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Show in my father's house/ 35^ He put an arm around me and walked me to my car- "I have to get back to work now. Don't pick UD any stray dogs on the way home. I'll be at your house by seven. The store is having a Christmas party - dinner and dancing - sort of formal, ok?" I sighed with relief. I felt his concern all around me. Brian. He still cared for me, although so much time had been lost since we first found each other. Experience had been so important to me, then. A voice within had driven me to experience, saying you must taste of everything or you Perhaps will be unfulfilled.' A "the voice had grown, angry and gnarled, from my father's branding of me - how long ago that seemed. And now I was surfeited, choked with experience. In the months ^following the rape, I had entered a period so frenzied in one way and yet so calculating in another that even now I don't know how I bore the division of spirit. I felt dirty and small - so utterly insignificant that I no longer valued anything around me. The world became a grey, lusterless place. The people around me I regarded as fools or criminally selfish. The teachers I had once respected seemed to sport ulterior motives; the peers who had made me a leader now seemed juvenile and naive. And my own family - the only group of familiar souls in my life - was beyond comprehension. In general, I was beyond reach. I felt that I had been'cast into outer darkness' - a punishment reserved for apostates of the Church - and that I could no longer call myself my father's daughter, not even in the recesses of my own heart. |