Trigger Warning

Trigger. I hear the word constantly. It rolls off tongues with ease, especially in my line of work. Because supporting survivors of domestic violence is learning to navigate booby traps. Is learning to crowbar breath between instinctual alarms and reality.

People talk trigger warning as a way of being gentle. It is a way to prepare someone for information that could stimulate old ache. It is done with the best of intentions. Or it is done with a complete lack of awareness of what a real trigger feels like. Either way people are trying. But for me the word itself has always felt loaded, heavy, violent. For me it speaks to an act, a memory, so violent that it can annihilate. It is the trigger of a gun, it is the pull before the possibility of destruction.

But generally what follows does not destroy. Does not even maim or hurt or sting. What follows is usually just a reminder of what I already know. A reminder that people are being hurt in extraordinary ways and being asked to pretend as if it did not happen. This violence is not an exception in my life, so I don’t need the kid gloves. In fact the kid gloves just remind me of the childhood I never had. They speak to false protection. They speak of uncomfortable hands unwilling to get and stay bloody for me. Because this life has never been able to expect clean, gentle, and safe, as a base line.

Still I appreciate the sentiment. And I’ve learned to notice the words, the tones, the topics that make me want to crawl deep into my own skin or run screaming. I’ve gotten better at naming when my memory usurps reality and makes me feel younger, weaker and more vulnerable than I really am. But triggers, those have been fewer and farther between. At least for me. At least until recently.

A few months ago I was standing in my beautiful new kitchen with a boy I really liked. I never thought I would get to live in a place so nice and I never thought that I’d actually get to be alone with this boy. I found myself smiling from the inside out. I was optimistic, grateful, open. Until he kissed me. Until he pressed his sweet mouth to mine and I felt the wall behind me.

Then I was panicked, paralyzed. Then the only focus I could have was on breath. The search for it. Then I could only try not to choke or die or implode. Because his lips were not the lips on mine. This doorway I was pressed to was not the same doorway. For the first time in such a long time I was in that doorway of an old bedroom with that old friend. And all that stood between me and the destruction of my body was the turn of a door knob and eleven years.

I slipped away from him and that should have been enough to tell me he was a different man. I could escape. There was nothing I needed to escape from. But my body was still not breathing, my eyes were still tearing and the whole of me was still shaking. And he did not know, well he did not know the whole of it. Because I have learned to survive but I am still learning to share that survival. Still learning to trust that others can handle it, can hold it, can want to. Still trying to believe it’s possible that someone could help take some ache away and not just add to it.

That was our last date. The last time I’d let him kiss me. The hopes of something solid and sweet, shattered. For no reason. I have been kissed rougher, been pushed tight against a door, I have wanted it, craved it, called out for it. This is how I like my sex. And that kiss was much sweeter, much softer, but random explosions of trauma still ripple through this life. They have no warning, they give no reason. They just destroy and move on. Leave you feeling that old sort of confused and stupid. Leave you with the memory that once your body was not yours and sometimes still, they have their hands on it. From thousands of miles away, from decades beyond, from the grave.

They make you feel silly for making such a big deal of it. After all this is just one boy. It is not all the time. There was no guarantee he was the forever one. And others have it so much worse. But that is not the point. The point is that the trigger is not a poem about rape, it is the kiss I’ve been longing for. And there is no predicting, no protection. So please, don't make it sound so simple.