Although Jamison uses the structure of the
essay to ‘distance’ herself from the event in question, I still get a sense of
rawness around the subject; her actions say a lot about what she must have been
like at this point in her life, and I get the feeling she wasn’t in the best
state of mind to begin with. She begins by saying how she has been ‘leaving
home’ for years, something that based on insecurities you can pick up later in
the piece, can roughly be translated to ‘running away’ (from what we cannot
tell). She seems desperate to be liked, included, even though she is fully
aware that her status as a foreigner makes this impossible. She suffers through
the microagressions of a societal ‘other’, but I get the impression that the
slurs don’t bother her as much as the creeping sense of not belonging. And,
though she knows it is futile, Jamison continues to force herself into their
circles, she laughs at their jokes, makes them sangria. In the aftermath of the
assault, she falls into numbness - even she doesn’t know how to describe how
she feels (‘Guilt always sounded wrong’). Once again, her actions define her
character more than the narration, how she gets her nose fixed as though
removing the evidence will remove the memories (just like how ‘leaving’ means a
new slate, a new beginning). She sees an ex, maybe so someone else can be angry
and righteous about what happened to her and feel what it seems she cannot.
Mainly, I think, this piece is about how she feels she has failed as the ‘hero’
of her own story - she does not win, she does not fight back, she just goes on,
conflicted and confused, even more a stranger to herself than she was to begin
with.
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