Appreciators of Sex and the City deep cuts might recognize Suffern, New York, as the fictional setting for Aidan’s country house, where bonafide city-girl Carrie Bradshaw sees a squirrel and declares she is “suffering in Suffern.” Why Carrie—written to originally be from Connecticut—was so distraught over a squirrel, I’m not sure. But the sentiment of Suffering in Suffern was one I understood immediately.

I am sixteen. He is thirty-four, tall and thin, a dynamic instructor who has been known to jump on his desk when acting out the murder of Polonius in Hamlet, a man whose narrow ties against his starched white shirts look like stained-glass windows. A man who just this year returned from teaching English in Orleans (which, until he says it, I don’t know is pronounced without the s), France and Frankfurt, Germany. A man who drives a two-seater with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. My high school English teacher.

“The violence I had orchestrated left my insides lacking…”

The violence I had orchestrated.

I had orchestrated violence.

Had I orchestrated violence?

I was prepping for a podcast, scanning through my essay collection, Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, when I passed by this sentence. I used to love it. When I read it, I could envision myself as a conductor keeping in time the crumbling of my early womanhood. I’d visualize the rotation of shot glasses, kegs, faceless men, loose pills, and strobe lights blinking in the basement bangers all circling around me like a halo. By putting myself on the conductor’s podium I could pick and choose what parts of my experiences I illuminated to others.

Tall ships lined up like regal ducks in the Delaware outside the floor to ceiling windows of the Rusty Scupper. The lights from Penns Landing illuminated their bulky masts, casting cross-shaped shadows upon the concrete. It was nearly midnight. Two parties hung on for last call: a middle-aged couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and two handsome guys who’d been downing gin and tonics for nearly two hours. Exhausted after a long shift, I looked forward to washing the smoke and liquor off my body and crawling into my bed a few blocks away.

By the first day of grade twelve, I can’t handle living in this shithole town anymore. Summer: a blur of house parties, handsy boys and men, and sleepless nights. I butt my cigarette against the brown brick façade, march into the guidance counsellor’s office and say, “If I can’t finish first term, I quit.” I graduate in January.

Once again, I find myself in a strange place where nobody knows me. I am naked. And drunk on Jack Daniels and fucked up on Quaaludes and coming out of another blackout. The blackouts are coming more frequently now since I am drinking on a daily basis. Because of the blackouts, I’m never sure where I’ll wake up.

Dear child,

It was never your fault.

When your mom left, you were a forgotten consequence, but never the cause. She chose drugs because of her own weakness, not your self-described inadequacies. You were a toddler who lived every moment with a full heart and a pocket full of hope, but she was too far gone to bask in that light.

Dear Scarlett,

I want to tell you not to go to the bar that night. I want to say, “Just stay in with a good book.” But I know you. If I tell you, you'll only be more determined to do it. So get dolled up, go to the bar, listen to the band, and dance your heart out. But listen. Listen when your best friend tells you to stay away from him (they work together and there have been rumors).

Dearest Little Girl,

I didn’t mean to forget you, to push you away for thirty years. I thought I knew you, but it turns out I created memories from photos and stories. I thought you were the happy, smiling child everyone said you were.

It’s a filthy place, the inside of his mind, but I’ve forced myself to wade through the sewage of his thoughts.

He followed me for a block, waiting until we were somewhere with less traffic.

I am cerebral person, I have to think about things, rationalize them, untangle them, for a long time after they happen. Even if it’s torture. Even if it’s pointless.

It never happened at Isaly’s ice cream joint, the first place I waitressed.  

Well, waitressing is probably not the right word for what I did. It was more like order-taking, burger-flipping, shake-making, and plopping-on-the-counter-for-the-customer work. That demanding all-in-one food industry post that so many have as their first or second or forever job. 

It was almost three years ago when I went over to his house. He was a sophomore in college that already lived off campus and that was kind of cool. He was into anime and when I had been the desk manager at the dorm he had lived in the year before that was how we became friends. Kind of. 

Childhood games, such as “boys catch the girls,” taught us how to behave and what to feel about ourselves. It taught us that we are not important unless we are pursued.

It was over a year later that I realized what had happened. It may sound strange to you that I didn’t know it had. Wouldn’t you know if that kind of thing had happened to you? I wasn’t unconscious or inebriated. I remembered that evening, those moments in that room, but I didn’t realize it had happened. Because it wasn’t the kind of thing I was taught about in health class. Instead, I was taught about herpes and genital warts and obesity.

Train station toilets and hospital rooms, especially bed seven, smell the same. Like chlorine and baking soda and coercion and cold. I’m seventeen and I wear my school uniform. No - she wears her school uniform, three layers of khaki and stockings. He wears a suit and carries an umbrella. 

On an August day in 1988 I walked home from my summer job at the Farish Street YMCA. I was fifteen and a freshman in the Lanier High School band. Dressed in shorts and a t-shirt I moved along the sidewalk of Monument Street quick and unresponsive to the honking horns and catcalls from the fluid noon traffic. A man in torn blue jeans walked towards me with a brown bag in hand.  He brought the bag to his lips then howled when he returned it to his side. He looked at me then said,” GOOD STUFF!”

What are you doing?

My brain is foggy, I think my eyes are closed. Yes, they’re closed. He slides his hand down, under my shirt, under my bra.

He thinks I’m sleeping.