---

Trigger Warning: The following extracts depict sexual assualt. Be cautious when reading.

Journal Entry 1 – Cafe #1 14:13

Fatalism is concurrent with the present. The objective remains active in every part of our life. We can love unconditionally to death, eat to death, dance, sleep, the connection is simple. Knowing this, what am I left with? Any action can be painless, rudimentary at best, or at the root, my own hands can bring upon the fatalism. I can be the mechanism, the driving force, the consciousness needed to sustain deliberate actions. Still, the thought of personal brutalism is not as manageable as it seems. A revelation like such is natural, a consequental choice one harbours in their teenage bedroom dreaming of desirable fantasies, developed on the basis of needed control which in actuality, we as people, lack extensively.

I am too self-aware, too knowledgeable of my own self-mutilation. Each dark-filled shower, open-window-peering to those deemed ‘neighbors’ leaves me aware of my loneliness and ultimately futile existence past the borders of my convoluted consciousness, which is to say, I understand I am human.

There are walls around me filled with faces, intimate moments documented for the price of four pounds, outlining the groups of many heads stuffed into a mere two inches, a series of faces developed from childhood pranks and secret moments with our siblings. Their joy is loose, unlimited, and occurring while they all share the same space. They simply are being human.

My thoughts have become a revolving door of regular customers, customized orders specialized with their names, a designated seat in the corner of the cafe, with its own expectant wait times, which is to say they don’t exist, they were already expecting you. It knows its flaws, consequences, its terms for being stationary, or rather obsolete, that the gray lines developed into barriers as you hover over the edge of intimacy where you are knowledgeable of dog names and family photos but lacking in personal trauma and work issues. I like to say I know myself intimately, yet the moment his hand pulled upon my left breast, I wanted to detach from the symbol of femininity in order to be free of his touch. My hands cannot undo all that he has stained, they cannot compete, and the moment of reprieve I allow myself, I now question what it means to be a woman at all.

Jounral Entry 2- Cafe #2 15:23

Do his hands naturally diminish who I am? The obvious answer always remains as stated in pamphlets or articles, yet as his hands managed to slide and grope right over my heart, for a split second he knew what my heartbeat felt like. He took the intimate moment I was guaranteed, stripping my body for the pleasure of his naked hands. I was diminished to a byproduct for his self-indulgence. Memory is a sacred commodity, unable to be erased but possible to alter, and while I sink into inescapable briefs of sadness, I can feel it penetrate into each level of skin cells until I am merely made up of blood and skin. My normalcy breaks then as an acknowledgment of my insignificance is apparent. Who am I now, when I am simply another body, another voice, an option to feel or disown? The feeling of human connection has grown exceptionally since last night, the understanding that the warmth I carry is unable to erase all that pains me. My arms have failed to wrap around my body, carried by some unknowable need to not stop moving.

On my second cup of tea, I found myself soothing the cup in front of me. My hand strokes each side, the other comforting the lid so the liquid has little room to escape. I picture myself as a child once more, her importance highlighted more now than who I was before. The simple effect of my failure to not be perceived leaves me inconsolable. Should I tell her about her own future? She could of had more time to prepare, diminish, compartmentalize, secure down each leg, arm, section of skin on her body to seize as her own. She might rename herself as strictly her property unknowing of the many unwanted hands that have touched her since. She would be a different girl with different experiences. I still never know which one I prefer in this sense: present acceptance or reconciliation of my past.

I needed to be loved more than I wished to live, but their intertwining consequences leave me distraught and aching until the questioning of either is far easier to digest alone.

Journal Entry 3 – Cafe #3 16:09

I forgot how pliable the memory is, or rather, how willingly we suppress acknowledgment. A young family sat before me, molded by the young daughter whose hands would reach into the center of the table, aching for the shared coffee cup split between all three. Weathered and tarnished by the mouths of others before them, each partakes in their own enjoyments: the father faces the door, a book positioned so both he and his daughter can appreciate the words lining the paper, his whispers quietly and while you wish to be knowledgeable in their interaction, if he is willingly reading to her, his eyes stay glued to the black ink and his head doesn’t turn. The daughter listens as she once did half a decade ago, caged by youthfulness and her developing brain, she reconciles her past with her present action, a head tilt toward the shoulder of her father to see the words better. The mother is content, a sign of security as her back is to the door, her head pushed down toward her phone, a restful posture and performative hands. An expression of love, traced from the position of their heads falling inwards toward the other, a show of each foot pressing into the other, intertwining until skin can be touched. A warmness should appear at such a scene, but this ordinary show of affection leaves me bare of raised cheeks and stretched lips. I should feel more than this. The rain has been the only object to touch my skin today, but no purity, no salvation has been gifted to me. Why must a God be in control of every action and why do I have to beg in anguish for the disgust I never wanted to feel? Should I reject purity and desire my bones to be heavy instead? Would salvation be granted if I crumble into my bed, unable to bruise each knee in a trance of reverence, and only then when the skin is malleable, dirtied by its own cycled existence, might I derive a moment of peace, where their hands haven’t been able to touch me. I could be the one to squeeze, grasp, pull until the blood resembles the color on my cheeks and the warmness is brought on by the pain of each hand than the fingertips of another. Would I be pure then? If the mutilation was from the self rather than the other? Does pain circulate, can it be passed on, rid of, covered up like layers of clothes until you have a new meaning, a new reason for absolution? My eyelashes have been dry for three hours now, rid of the black tar I willfully drown each eye in. Joy has become a solid being now, one standing in front of me as a mother with caring hands extending outwards, yet one cannot replace the existence of comfort their mother has once brought them, and to take the hand of a creature rid of her scent, her aspiration, is cause for only more decay. Joy will eventually return, like we all do to seek out Mother once more, but I must wait, and in that time must I imagine the scope of her brave hands instead of those that pulled the night before.