This past year has left many of us in ruins. The unluckiest have said premature goodbyes to loved ones. Others have lost jobs, homes, businesses, and financial independence. Those of us who’ve escaped these casualties have suffered in different ways – fear and frustration over continued racial injustice, crumbling mental health, longing for community, warring with family and friends over politics. No one has made it through these last twelve months without a few scars, and many of us still have open wounds. As we drive through our neighborhoods and on backroads between towns, we see the wallpaper of this past year slowly disintegrating across the frozen landscape. Trump signs linger, painted plywood and weathered blue placards dot the ditches throughout the county and beyond, though nature is slowly stepping in to tear down the divisions between us. Names have already been taken, though, and mental notes made. We all know who belongs to which side, and these things are not easily forgotten, not after the year we’ve had. Silences linger between family members, and there are pauses in friendships we have now grown accustomed to. This year has revealed more honest versions of ourselves, but this revelation has yet to prove helpful or harmful. I think back to March when the worry set in, and I began to hold my children just a bit tighter. I remember May and June, the rising racial tensions and righteous anger fueling protests. My husband and I lingered on the brink of something ugly, threatening to split us down the middle if we could not find common ground on how to lead this transracial family of ours. Arguments rolled long into the night, and neither of us knew if we would ever find our way out. I remember late summer when a traffic ticket led me into a conversation with a local police officer. He wanted to ensure I knew all about the “China virus” and the litany of conspiracies he heralded as facts. Inside the county courthouse, he sat uniformed and smiling, glistening really in his authority and privilege. “My wife, she plays along, but me? I never wear this thing,” he bragged, pulling at the mask laying limp around his neck. September came and swept my kids up in its undertow as they sobbed onto the kitchen table, missing friends and classrooms they wouldn’t get to see. I excused myself to the pantry to hide my tears behind a closed door, questioning the choice we had made. I remember wondering which onlookers thought we had overreacted. Then came October and November and December – the longest election of our lives. Those of us who’d made it through the previous months without weeding our gardens were soon covered in dirt, ripping out the creeping thistle we always thought was a flower.

Have you ever actually been grabbed by the pussy? Have you ever felt the pressure of five hungry fingers gripping your body without permission? Has someone ever clutched, squeezed your flesh without warning or consent – someone you know or someone you don’t, a supervisor or a coworker or a client, a smiling face you had wrongly considered a friend? Have you ever been kissed by a mouth that “[didn’t] even wait” for an invitation? Have you found yourself alone with someone who expected you would let them “do anything,” someone who then decided that the most private, sacred parts of you really belonged to them? Has your body ever been the topic of discussion in whispered laughter - your butt, your mouth, your legs, your “big phony tits?” Have you ever listened as a pack of wolves tore that body apart? Did you pause for a moment, trying to decide whether or not you would bear the weight of confrontation once again? And again? And again? And again, did you ask yourself, “Can I just pretend I didn’t hear them this time?”

I am sitting in a concrete classroom. A young professor with thick dark hair and sharply tailored pants stands before the chalkboard. She is smart and beautiful and terrifying. She is everything I hope to be someday, but I am just a bright-eyed freshman, barely eighteen, barely formed. And I am arguing my point. “Never. It should never be legal in any situation.” The room is quiet, and the professor stares at me, eyebrows slightly raised. I have dissented from the crowd, daring to regurgitate that which I’ve been trained to say, things that make sense within my small and simple world. Right now, that world is black and white. I have not yet traveled through the gray.

In a house filled with penises, I am determined to keep my feminist spirit alive. This is not easy. It feels insurmountable some days, especially as my boys age and I find myself shielding my sons’ eyes from all that makes me female while they prance like tiny peacocks on display. These peacocks pee on everything: bathroom walls, linoleum floors, newly laundered beds, porch railings, trees, flowers. These little peacocks mark their territory with sticky urine. And it’s not just them. I let the dog out and watch him lift his leg and spray the earth. He comes back inside, then licks himself loudly, unapologetically.

It all started with Hemingway. Scratch that. It all started 17 years prior with a handful of lies and one night of no after no after no after no into tears into silence. It hadn’t started with Hemingway at all; he just broke it wide open. We left on a Saturday morning with a loose agenda and high hopes. My girlfriends and I stuffed ourselves and our strong feminist leanings into an SUV and headed north. It feels good to head north. We were Hemingway hunting. Michigan natives, we had the good fortune of easy access to the upper reaches of the Lower Peninsula where the rolling hills and pine forests bleed into the cool of a Great Lake, a place that gives space to dreams and fears and harsh realities, a Hemingway haunt.

I drink whiskey because I like how it sounds, rolling out of my mouth and onto the bar. The burning sweet bite at the close of each swallow has grown on me over the years, and where I once had to brace the back of my tongue for the awaited burn, that same tongue now salivates when I near the well. This behavior is learned, imprinted. I’ve adapted to the thick warmth it brings. What I can’t accustom myself to, what I should not have to accustom myself to, is the side-eye glance, the blazing double standard that follows in its wake.

I am 20 years old. I am perched on a stool staring out across rolling greens, straining to see incoming dots on the horizon. Golf carts buzzing along the paved path toward my outpost for the day - a halfway house nestled in the hardwood forests and carpets of grass, lily pad ponds with the croak of frogs and heron calls. I am bored with flipping burgers and moving sausages from warming pot to grill face, freshening them up, bringing them back to life for the next customer. I hear the cart approach before I see it. Four golfers stroll up and peer through the open window. Men. Always men. I get down from my perch and stand there as they size me up. Eyes scan my body, tip of my head to tennis shoes. They move from shock of blonde, blue eyes and matching polo, khaki shorts mid-thigh. I shift my weight from left to right, smile, ask what I can get for them.