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"siren", tori amos |
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I wrote a post in here a good couple of weeks ago about a young girl who had gotten raped a couple of streets away from my apartment in New York. She was not an anomaly, and according to the statistics, there have been many many more since that night that she was attacked and savagely beaten. I didn't unfilter the post because most of it felt preachy and I'm not in much of a position to be making judgment calls on life or the universe or anything in it, honestly. I didn't unfilter it because it was painfully true and for the first time I felt like I had something valid to say, which for whatever reason made me filter it. There was a follow-up article this morning, which I don't often see, something to let those who had seen the one before it, seen the article about the 13-year-old girl and her pink handbag and wondered how she was and if she would come out alright, something to let us know that she's doing better, that she pulled through fine, that in time the scars on her face and body won't be as noticeable. But as cliché as it sounds, there's emotional damage that doesn't heal the same way a lot of things do.
Here is the original post. It's long, so be warned before you click the cut.
( And I've never seen Barbados, so I must get out of this. )
And this morning there was the tiniest of an article about her, a little breath of an article in The New York Times, and I went to church as though it'd help. On some level it helped relieve me of my guilt, the guilt of in the end being so very incapable of helping another human being. The questions come: if you're walking down a street and you hear someone call for help, how much will the diffusion of responsibility prevent you from helping another human being? There are a hundred ways to cry for another human being but sometimes there is only one way to help.
"13-year-old [name omitted], who was admitted to the hospital nearly thirty days ago, is resting comfortably at home, her guardians report." No mention of her pink handbag or pressing charges, but the article became a human interest piece, mentioning her love of Harry Potter and Ashlee Simpson, and in the midst of a dehumanizing experience she ceased to be a statistic and she became a person, and sometimes when there are too many numbers, I forget that every number has a name, a fingerprint, a mother and a father, a faith or a lack thereof, a favorite book or a favorite movie, a hair color and an eye color, and at one point in their lives they were children and they too put too many things into their mouths. And the optimist and the dreamer and the idealist in me wants to believe that there are days when we can clear aside numbers and discover names and histories and people.
If I had a thought in my head of how to do it, I'd change the world. But as it is I don't mind this one so much. How trivial to think, how odd to bring it down to so small a level, but that girl is a far far greater man than I am, Gunga Din, to have what we as women are told to value highly ripped from her fragile body, her face irrevocably changed, and to sit peacefully in her room a month later and read Harry Potter. For as long as I live, every time I see a pink handbag, I'll wonder if she ever got herself another one, or if this time around she went for key lime.
I want the strength to always remember that no matter how badly I think life has beaten me down, you can kill it back with kindness and the recognition that the world, for all its nastiness and brutality and banality, has so many gifts to give in so many ways, be they a kiss, a butterfly, a really good sandwich, a letter tucked into a jacket you haven't worn for years left by someone now long gone from life, or just a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
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dominczyk's journal