal human smugglers. I thought of the drug cartels sending runners through this passage. It was two in the morning, and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to sleep in the desert.

So I went all the way. I took the hooking righthand road toward Portal and watched the cliffs of the Chiricahua rising out of the darkness. The moonlight was strong. Hares darted across the road: conejos, I remembered. I scanned the radio and found some bad country. Turned it way up.

When I got to the Forest Service entrance—Cave Creek—the sign, brown and in all caps, read: “TRAVEL CAUTION: SMUGGLING AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY BE ENCOUNTERED HERE.”

And I laughed maniacally. “Okay. Fine.” There was no way around it.

It was Easter weekend. There wasn’t a camping spot left. At three a.m. I circled every campground twice, then finally parked my car beside an occupied site and bedded down in the back seat. All night I jerked awake, worrying about tickets from the Forest Service, or (!?!) a coyote putting a gun to the window and demanding the car keys.

Needless to say, I was fine.

Here on the porch, it’s hard to feel anything but peace. Cave Creek Ranch is tucked down into the grasses, a circle of stone cottages protected by juniper and cottonwood. Skinny, ruffled-looking deer totter across the lawn.  The front yard is set with linened tables and wedding flowers. I cannot imagine people walking through at night while we sleep.

But when I ask my Arizona friends, they shrug. “It’s a real possibility around here,” they say.  They know that, regardless of what we see, we are in the borderlands. 

I take a walk down the road. Dust kicks up behind me, and the light is golden on the long cliffs. I find myself hating my wild fear. What moves through this desert is not only shadow but people too. They are people who love, who make love, who wipe their childrens’ brows in fever. They have passions, talents. They work hard. They are people fighting to live. I have spoken to them before.

I stop in the sun. Hands out. Heat collects in my palms. I hold the contradiction as it twists and moves through me: Coyote. Smuggler. Immigrant. And This gentle land. Nourishment. Oasis.  I am cradled by desert heat. By secret streams. I become quieter and quieter.

Then I know that the fear I feel is only my inability to understand all things at once.

Why I Buy Expensive Food.

The man at the credit card swipe laughs when he sees me back. “Already?” he says.

“Another forty.” I sheepishly hand him my card.

It’s the third Farmer’s Market of the season, and I’m hungry for the rows of white tents, the bags of baby kale, the sweet boys with the new hummus stand. “I always thought I hated shopping,” I tell the man. “Turns out what I hated was malls.”

The machine hums, spits out paper. “You want a receipt?” he asks, tearing off the end.

“No,” I said, “no record of this, please.” We grin at one another as he hands me $40 in Market Bucks.

“Don’t spend it all in one place, now.”  I heft my heavy bag onto my shoulder and head back into the crowd.

If I were spending this money anywhere else, I might feel sick.  Buying a full tank of gas gives me palpitations. I’ve put off replacing gear until it’s a detriment to my health. But cheap as I can be, I’ve learned that handing over bills can be a pure sort of joy when it directly nourishes my community.

In a capitalist society, money is power.  I don’t love this, but I recognize its relevance.  The money we spend as individuals creates markets.  Markets facilitate the allocation of resources. To me this means: Where will our water go? What options for work will our neighbors have? How will we use our land?  What industries will governments support as essential?  “Allocation of resources,” despite sounding vague and sterile, means everything.

I am not a person who makes much money, but I am very aware of the small power it holds. I know that if I buy a cheap plastic product from Target, I am ensuring that certain vile environmental and labor practices continue. With my dollar, I’m voting for globalization.  I’m throwing my weight behind large tracts of agricultural and wild land turning into parking lots.  And, by default, I am not voting for certain things: Artisans. Local commerce. The creativity of my own community.

It’s a sunny day at the Farmer’s Market, and everyone is beginning to shrug off their fleeces. I walk the long rows of booths pricing spinach, coveting the local wine, trying bits of gluten-free brownie on toothpicks.  I find myself buying from as many different booths as possible; feeling like an ally to all these farmers and artisans, I have trouble choosing one over the others. 

When I hand over my Market Bucks at last, I always vote for something specific. This booth, it’s Farmer John’s pleased, humble face as I buy another bag of his locally-grown, self-ground flour.  I know I am helping him live a life he has built. I am supporting open space:  this Niwot farm, at least, won’t sell out to a subdivision.  I am purchasing flour that required almost no gas to get to its end location. And most importantly, when I buy his flour, it makes it more likely that local flour will continue to be an option for everyone—even those who don’t yet know that local flour exists.

