Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003 - 3:18 p.m.
Writing, About Time

Some random jottings today. Unusually, it's not that busy at work this afternoon, and I don't have any one big story to tell but I do want to write. I want to write. It's not often, lately, that I've been able to say that. I've been dreading writing, avoiding it. I've not wanted to get into anything.

The only thing that's happened since my last update is that I had my first post-assault nightmare, from which I awoke, screaming, at 1:30 am Tuesday morning. A big fat bespectacled man in a suit was trying to push his way into my old apartment, and I was bracing myself against the door, trying to prevent that. In the dream I was screaming for help but no words came out. I had lost my voice.

I long for a return to a normal level of abnormality, but for right now I am where I am. There is joy and interestingness in my life—most notably, this intriguing new fellow Miles—yet I am having difficulties focusing in any visceral sense on anything other than the assault. That fixation will lessen over time, no doubt.

I have decided, though, to leave my current job at the end of the year; it's time to do something less demanding and more meaningful. I have no idea what that might be, but I definitely need a change, vocationally speaking. Big time.

My reading assignment this year—self-imposed—has been Proust's 3,000 page In Search Of Lost Time. (The new Penguin translation.) I'd finished volume 2 of 6 earlier the same day I was attacked, but the universe decided I was meant to finish it eh? Today I’ll finish the third volume, so I’m at the halfway mark. It's an interesting read, at times wondrously meditative, at other times tediously frustrating; I'm glad I'm persevering through it for the many many gems of throbbing prose.

And I think a lot too about how delicate, sick Marcel Proust never really figured out what to do with his life, with his writing until he was much older than I am now. How he never really amounted to anything, did not find his writerly stride, until he accidentally began Lost Time. And there are all those writers, a few notable ones at least, who didn't find theirs until even their 70s.

I feel sometimes like it's gonna take me that long. That whatever it is I'm really meant to do I won't be ready to do for a while. At other times, I think some radiant purpose is just around the corner, a subtle twist of tomorrow's kaleidoscope where everything I've done and's been done to me will make perfect sense and springboard me into actuality.

Time's not a-wasting though. I don’t believe in wasted time. I don’t believe in boredom. Boredom is for lazy people, someone once said, and I think that’s true.

I want to use this journal more, pull it off its pedestal and work it. I haven't found a writing voice that feels true again yet. I am envious of some of my own early stuff, which reads so fresh, so vibrant. Rediscovering whatever the current truth of my words might be is about the body. My body of writing. I'm not often in my body when I write anymore. That will come back, if I work at it.

Part of it—a small part anyway—is about time. In that sense time has been a-wasting, as I've given too too much of it over to a decent-paying but absolutely uninspiring job these past couple years. I only get to update, really, when it's slow at work; by the time I get home at eight or nine or ten o'clock at night, I'm simply too pooped to write much.

Anyway.

My own personal journal, the one I was keeping on my computer for two to three months prior to the assault, is part of the prosecutor's evidence. This is because I wrote about Diego the morning after we met (so the morning of the assault) and my account contradicts the inane story he's concocted about why he stabbed me twenty times. So this is a good thing, that I had written my impressions of him and our first meeting down; what's hugely disconcerting, however, is that I don't know how much of that word-processed journal, never mind whatever else is on my hard drive (which the police made a copy of) will be accessible to Diego's lawyer. I don't know what privacy rights I have.

The upshot of this is that, were the defense lawyer to get carte blanche access to my private journal, he'll easily find out about Queer Scribbles since I made several references to it there. There'll be nothing stopping him from then pulling it up on a Google search. So if worse comes to worst, I guess I'll have to shut this site down (and delete it from Google, etc.).

I mean, fuck, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I've done nothing wrong. But let's be realistic: if the defense lawyer's worth his billing rate he'll craft some demonizing narrative about me out of a few choice excerpts.

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. So much of the time I can’t fucking believe this is happening to me. Too much of this is playing out like a TV drama.

I'm more than a bit keyed up about this aspect of things. I've just faxed a letter to the prosecutor asking him to respond to my privacy concerns, so I'll see what he says.

Oh, and by the way, Diego's story is that I pulled the knife on him, demanding sex. When he wouldn't "put out", he says I then went on to stab him in each of his hands.

You see, the tendons in Diego’s hands, on each palm, were split open during the incident. This is a very serious injury, and he was in hospital for about six weeks getting physiotherapy. When I heard about his injuries I was completely fucked up because I had a vague memory of struggling with him over the knife, but I had absolutely no recollection of inflicting any wounds on him! Friends and family responded to my fucked-up-edness by (a) reminding me that he was the one trying to kill me, and whatever I'd had to do in self-defense would have been justified, and (b) a couple of Dad's hunter and military friends/relatives opined (and this was later backed up by the police detective) that, no, Diego had inflicted those wounds on himself.

Because, I’ve now learned, when you're stabbing someone or something hard (like the bones in my shoulder, for a relevant example, or like a wooden picnic table) with a knife that doesn't have a guard on it, and you don't really know what you're doing, what inevitably happens is that your hand slides down the knife handle from the impact and you split the palm of your hand open along the blade. It’s a common injury; my uncle said they trained him in the navy on how to avoid it. So that's what seems to have happened to Diego; first he cut one palm open, then he used the other hand to continue his assault and did the same thing.

So, there, I've told that part of the story for the first time here.

Anyway, so that’s Diego’s cockamamie story. What he has yet to explain, and this is what led the police detective ultimately to believe me and charge him, is exactly how, if I'd stabbed him in his hands, rendering them virtually useless, he then went on to stab me twenty fucking times all over my body?

Trial's next June, unless Diego has skipped town by then. I'm dreading it.

I'm also reading some non-fiction books about revenge and forgiveness, and I'll have more to say about those later. There's a whole bunch more going on for me as I walk through this than just the irrational fears and anxieties I have about being alone. As my therapist puts it, quoting Maya Angelou, the assault has changed and will change me and my life irrevocably; the goal is not to be reduced by it.

Hear hear.

Hmm, well one last thing I guess: every night I thank the universe, or God, I haven't really named the entity, nor do I feel a strong need to, maybe I'll settle on Big Girlfriend In The Sky or something, but every night I thank it/her/him for protecting me from Diego, and from anyone else who might mean to do me harm.

And almost every night, however uncomfortably, I go on to ask that he—Diego—might one day acknowledge what he's done, that he too might heal.