Sarah Seidler (Bio)
There is a photograph of me at 18 in which I am wearing leggings with a hole in the right knee and a grey t-shirt. I am smiling with my mouth open and my eyes have become twinkling slivers peeking over cherry-red cheeks that are forced upwards by the corners of my toothy grin.
It is my freshman year of college, apparent in the photo from the plastic shot glasses and bottles of the cheapest vodka scattered around a bean bag chair in a dorm made for two, but containing ten, maybe twelve, similarly enthusiastic companions. The red cheeks and the open-mouth, howling laughter escaping my lips is mostly the result of that cheap vodka that we’ve been liberally pouring all night.
It is warm.
We are warm.
The alcohol going down into my core is warm.
My naiveté and excitement encourages more indulging and that warm feeling in my core eventually becomes hot. The glow of the lights strung up in the room pulses against the back of my eyelids as I close them to regain composure.
When I reopen them, I am being led down a hallway and then a staircase by two trusted friends, taken to another dorm where I promptly heave forward and unleash a new kind of chemical warfare on a tiny garbage can.
One friend leaves. The other stays while I finish voiding my stomach of green apple-flavored Burnett’s.
He stays after I pass out on his bed. He stays. And unbeknownst to me, crawls onto the futon where I lay and presses his body into my back, his face into the nape of my neck. Sometime in the middle of the night I wake up startled by the feeling of his hands on my breasts, his pelvis digging into my backside. Slight movements. I’m not sure what would happen if he knew I was awake so I steady my breath and maintain a stillness until I force myself to go back to sleep.
I do not make eye contact with him for three days, and then I apologize for throwing up in his trash can. He says it’s not a problem.
There is a photograph of me a month later that I took the morning after the most eventful second date I will ever have. I have a broken finger that will turn purple gradually throughout the day, but I do not care, because I am busy recounting the story of the misadventures and wild romantic gestures that last night brought. I have never been in love, but I have a good feeling about this flannel-clad boy who was somehow able to turn a flat tire in the middle of a cornfield into a scene straight out of rom-com. He makes me forget about bad people and bad touching and sadness and fear.
There will be many photographs of us together, I hope. We take pictures at parties, eating takeout Chinese food, going to concerts, walking across campus.
The photographs are nice because we are always smiling in them. They make me forget things about us, about him.
They make me forget that he had been arrested for assault and battery. But high school scraps don’t really count, do they? And besides, he’ll never break my nose.
They make me forget about his short fuse and momentarily build a bridge over the eggshells that usually I must walk on to approach him.
But, I am smiling. I smile a lot, so we are happy. If we are happy, I am happy. I am happy.
There is a photograph of me taken on March 27, 2016. Easter Sunday. I am sitting with his basset hound at my feet. I am wearing a green and white dress with lemons on it. I am still wearing this dress later that night when we are in his bedroom and he is shouting. When I am sitting cross-legged on his bed with my hands over my ears, and he is shouting. When I say that I don’t want to have sex, and he is shouting. When he looks into my swollen, drenched eyes and tells me he won’t stay with me if I don’t give him my virginity tonight.
An hour later, the dress ends up discarded on the hardwood floor.
I do not wear the dress with lemons on it anymore because I feel dirty.
But I look at the countless photos taken in dressing rooms before performances, photos taken on the beach in Florida, photos taken with friends, photos taken with family. Smiling, brow unfurrowed, sunshine, staying afloat, trying. Scrapbooks overflowing with the effort, my effort.
There was a photograph taken of me the last night I felt safe in his house. I am almost 20.
Scrapbooks have instead become filled with the absence of the photos of me panicking and hiding in bathrooms, hiding in bedrooms, hiding behind bodies after the Title IX report is filed, the stalking and harassment is documented, and the bruise on my arm where he gripped and yanked is almost completely faded. And although I am glad there is not a photo of me in the Dean’s office testifying to my last 9 months, I would be curious to take a look just to be able to pinpoint the exact moment that the two worry lines between my eyebrows became a permanent feature on my face.
There have been many photographs taken between then and now, though. In most of them, I am smiling again. Most of the time you cannot see those worry lines, although there are times where they swallow the carefully applied powder bravery and reveal the anxiousness that they carry in their thin canyons. They grow and recede circumstantially.
A few months ago, he revved his engine and shone his headlights as he accelerated at me in a dark parking lot and I hurried to my car and stood and shook alone as he sped past. They grow.
He is removed from a class that we were placed in together and I feel that someone at the university is throwing me a wink and a long-awaited bone. They recede.
Later tonight there I’m sure there will be a photograph taken of me, days short of 21, wearing red and black, post-performance adrenaline high. A woman happy most of the time, ambitious to a fault, surrounded only by empowering women and men, but still feeling the effects of a lingering insidious presence on campus. Graduation day I will take a breath so clarifying and relieving I will lift off the ground with the rest of the caps as they are tossed in the air in celebration. A culmination.
For now, I have this recitation. And an appreciation for those who protect my right to safely receive an education. A condemnation for any administration that provides a haven for abusers. I want my university’s reputation to evolve into one for denouncing misconduct outright, not with words, but with action and without hesitation. So victims can report without fear of being met with equivocation, rather, there comes validation. Affirmation. Therein lies my inspiration. Women who state, stomp, make declarations. Those who offer support and lay the foundation for a garden of health, love, and strength from which to bloom, out of which to blossom, re-fertilizing someone who had become a desert.
We will not stop taking photos.