*This monologue contains sensitive subject matter about sexual assault.*
“Hi, uh, I’m Meggy Harmon, and this is my poem ‘Oxychain,’ a combination of ‘oxygen’ and ‘chains.’ Honestly, because this is a poetry slam, I didn’t really write out a poem. This is more improv; a, uh, stream of consciousness, really. I just have a lot of crap I’ve been thinking about. I know some of y’all are out there thinking I’m lazy and stupid for not writing something out, and, to me, you’re part of the problem.”
“See, I’m 18, and I wish badly as hell that I was in my twenties and alone. I look at the people around me, every day at school, and I feel like they’re all acting like they’re high on meth. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, I hear you. Why are you even here? God, this isn’t funny. I know it’s human instinct to laugh at funny stuff, but damn, restrain yourselves.”
“I have this friend, and her name is, uh, Clarissa. She just got out of this relationship, and it was so damn abusive, I can’t believe they were together for almost a year. Yeah, a year of him cheating and lying and… They fought once and he ignored her for four days. She cried to me and told me it’s all her fault. And after he dumped her, she cried every day about him until we graduated.”
“My other friend, um, Jeannie… We tried to get her out of it. Sometimes Jeannie chooses not to start conflict and let people run over her, and I begged her to help me so for one damn time I wouldn’t fight alone. I begged. Anyway, we tried to get Clarissa out, but, in the end, the only thing that got her out was him leaving her.”
“After her fourth week of crying I met with her and told her to stop that crap and realize that high school would be done soon and, God, he didn’t matter. He shouldn’t. I told her about other stuff he did and it made her cry more. Stuff like sending unsolicited nudes and…He did some stuff to me. Grabbed my chest and butt like he owned them, and also my, um, inner thigh. I told this to Jeannie and she made me tell our teacher. That was the only time she dragged me around, and that changed some stuff. I think she was confident because no one else would hear me besides our teacher.”
“Yeah, my teacher was pretty cool about it. He said he’d talk to Ch… um, Clarissa’s ex. He did, literally five minutes after I left his office. I blocked the dude on everything: Instagram, Snapchat… I feel really awkward talking about it so openly. Like, I don’t know, I’ve been told that victims of sexual assault don’t like to talk about it. It makes me think that I’m not actually a victim because I speak up.”
“I kind of wonder what he did to Clarissa. She said they did it only a couple weeks into the relationship. She always said before that she was asexual. I wonder if he changed that, not that I’m saying ace people can’t want sex. God, I want to stop worrying about her. It’s a natural worry to have, right? Who else he might’ve assaulted?”
“Anyway, he wrote this whole ass apology and texted it to Jeannie’s boyfriend… They’re good friends. Jeannie’s boyfriend sent it to me and I said I didn’t accept it, and man he made me feel like a bitch. I told Jeannie that my body only partially felt like mine, that some of it felt like a commons for anyone to partake in. Jeannie’s boyfriend has kinda done things like that before.”
“I dated this guy a while back… His name’s Alwyn. He doesn’t hate me anymore, I think. He’s also close with Jeannie’s boyfriend. Let’s just call her boyfriend T, because I mention him a lot. In essence, Alwyn dumped my ass, and a few times he thought he missed me. I thought he missed me. T told him that I was toxic and that, when we talked about our boundaries and sex and stuff, I tried to pressure Alwyn into things with me. I became scared as hell because I was eighteen then, too, and he was fifteen… I’m an idiot. We didn’t do anything, but God, T made me feel awful, because someone told him I wasn’t a virgin and I guess that changed everyone’s opinion of me.”
“I don’t even know half of the time who in our friend group is out there saying stuff about me. Everyone lies. They’re crazy and they’re the only people I have to work with. I sound so arrogant. T was really obsessed with this idea of keeping harmony in the friend group; it’s a cool idea; I’ve always wanted to name my future daughter Harmony; that doesn’t really work out, though. But anyway, he wanted that so badly that he’d try to kick out anyone who he thought disrupted, and he was usually successful, because they all liked him.”
“I kicked someone out once: my best friend since third grade, because she told everyone I was a slut, because of the whole ‘virginity’ thing. She was super religious. I mean, I’m religious, too. I don’t like rules or judgement, I just like God and Jesus, that’s all. We had a Baptist megachurch near the school that I didn’t go to, because I decided I was non-denominational and intentionally alone in my beliefs. Clarissa told me once that she believed in heaven and hell, but a sort of Dante’s Inferno style of hell, and sometimes I wonder if she ever considered, by that system, that she’d be heading to one of the first few circles.”
“I might believe in that too; I’m not sure. Not the sodomy part, though, because I think I’m bisexual. Well, I am, but not the sex part, just romance. I don’t know. My friends think it’s stupid, so I tell people I’m straight when they ask, because I only really want men, anyway.”
“I think my friends control me. My God, I just want to be free. I thought people would be by my side, and they aren’t. They’re all gone except Jeannie, and she stands by T, thinking she’s gonna marry him. I’m scared that, if I was to show up at the wedding, he’d say something like ‘ha ha! Remember when you thought you were assaulted?’ and I’d have to leave the wedding and tell Jeannie that I didn’t like her enough to give up myself.”
“I’m not sure I really like anyone anymore. That’s not true, I like my parents, but I feel like there’s so much they don’t know about what’s going on and I don’t know if I have the heart to tell them. Maybe how I told you guys. I think I lost track of what I intended to say. God, everyone, just please don’t judge people. Being judged is like being invisibly chained… Chained by air. By oxygen. The things that should give you life give you pain. Anyway, I should end this before I start crying, or some embarrassing crap like that. I hope you all enjoyed it, and I’d say that I don’t care if you didn’t, but I do. I care a lot about this. Thank you.”