It’s impossible to bring up local, organic, and fair trade products without someone mentioning price. And price is, indeed, the point.  It would be easy to walk around the Farmer’s Market and sneer, “Eight bucks for a glass jar of tomatoes?  That’s ridiculous!”  And of course, if you’re used to standing in the aisles of King Soopers digging up seventy-cent cans, it would seem so.  To me, what’s relevant is how few costs are externalized. In other words, most (if not all) costs of that Farmer’s Market jar of tomatoes are paid for up front. There’s no river that needs to be rehabilitated because of pesticide runoff. There are no poorly-paid workers on Medicaid or utilizing the local soup kitchen. The tomatoes—by requiring less gas for cultivation and transportation—do not fuel international, oil-based conflicts.  There’s no energy spent to recycle an aluminum can—the glass jar just gets washed out and used again.  Industrial tomatoes are not actually cheaper; we just pay the costs in a different way.

It’s time to be more creative in how we think about price. As a society, we currently spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any past culture.  To some, this looks like freedom. To me, it feels like chains. In search of a cheap “price” up front, we’re leaving wreckage on all sides—costs we do have to pay sooner or later.

The idea is relevant to more than food: clothes, furniture, cleaning products. Here in Boulder, it’s easy. I buy my candles from the hands that make them. Boulder is a place where these markets are strong because there are lots of us willing to use our dollars in exactly the way I describe.  But even in communities less robust than Boulder, there are ways to use a dollar to create the world you want to see.

For starters, choose used over new, local over industrial. This simple move minimizes the resources necessary to create and transport the product. Next, ask for organic and Fair Trade if your local vendors don’t carry them yet. You could be the one who creates the market your neighbors will support. Last, buy from locally-owned businesses. Attend art fairs.  Your neighbors—no doubt following their own dreams at financial risk—will appreciate it. And if you really can’t afford to buy everything organic or local, do what you can. A vote for ethical industries with some of your dollars is certainly better than none.

When I leave the last booth, saddlebags sagging with groceries, a vendor calls out behind me, “Thanks for being such a supporter!” I have to smile. Maybe I’m a little over-excited when it comes to the Farmer’s Market, but I also can’t think of a better way to use my own limited, precious resources.

Curious how externalized costs work? Check out this easy-to-grasp video through the Story of Stuff Project. It’s not food-specific, but it’s a great introduction to thinking about the often-unseen costs of modern life.

Compost.

It’s mid-afternoon, and everything is broken. Beneath the sink, the maintenance guy grunts. Then the sound of water. “Oh shit,” he says, “do you have another bucket?”  I grab the trash can, jimmy it under the counter. He lets out a long breath.

For months the drain has barely been working, and this time even Drano didn’t help.  I’ve had stacks of dishes and a sink full of smelly, stagnant water for a good week. It makes it hard to live well, in my opinion. Rot is conducive only to rot.

The maintenance guy gets up, takes the can of water to my bathroom sink. He dumps it. “Your sink in here is slow too, you know that?” he says.

“No.”

“Well, you’re not usually pouring giant buckets of water in it, I imagine.” He tips the rest into the toilet. Flushes.

When he heads out, I am relieved. It's a start. The dishes are not washed yet but they will be. The trash is sitting in a tiny bag in the middle of the floor but I will take it out.  I’ll beat you yet, rot, I think.

In the spirit, I grab the compost and swing out of the house. The composter is in back, a a simple black plastic bin against the fence, far enough from the patio that no one will have to smell it.  It’s something I bought myself last winter. I was lonely for the soil.  I didn’t like to think of my scraps being hauled away to some city warehouse, where I’d lose track of how they were doing. Still, too often I stall in bringing them down.

It’s grey out, with the threat of rain.  I pull the lid off, then smile. Green shoots peek out of the slag. When I prod them with my rake, I can tell: half an onion, sprouting.  A couple of rotting potatoes, new arms thick and purple, sending leaves into the air.  I thank them. They are small miracles.

Then I dig the rake into the compost, begin to turn. In places it’s black, close to soil. In places it’s slime and leaves.  I start at the edges and work my way into the packed middle. I comb up a corncob. Spill over, finally, the bag of barley from Erik’s first homebrew. Something in me shifts. I stop. I know what I am touching.

In this bin, the weight of a year. What is thick, heavy, wet. Bitter fighting. A salad half-eaten, the day my blood poisoned. What went to mold while I slumped in a hospital bed. The meal on the table the night he said No, I’m not attracted to you anymore. Tomatoes gone bad as we avoided the house. And cabbages let rot while I sat outside in late summer, cupping white wine, mourning him.

