#42
On the Perfect Victim
Heat pools densely in my belly, as blood runs to the surface. Flushed auburn and cherry-red, skin singed with anger, I choose laughter over tears.
Eartha Kitt in All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story (1982) dir. Christian Blackwood.
As I ruminate, babe, in a stranger’s apartment, the pain feels paramount. In the midst of nite, mine voice echoes from these here four walls; plain, undecorated, peeling-at-the-edges. I can’t sleep. Recalling my parents’ bedroom - moons before Death, babe - bankers’ boxes and broadsheet newspapers stand piled high in the pitch dark, forming human figures of differing scales. The guttural rumble of my Father’s snore forbids me to set beyond the door.
I’ve lauded before ad nauseam, in frilly prose and floral poetry, upon love, longing and loneliness. Staring deeply into de Palma’s eyes, glassy and forgiving, I feel and know that that all-consuming yearning stems from a youth imbued by neglect, reluctantly so. As an antidote to that alienation, angel, I witness a pattern of ‘becoming the other’; falling into a lover, urgent and true, no matter how soul-stripping.
Within these letters to you, dear darling, I have done my utmost to unravel that thread concisely; with tact and cryptic humility. In the month of August, stressed and frenetic, I no longer hold the desire to be kind. Back outstretched on a soft bed - late into Summer - I examine the dappled texture of a lover’s ceiling, as dusk gently blankets the bedroom. “I’ve spent so much time trying to rationalise that behaviour,” I tell him.
I often wonder, reader, whether I’ve done the right thing. Behaved correctly, like a good girl; suffered in the way that I should have. “You’ve learned your lesson now,” she tells me as I stare ahead, high. I recall gesturing to a blood-soaked Carrie (1976) in the many weeks since, naively professing to her waif, drenched frame, “I am finally ready to close this chapter.” If only I were to remind myself that grief is never linear, and anger will always persist.
Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Awaara (1951) dir. Raj Kapoor.
I’ve begun, belatedly, to better understand the trope of the ‘perfect victim’. ‘Victim’: a word which I have never once used to describe myself, and feel hesitant to immortalise on paper. To be the ‘perfect victim’ is a fallacy in and of itself. To respond appropriately, with dignity, patience and grace, is difficult in ways which I cannot describe to you. I realise, reader, that this response is deeply gendered.
Throughout these, now, over eight months since-the-severed-limb, I have continually doubted my own experience. In letters and phone calls, in a teary-eyed embrace lit by a flickering television, as the snout of a greyhound butts my knee, I have endlessly questioned whether I’m telling the truth. This disbelief, it seems, is compounded by near decade-long emotional coercion.
A silk-bound princess close to my heart stands in the studio in the late hour. Hands gently clasped around a cup of water, she listens intently as I demonstrate gaslighting. From my desk, flooded with print editions, a prayer candle and holy water, I retrieve a greeting’s card. “Watch this,” I tell her. Holding the card in front of her face, I throw it to her feet. The card clumsily spins through the air as it catches the dust-covered floor. A corner audibly taps the floorboard, denting slightly.
Eyes boring into hers, I ask, “What did I just do?” She responds, tentatively, “You threw that card on the floor.”
“No I didn’t,” I demonstrate. She nods, silently.
Anna Biller as Viva in Viva (2007) dir. Anna Biller.
I have become, babe, to the alarm of friends and colleagues, fixated on love. Its definition, its physiological identifiers, its truth. In trying to understand it, I sourced a book which felt divinatory. It has struck my gut profoundly, and feels as though it was placed betwixt mine palms by an almost-angel, knowingly. All About Love, by American author bell hooks, is a text I’ve wished to read for many years, yet had postponed for fear of it feeling far too pertinent, too troubling to accept.
The book, bound in red with a well-worn spine, buckled and fraying at the edges, has caused my chest to rise, and my heart to swell.
hooks bases her definition of love on American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s seminal work The Road Less Travelled. Deducing love as a laboured effort which we must nurture daily, hooks illustrates love as conscious act opposed to a subconscious feeling, comprised of many concurrent elements: ‘…care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment… trust… [and] honest and open communication.’ This, dear darling, reaffirms all which I knew to be true, but did not wish to know. While a man can express care and affection, he may not love you. To fuck is not to love. To fear is not to love.
To plan an exit is fraught and desperate.
That rapturous, dizzying pull which we confuse as falling in love - tongue falling from mouth, eyes bulging, babe - is, in fact, ‘cathexis’. Defining by Cambridge Dictionary as ‘the act of directing your mental energy towards a particular person’, ‘cathexis’ is obsessive, unhealthy. In amidst that magnetic compulsion, hooks writes, ‘…individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them.’ A hard ball forms once more in the back of my throat, babe - acidic and bulbous. She continues ‘…we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist.’
I leave you, reader, with a sword to thine heart.
‘Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.’