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| Tracey Emin, In The Dead Dark of Night I Wanted You, 2018. |
I feel so much hatred and rage. My entire body vibrates with it.
On the train, I saw a 40-year-old man paw at a high school girl. I had heard about people's vision going red with anger, but this was the first time I'd experienced it for myself. Crimson. Maroon. Currant.
I genuinely thought I might kill him. I'm not being hyperbolic.
I had to dig my fingernails into my own flesh so that I wouldn't dig them into his. I bled red, too. Crimson. Maroon. Currant.
I yelled at him (as did the high schooler, to her credit), and he ran away like a dog with its tail between its legs, but not a single other person on the train did anything. They hardly looked up from their phones, as if they couldn't be bothered or if the scene was so routine, so common, that it wasn't even worth acknowledging.
And, in that moment, I truly hated all of them. Every single one.
I've never felt hatred so raw and visceral for another human being before, let alone an entire train's car worth of them.
Their silence is complicity.
They did not rape me, but they are doing nothing to dismantle the culture that allows rape to happen.
Some people do not find it worth the trouble or think that the offender might turn the direction on them. But whatever their reasoning is is not helping anything. Whether it was right or not in the citizens' or authorities eyes does not matter. It was right. Thank you for still showing that there are good people in this world. Bad people no matter how small or big their actions are need to be called out and brought to some kind of justice. I would have done the same as you.
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