It took him a long time to understand what had happened to him. Slow. Slow. It was as if he couldn’t blink. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t do anything. Slow. Slow. Ninety percent of the boys in the developed world who have been raped multiple times will kill themselves.

Eventually.

This one will. I would bet the ranch on it.

Some will be quick. Some will take their time about it. Slow. Slow.

All of them will try it if suicide can be fixated at ideation which it can.

These numbers arrive as big data insurance actuarial forecasting, the American Hospital Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Family Physicians, American Board of Pediatrics, American Board of Emergency Medicine, American College of Emergency Physicians, American Society of Investigative Pathology, CDC, National Institutes of Health, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, WHO, and FBI Firearm Death Rates.

Suicide and gun violence are intimately connected.

He was weak. He wasn’t really a man. A mans man man. He wanted it. All fags want it up the ass. It just happened.

But when it happens to you, your entire world becomes swift as a shadow and short as any dream. The jaws of darkness do devour it up. No mid-summer-night’s hypnosis can disguise itself or any of its second selves for very long. The memories come roaring back to live a barren life of their own.

Tongues by night. Now everyone will know his secrets. That he was tender and easily damaged. That he was such a pussy, he could not fight back. He was as frail as a girl.

His scars will feel all wounds.

He cannot be healed. There is no mystic cure. Serotonin is not the answer anymore than hydrogen is the answer. Our bag of helper tricks has worn holes and is low on tread.

It sits in his gut like a fist. A bloodshed of white flags. Since he’d been raped, he’d had a horses’s bit inside his mouth, and all his rage was like the slow turning of his head. I do not know how he will do it. Only that he will. He wants to die. He believes he has no choice. You can tell him five billion times that there are always choices, but the fact that you were not the one who was raped, and he was the one who was raped, will exist between the two of you in an unspoken taboo even as he leans slightly toward you in his gravity, and you lean toward him in the promises of your bag with the magic tricks, he will test both you and the bag for contraband.

It isn’t about the rape. It’s about after the rape. There is a drawbridge and he has shut it down and nailed the lid up tight. He shits once a month if that. Diverticulitis is the least of it. His gut hurts because he has been reduced to ballast.

They see no reason to live, and they will tell you they just don’t want to be here.

Around this time all the little helpers go into helper high octane help helper mode. Buyer beware. They’re dangerous.

Who will hold the inner chambers of his outer stone.

I take him to long silent fields and we sit down among the weeds. That is all I do. Sometimes we speak but usually we just breathe. The hooty owls are still patrolling. What we seek are the deeper waves of grace.

As deep as the cello in this video.

We throw rocks at the railroad tracks. He doesn’t walk so much as stride.

You are thinking it is a little thing.

To stride. Upright. I have never seen him do it but for the walks we take.

He’s striding through the centuries. Slow. Slow. As dangerous as the answers are a hanging sword. We fawn over rape as if it were a failed tradition.

We curl up tightly in our comfy beds and wait for death to come.

He is facing his.

Head on.

Who else can say they have the courage for it.

I will miss these walks of unpaid debts. He’s either going to open his mouth to scream or he is going to die. It’s not up to us. We are the helpers who somehow manage to only help ourselves.

His razor in the water is just not warm enough. He smells of rivers and shoes. I check on him at night. Eventually, he sleeps. I check his room for weapons. There are none.

He is his own weapon. His body and his burn and his walking stick. You can sit with him in weeds and watch it all, all, all happen. Slow. Slow. It was as if he couldn’t blink.

Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

Posts tagged with community-mental-health

After the Rape is a Slow, Lonely Death, and a Grim-Visaged Dirge