"I think maturity is accepting duality, accepting contradiction.

People who do bad things are not paskudniks. Do you know what that means?"

It means the worst of the worst.

We all have both parts of us,"

said the rebbitzen

at "Tea and Torah."

in a nice b&b near the beach, a few blocks from my house.

I came once before for the alliteration and the pastries,

but found myself fed by the torah.

I think maybe there is a part of me designed to receive it.

Before I came in, I paced in the garden outside,

on the phone with a friend of the man who assaulted me last summer.

It is still hard for me to say the word assault without flooding the air with caveats--

it was that thing that felt like assault to me, only to me.

Because that night our experience split in 2,

like a tree struck by lightening,

not just his and mine,

but also I.

that night, there were many of me

and one of them is only made of sound.

But I want to go back, back to the beginning,

before last summer,

before i was a child,

before i lived in a body, coiled,

before i lived in 2 bodies, divided

playing stickball on the soft summer streets,

we’d run away.

and in 4 bodies,

we left the ghetto,

left our secrets ground into the dirt floors,

and in 8 bodies we climbed out of the shtetl,

like vines with nowhere left to go

we rose up

above our bodies

just watching

and we crossed oceans

and remember? it felt like we moved through time.

And our people are a people pushed into corners,

backed against walls

and our people fight to find a way to fight.

And I fight

And I fight to remember

And I fight to remember

he is human.

And we are human,

And in 16 human bodies,

I imagine it began.

I imagine it began,

with the kazaks

heavy boots, soft earth

and we were crushed

under their horses,

and hands,

and bodies,

and languages we couldn’t understand.

and the earth was infected.

Rape is

a parasite

a pathogen,

carried on the backs of shame,

scurried on ships, riding across oceans,

it climbs into the bodies of our children,

an old illness of old oppression,

in our clean new homes.

And rape

is a weight,

sewn, with our ancestors’ tailors’ hands, into the insides of our skin,

passed on like a valuable hidden in wartime,

like the only way to survive.

And assault is a language,

a way of speaking.

And last summer, it spoke to me,

and it said,

I don't believe you exist.

I AM HERE

I AM HERE AND YOU WILL SEE ME.

And we will see each other.

I don't believe there is anything that matters

inside your body,

Inside my body is the clawing of life across the earth

just a body.

Inside my body is the curve of trees and the space between them.

To me, you are only skin.

Under my skin is the arch of sand stained by the rush of winter, so I know the ocean rocks with the sadness of what is lost, but is still open.

The rebbitzen said,

the ocean represents torah.

But I know that before judaism,

Ocean was the power of the

darkness of the

womb.

And we hold this hollowed power in our bodies

and we live there when we are afraid.

And the rebbitzen said,

But Hashem said,

"just go forward. don't even pray."

And Moses split Ocean in two.

And I am ocean.

Ocean has no skin.

And I wrote letters

to the man from last summer,

demanding he change.

“The thing is, he lost the letter,” says his friend, on the phone. “You know how he is always forgetting things.”

“Yea,” I said. And I am too.

And last summer, my grandma, we poured into the ocean,

but what of the part of her that was torn from her body,

not just when she was raped,

but when she raped my father?

I think that, without body, she is made of (unsaid) sounds,

I think they fill my mouth, like food, when I cry or remember,

and I think there is a part of me designed to receive them.

Rape is a ghost that lives inside us,

through us,

without wings,

without skin,

without song,

without sound

without memory.

And I am here to remember.

And Hashem said “just go forward. don’t even pray.”

So we went forward, but our hearts flew away.

They became birds,

and I became a rush of bones

a person without flesh,

a person, who,

without flesh, cannot exist,

so, not existing,

I went home

I looked for home.

and I came to the Ocean.

And I wrote letters.

And I send them again, when they are lost.

I go forward.

I don't even pray.

And the ghosts still swim in my belly,

just fish in the bottom of the deep, open ocean,

So I swim alongside them.

We swim to

survive without shame,

like the summer.

It is summer again,

when mangoes and sunlight make music

in my body,

hollowed and hallowed and whole.