Salt

Artwork by Emmylou Hocking

content warning: details of rape and sexual assault

Over the past year I’ve had recurring dreams involving water. I am usually standing on an embankment watching as people dive into flowing rivers and oceans and transform into glistening fish and seals. The water is cool and clear and ripples over their smooth animal bodies, and I am filled with desire to join the swimmers and be carried away by the current. In her book, Everybody, Olivia Liang asks you to imagine what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear. Maybe that is what I’m doing as I stand on the embankments.

***

I have seen different psychologists on and off since I was six years old, but for the past two years, I have been seeing a counsellor who specialises in somatic forms of therapy. Every fortnight we sit in a small room with wooden floorboards, large windows and a massage table positioned in the corner. It takes almost two years before I tell her about the rape and assaults. I tell her that I have no interest in talking about it; I am done with analysing events, and I am sick of hearing the lines 'it’s not your fault', 'that was a trauma response' and 'a lot of victims feel that way'. But my body remembers everything and it refuses to let go. Liang says our bodies are luminously powerful, not despite, but because of their hopeless vulnerabilities.

I see the counsellor because I would like to know what it feels like to live in a body free of fear.

 ***

A nurse leads me through to a private room and invites me to sit down in the dentist's chair. She asks how my day has been as she carefully places different tools on the small tray beside me, and although it is only 8 am, I smile and tell her it has been good. As I look around the room she complains about the terrible parking near the clinic. The chair I am sitting on is covered in green vinyl, but the white, artificial lighting seems to bleach out the potential for any other colour. I face the sliding door that leads into the room; it is made entirely of one-way glass that I can see through, but those outside cannot see in. When the specialist arrives he cooly introduces himself in a thick South African accent and I notice his teeth, while slightly discoloured, are abnormally straight. He asks me to sit up in the chair as he takes out a large camera.

‘Give me a big smile,’ he says.

And I do. The flash goes off and my eyes water.

‘Wider,’ he says.

And I try. The nurse stands behind me, and when the dentist nods in her direction she places two metal hooks in my mouth and pulls my lips back.

‘I think you can smile bigger than that,’ he says encouragingly.

I do not think that I can, but I can no longer speak. Once he is finished, he loads the photographs onto a computer that sits on a desk behind me and invites me up to look at them. We all stand there, the dentist, the nurse and I, staring at a close-up of my toothless, gummy smile. He points to parts of the photo and tells me my smile is not symmetrical, and my gum line is too high. He says the tooth next to the missing front one has a higher gum line than the one on the other side and that this will cosmetically complicate the implant surgery. I tell him that my priority is functionality, not aesthetics, and that I am happy to go ahead with the procedure as is. He smiles his perfectly symmetrical smile and says I sound very sure of myself. He says he will need to wait for confirmation from my dentist before he is happy to go ahead with the procedure.

I am charged $400 for the consultation and drive home.

*** 

I see the same man at the dog park every so often. He is tall with long brown hair that he tucks tightly behind his ears and he seems to be wearing a different band t-shirt every time. I often stand beside him and watch Pig, his six-month-old wolfhound, bound across the park, ears flapping in the wind, completely at home in his body and wildness. The clumsy animal – still working out where the earth starts and his body begins – hops and skips across the grass, tripping over his own limbs before burying his nostrils into the dirt. I think this must be what Mary Oliver means when she writes that the dog reminds us of the pleasures of the body.

The dog park doubles as the local sports oval and, just outside the boundary, it is surrounded by a grey cemented footpath and swaying gum trees. I often watch small children mimic the oscillating gums, raising their arms above their heads and moving their bodies from side to side. Sometimes, when the weather is good, I stand in the middle of the oval and look up towards the sky. If I concentrate hard enough, I can imagine the sky as a piece of protective blue fabric stretched taut above me, keeping me safe and contained and grounded, making sure I do not fall out into the nothingness.

