10.10.03 2:52 pm

met a friend last night for girl chat. a fairly new friend in her early 20's and we instantly clicked and so decided to have a girl night powwow. talking over popcorn and kitties, we told our stories and i can't seem to shake it today. her story is haunting me.

this old soul of a girl was sexually brutalized by her grandfather from at least the age of three, and then it continued with her brother until she was sixteen. and through it all she made sure to protect her younger sister, hiding her in rooms to keep her from his suffocation. even when she ran away, she made sure to return to the house every afternoon when her sister came home from school to protect her. at sixteen she was raped by a stranger on a bus, and told to keep quiet about it by her mother, who had her own history of incest and abuse. the day after her rape she fled for good when she learned her brother was returning home from out-of-state school.

her brother is now in prison for attempted kidnapping with a knife. they found notebooks full of his explicitly detailed plans of what he wished to do to his victims.

she has been in therapy and on different medication for five years.

there was a shorthand in our talk, to speak of that place. the place that exists in the black shiver of waking from sleep to find yourself invaded, the weight on your chest closing off breath, body limp against mindscream, the yearn to be swallowed by cool dark.

i listened to the control in her voice, each carefully thought out syllable steadily ennunciated. the need to command her 'now', her distance from the past still carried so close. the flux between knowledge and the understanding of that knowledge: this does not define us.

she has kneaded this stretch of pliant earth into rock wisdom by the sharp heaviness of her existance.

and yet, she flies with the spirit of music.

and has learned to find prayer in thunder.