Blunt Force Trauma by Nina Rockwell
Writer Nina Rockwell gets real about the trauma of abuse and its many colors.
blunt force trauma.
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i stopped believing in redemption. i gave up on the thought of second chances. i survived six years of walking on broken glass having only pale and lifted scars to show for it. having proof only visible in the brightest of lights. by still being able to walk i have proven myself wrong.
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internal bleeding.
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the initial impact, blunt force, leaves the skin red and swollen. within hours the burst blood vessels form an array of shades. black with a purple tint, like dark berries, will appear first.
a bruise is the final stage of force trauma before the breaking of skin. a hematoma, or contusion, is a localized collection of blood outside of its vessel held within tissue.
red: 0-2 days after impact
i had never felt beautiful before, i never felt like i was enough. my body was heavy with sickness, and i covered myself well. my father reminded me often that he resented me. i fell in like with every man who paid any attention to me. older men, those who were supposed to act as my father became the objects of my desire.
he was the only one i didn’t already know. he was twenty, and i was fourteen. he called me baby, too.
i remember the first night we met. i remember his checkered floor. it was just before christmas. we smoked pot, and he laughed at my baggy clothes. i stood with my eyes shifted down. my left foot was in a black square, and my right foot was in a white one. he lifted my grey oversized sweatshirt over my head. beneath it was a small tank top that fell just above the belt holding up my too-big jeans.
he laughed, and ran his dark brown hand across the strip of the pale skin of my belly that wasn’t covered. i was sick, overweight, and scared. only one other man had seen this much of me since my body began to grow and shift from a child’s form to that of a woman. only one man had seen me, and he had laughed as well. he had laughed at my pale skin, my swollen stomach, and my virginity.
my mind slowed. i began to paint a picture behind my eyes. it was wintertime, but even at his most pale he was dark as mud.
our baby would have been the color of dried river clay.
i was scared when he saw my body for the first time. he told me i was prettiest when i was crying. i really thought he loved me back then. it began so easily.
blue/purple: 2-5 days after impact
i have been dreaming about the desert. i am always standing in the kitchen. it is painted a shade of blue i have only ever seen in bruises.
[[be gentle with yourself. it wasn’t your fault. you didn’t know any better.]]
i remember when he introduced me to his cousin. he said cousin hadn’t gotten laid in a while so i should let him fuck me. i objected. he hit me instead of saying anything else. before i had time to speak again a man i’d never met was undressing me. his hands were dark like d’s, but ashy. they looked grey, and they reminded me of sickness. d sat in his la-z-boy, and watched while his cousin raped me. i closed my eyes, and i remember painting the sunrise inside of my eyelids.
as easily as our relationship had begun, it became an ownership of my body.
sunrise used to remind me of hope, now it reminds me of sickness.
[[you were just a child. you couldn’t have known how to stop it.]]
green: 5-7 days after impact
i had been sick my whole life. i bled brown before my period ever started; a side effect of PCOS, the disease i was diagnosed with at age sixteen. my ovaries never formed correctly, so at eighteen when i lost our dried river clay baby i blamed it on my illness. i denied drug use, and i denied his fists being the cause of my sunflower yellow bruises.
i had left. they were fading.
i used to cut myself just to watch myself heal.
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[[why did you go back so many times? why did you go back if he was hurting you so badly?]]
i never thought i was worth feeling any better than i did when i was with him. i deserved the bruises, or so i thought. i knew i would never get anywhere in life if he was a part of it, and my fear of the future was enough to keep me attached to him. i found safety and shelter in my abuse.
[[was he drunk when he hit you?]]
he always had bottles of rum everywhere. i was drunk, too. the abuse coincided with our drinking becoming more extreme. i started doing speed when i was out with my girls. i’d come home spun out, drunk, and messy. he would be drunk and stoned, and he would smack me for not wanting to have sex. i wasn’t interested in sex when i was high on speed. it made me feel like i was going insane.
i never let him come inside me because he never used condoms, and my failing ovaries made it so i couldn’t take birth control. he never came because he said if it wasn’t inside of me it was nowhere at all, and then he would beat me because he didn’t get off. i never did either, but he didn’t care. i was a toy.
[[how many men have sexually assaulted you?]]
it depends on what you consider assault. nine men, and two women have vaginally penetrated me against my will or without my conscious consent. it has happened hundreds of times.
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he used to drive us to edward’s park and make me suck his dick in the front cab of his pickup truck. i puked on him once because he kept shoving my head down harder, and harder. it was the first time I ever puked on someone, and it only happened one other time. the second time was a man named assam. he barely spoke english, and i had done too much cocaine to believe that i could successfully give a blowjob. i puked up the bottle of wine we had drunk at the bar, and the almonds i’d eaten for dinner. he didn’t listen when i told him i wanted to stop. he left me crying on the floor of my living room.
fourth floor.
i snorted the rest of my drugs before crawling, broken, to my bed. i fell asleep in my own blood and wine vomit. this is what a fancy apartment did for me.
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because he made me into his slave my heart was stunted in its growth. i am a child in the body of a woman. i am the deer-in-headlights of the dark back roads of small towns.
because he claimed me as his own before i knew what it meant to claim myself i lost track of learning who i was as a woman, and became accustomed to only knowing myself as his property.
yellow: 7-10 days after impact
i never once believed i was worth anything more than he gave me until i watched the way my body healed itself. watched the black and purple bruises of blood vessels bursting fade to sunflower yellow.
sunflowers reminded me of summertime. summertime directed me to sunrise.
sometimes even now the sunshine feels like sickness.
brown: 10-14 days after impact
i have pieced myself back together. it has taken years of yes and no, presence and avoidance. i still find myself running to hide like a startled child in an aisle covered in shining red tinsel, and miniature santa claus figurines.
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fist to jaw. foot to shin. foot to stomach. never bad enough to hospitalize. hand firmly gripped around wrist. i would tattoo a handprint around my arm to remind myself of what it means to survive. it’s still there, but invisible. the soreness that lingers even after a bruise has completely healed and faded.
this soreness has lasted for years. since the first time he laid a hand on me with malicious intent. He hasn’t left a bruise on me since i was nineteen when i finally had the heart to hit him back. i am older now, and i can still feel his hand on my throat.
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the shadow of a man is tattooed on my brain; on my soul there is a hint of a broken heart. makeup cannot cover what you cannot see. there are no bruises to cover from psychological battery.
as a survivor of physical and sexual abuse bruises remind me of loneliness. i will never forget what it feels like to smear vitamin e oil across the reds, blues, and blacks of my skin to keep my mother from asking questions. how uncomfortable it was to wear long sleeves in the summertime to cover the grabbing marks, and the cuts i inflicted on myself so i could feel some sense of control over my own body.
i have never let a man hit me more than once since i walked away. i learned well, how quickly i could lose sight of the exit sign.
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how do you write about being broken without re-breaking yourself? i have spent more time forgetting about him than i have spent remembering myself.
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Nina Rockwell, the daughter of fate and worry, lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon where she hosts Collide, a monthly showcase of local poetic talent. She has been published in the Portland Community College literary journal, The Pointed Circle. Most of her writing education has come from The Literary Kitchen, Ariel Gore's School for Wayward Writers, and from having two eyes and a heart.
She is currently, and always, writing her story of survival.