***

On the day of the surgery, a nurse escorts me into the operating room. He has light blue eyes, long eyelashes and is bald and broad-shouldered. I am struck by how beautiful he is and find myself wondering who he inherited his eye colour from, if they’re his mum’s or his dad’s, whether they have always been that light or whether they’ve faded as he’s aged. He speaks calmly to me as the anaesthetist wraps the circulation machine around my legs and inserts a drip. The dental specialist enters the room along with three or four others who I do not recognise, their faces covered by masks. I am told the anaesthetist is going to give me something to help me relax, and shortly after, a wave of calmness rolls over me.

When we get home, Angus stands in the shower with me. He wipes the crystalised blood from my lips and washes me limb by limb. I cry because my body doesn’t feel like my own and because his hands are so gentle. Later in the night, when I am trying to fall asleep, I wake to waves of panic and no matter how many times I tell myself that I am safe, that it is okay to fall asleep, my body refuses to believe me.

 ***

When I was younger, I used to lie on my back in the driveway when it rained and position myself so that my hair moved with the water as it flowed down the gutter. It felt good – the Northern Territory sky opening up above me, peppering my small, outstretched body with smooth pebbled drops.

On Sundays, I would attend swimming lessons with all the other children; all of us dressed in zipped-up collared rashies, with icy poles as our holy communion. I learnt to blow bubbles, float on my back and, with the help of pool noodles and kickboards, swim from one side of the pool to the other. Mum tells me that for the entirety of the term, I refused to put my head under the water, and that the more I was pressured to, the stronger my refusal became. I don’t remember that, but I do remember, in the last few weeks of classes, paddling over to the far side of the pool where it was quiet and hesitantly placing my head against the styrofoam kickboard and feeling the water lap at my cheek like the tongue of a dog who was happy to see me. In Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘Swimming One Day in August’, she describes the ocean as a balm to feelings of heartbreak and overwhelm. She writes that the ‘sea held me, until I grew easy.’  While the town pool was not quite the same as the ocean, maybe the same concept applied. I played with the water for a while, pressing one cheek against the surface and then the other, until finally, and only when I was ready, I ducked below the surface.

***

The dentist opened my gums down to the bone and stitched them back together with a fine black thread that now loops around my front teeth. My tongue runs along the warm swollen flesh and quickly learns where all the stitches come from and travel to. I gently swish warm salt water around the wounds multiple times a day to support the healing process. When I attend my follow-up appointment two weeks later, the dentist attempts to remove the stitches, but my gum tissue has healed over them. It feels as if they are making new incisions along my gum line. Tears pool in the corners of my eyes and roll down into my hair.

‘Your body is healing too well,’ they say as I fight the urge to push their hands away from me.

Eventually, local anaesthetic is used and as the dentist removes the last few stitches. He rests his hand on my shoulder and softly says that I will be okay, and that he is sorry. I look at myself in the mirror when I get home and notice blood still smeared across my cheek and front teeth. When I pull up my top lip, I find that the piece of tissue that connects the lip to my gum has been cut away, and everything feels hot and swollen. A psychiatrist once told me that I had a fragile and brittle temperament. They told me that, to my detriment, I was particularly sensitive and required resilience-focused therapy. But as I stand here, smiling in the bathroom mirror at my bloodied face and swollen gums, I am sure they were wrong.

***

Angus takes a Friday off work and we pack the car with our camping gear and drive down to the Otways. It is winter and the roads are quiet. My body aches with the pain that comes with the first day of my period. But when we get to Lorne we buy fish and chips and eat them in a beach car park, watching the ocean as it rolls and crashes against itself. Every now and then, someone walks along the beach with a dog that runs towards a gelatinous entanglement of seaweed; their owners desperately chase after them, each with a plastic bag full of their dog’s poo flapping around in their hands.

The water is a steely blue and no one is swimming. The sky is cold and clear and the water laps at the shoreline. I step out of the car and take off my clothes, sliding out of my jeans and underwear and wrapping a thin Turkish towel around myself. I am slow and gentle with my body as I walk towards the water. No one is around now. My body bleeds and heals and the world is quiet. I let go of the towel, wade into the icy blue and fall into the waves. I transform into a seal and then a fish and then a seagull and then I am singing and yelling and breathing. And a dog is barking from the shoreline, and I am bleeding into the salt. I swim deeper and burst higher and I lose myself in the ocean's current.