A tentative wind kicks up. I dig in again.

Become something, I ask the compost quietly. Please become something.

Upstairs, rot is conducive to rot. I push the sour edges of my life into a jar and sweep them out. But down here, the hurts sit, given their time.  For a long while they look only like what they are.  Then slowly, the smell fades. They break themselves over into something else.

I am getting close. I can taste the soil without touching it.  This will, again, become life. After the rotting is complete. After the mold takes over.  What breaks us is our beginning. I have to believe that.

Springtime.

I have a computer in my body.

It folds out of my breast like a pack of cigarettes in a back pocket. Eventually I’ll be worn in. Its wired edges press up beneath my skin. Its intelligence clicks inside me.  I am metal warmed by blood. I am blood woken by metal.

It roots down, with a long arm, into the center of my hot-beating heart.

This week the seatbelt grates over it. The skin presses onto the wires. The wires eat up into the skin.  Some itching is normal, my doctor said. He also said Careful, they can saw their way through, and then we have trouble.  I cup my hand over the box. I try not to feel where it pushes.

Trouble. I’ve had enough.

It’s springtime. I drive past the hospital most mornings on my way to work. There are cheery flower planters. I stare at the third floor. It’s almost been a year. I do not feel safe. In my nose, the smell of saline. We’ll do a flush. Then the heparin. Then a flush. Keep your IV clean.  I clutch my arm protectively. Out the window, rotting soil struggles to life. There were five steps to the bathroom. I cried out as I dragged my IV stand. I shook and swayed with the pain. Saw shapes instead of men. You have to eat, they said, but I could feel only my own bones.

Then slowly, the passing of something I couldn’t name.

I sleep curled beside a window. The old tree, giant and wordless, leans over the bed.  Some mornings I wake full of sweetness. The stars are in me, the thick ancient blankets.  Then some mornings, darkness. The winds surge, wild and slippery, into my veins. I wake wide-eyed knowing Death.  He sniffs at my clotted organs. He knots his tongue around the wires and threatens to pull. I do not plead but lie silent. Long ago he claimed me for his own.

It’s springtime. I run my fingers across the scar again.  I think about thick wire slipping through skin. Red pulp. The insides of me aching to join the outsides.

Put your lips here, upon the wire.  Understand.  To love me, you must also love death.

Why Guinness Makes My Heart Hurt.

Downtown, in a pub alone, fingering the scratched wood table. At the front of the room, a longhaired man sets up a wobbly microphone, drags cords to the amp.  I’m having a Guinness and waiting to play.  And, like the nerdiest blogger on the planet, I’m drafting this by hand.

The Guinness tastes thin and sour. All winter I’ve been holed up at little breweries drinking thick, creamy stouts fresh from the barrel, and this just isn’t cutting it. What’s funny is I never liked Guinness to begin with. It’s something I’ve trained myself to get through; something that does, I admit, taste good on its own from time to time now. But that’s not how it started.

My first Guinness was in Golden, about a year ago, at a pizza place on the main drag with a big wood rail out front. Erik and I’d stopped there on our way home from Colorado Springs, hoping to redeem a trip that had been (frankly) not fun at all.  Settled into our table, we were discussing drinks when he figured it out. “Never?” he said. “You’ve never tried one?” His eyes were huge. “That’s it. I’m buying you your first Guinness. You’ll love it.”

At that point we’d been together just over a year and a half, and things were rocky. He was traveling too much. I’d been unemployed too long. That weekend, we’d gone down to take care of a workaholic friend in the Springs, but en route discovered Erik was in arguably worse shape: a pink eye full of crust, explosive sinuses, and some resulting heart palpitations. (What an underappreciated joy it is to not feel your own heartbeats!  He was fine, but it never stopped being scary.) We stayed the weekend anyway, thinking I could take care of two patients at once, but the weekend wound up soggy with whining and Kleenex; the gas was hardly worth its cost. Erik barely left bed and Makendra wrote endless press releases, and at one point I took the cat outside and put my head against the house and wept.

So do I even have to tell you the Guinness tasted sour and thin to me then, too?  Without thinking, I made a face—and watched Erik’s fall.

For whatever ways he drove me crazy, Erik loved nothing better than to share with me. Picture the two of us propped in bed like twin bookends, reading.  Picture us running errands, hand in hand; picture us chopping endless vegetables for curry. Whether or not I wanted to share something (you should probably laugh here), I usually ended up trying. He was the king of cajoling, impatient and excited, insistent upon my presence. We’d go to fancy dinners and eat half our plate, then pass it across the table to the other. We even shared a towel.

