From time to time, I use this blog to explore the non-erotic parts of my life. This is one of them. So, a caution: this piece deals with the very upsetting subject of incest. It is not meant in any way to be read as a piece of erotica. Rather, it is an examination of the phenomenon commonly knows as countertransference. (click on the linked word for an explanation of what this is)
The girl sitting in front of me feigns boredom with every fibre of her being. Layers of carefully applied nonchalance in matte powder. Eyes lined with exquisite control. A mouth like a maraschino cherry – sweet and carcinogenic.
I smell on her the curdle of skin kissed by the wrong lips. The mothy pulse pale blue beneath a white throat, trapped and silent, glued in place with guilt and self-disgust, like her dead butterfly eyes. They’re pinned on my corkboard, pretending to read notices for normal people.
She does not want my assistance. To accept would be to acknowledge a flaw. And even the tiniest crack in her armour could presage the splitting open of her entrails. All she has left is the integrity of her facade. There is nothing else. She knows that I know and she hates me for it. Far less painful to be roadkill than to drag herself over to the curb and beg for help.
Perhaps the first time, or the second, or the third, but now the silence has accreted a mile deep crust of spent fluids and frost, of tears dried to salt and other things that turn my stomach.
Unnatural doll. I know what her father, your uncle, your brother – someone – did to her. The rancid scent of it stinks up my office like a suppurating wound, carried on the moist breath of each impassive exhalation.
I try every way I know how to reach her. I’ve temped her with space and food and a small dark burrow, but she’s not a small furry animal. She’s resigned herself to being someone else’s atrocity. And, without even knowing it, she casts me in the same pit.
And I, for all my sins, will not be what she needs. I cannot bend into the model of the mother who didn’t notice, the adult who looks the other way. But it’s the only game she can play. The only game I cannot abide. Until the rage I feel becomes more than me. More than the room can contain. And she has won: she is right. We are all the same.
I can’t stitch up all the rips or mop up the flow of wrongness pouring out of her. I can’t make the bastard take it back, or stop, or pay. She’ll walk out my office the same way she came in. Unhelped, unloved, unwhole.
This distance – this is the only border she has left. And I, seeing that it is indeed the very last border, am not brave or arrogant or sure enough of myself to violate it. I am left with the mute stain of her privacy.
And even as I remind myself that this is not about me, it takes all the control I have not to throw her out the window.
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