One was always enough: one schedule, one meal, one heart.

Except when it wasn’t. The problem was, we were terrifically different people.  Sharing an organic chicken was one thing. Sharing everything else—evening hours, tight quarters, vacation time, friends—was quite another.  Over time, our needs backed up. So few were being met.  But we held each other and pretended it wasn’t true.

All that spring the pressure built and hissed out the jagged edges. There was never enough time. There was never enough energy to do everything we wanted.  The night of the Guinness, we fought in the restaurant. He hadn’t even wanted to go, he told me. I hadn’t made him, I said. We loved each other too much to just say it:  we were desperate to do things together, but we didn’t want to do the same things. 

What he was ecstatic to share with me, I snubbed. And when I pulled at him--well, he got anxiety.

A long time ago I told myself, Nobody else is going to live in your body with you.  That didn’t stop me from trying.  Only when he left did my body know its own limits again. It cried out. The bed was cold. The kitchen was blank where his pans had hung.  I missed my third and fourth hands.

And yet, I was obligated to nothing. I never had to pretend to be excited. I spent my evenings wandering the neighborhood as dusk fell, ate meals without production, saw only the friends I cared most about. To be desperately lonely was actually to be free.

           

In the dim pub, I drink my Guinness. I watch skinny men lean against posts, staring at the baseball game. I watch the hodge-podge musicians show up with their long cases. It is somewhat incredible to me that I can drink a Guinness at all. That I can ignore, even for a moment, the worst sadness I’ve known: to love and fail. 

We would have done anything for one another. But the anything we picked would always be wrong.

Sex-Positivity 101.

     "We always have this idea that sex needs something to redeem it.” 

-Charlie Glickman, Good Vibrations

“I’m a Sex Positive Sex Educator"

SexTech Conference 2011, San Francisco, CA

I’ve been developing my understanding of what it means to be sex-positive for several years now. But today I heard the best description I’ve gotten yet.

In the Gold Room at the Stanford Court Renaissance Hotel, perched atop Nob Hill in downtown San Francisco, Charlie Glickman of the Good Vibrations Sex Shop gave us his run-down.  Here’s the quick version: We live in a sex-negative culture. We’re taught that sex is bad:  inherently dangerous, sinful, dirty, and—most importantly—shameful. The only way that sex can be redeemed is through procreation, marriage, or love.

Some sex acts are good, some sex acts are bad. In other words, when we’re being sex-negative, we judge the what and who rather than the how and why.  People who engage in certain activities are simply less worthy—regardless of the actual effects on that person.

Which acts was Charlie talking about? Anal sex, of course. Oral sex. Open relationships. Group sex. Same-sex sex. Sex without relationships. BDSM. Masturbation. Sex toys.

“As long as there have been people, there have been these types of sex,” Charlie said. “What changes is how many people engage in them, how we talk about it, and what the ramifications are.” In the U.S., some sex acts—acts which are often ignored in other countries—can lead to arrest, job loss, humiliation, or even a loss of child custody.  In a sex-negative culture, there’s an obsession with whether or not something is “normal”—and an endless interest in policing others’ sex lives.

So what about sex-positivity, then? Is this the view that all sex is good?

Not necessarily, said Charlie.

Sometimes people who’ve been constrained too tightly by social boundaries want to destroy the boundaries altogether.  “This isn’t healthy either,” Charlie said. “In fact, the healthiest people I’ve met are people who have very specific boundaries, know them, and can communicate them.”

In other words, a sex-positive view moves the emphasis back to the how and why.  Is someone having sex because they feel like they have to, or because they’re looking for attention? Are they having sex to keep a relationship from ending? Are both parties consenting? Are they comfortable with the activity? Are they preventing STIs and unintended pregnancy? Have they communicated about their preferences and boundaries?  Are they having fun?

Charlie says the cornerstones of sex positivity are pleasure, consent, and well-being.  It makes sense. Sex without consent is not pleasurable. Sex without pleasure does not contribute to a person’s well-being. And sex that does not contribute to your well-being (or your partner’s) is just like anything else in that category: a problem.  We all deserve to be well.

Of course it is important to ask questions about sex. Of course there are ways that sex can be unhealthy. But damaging sexual experiences do not come solely from stigmatized activities, and the behaviors we like to consider normal—like vaginal sex between a heterosexual married couple—have caused their fair share of pain.  To be sex positive is, at heart, to believe that what works for an individual is most important. 

Sex needs no redemption.

I say: Cheers to that.