joyce carol oates.
To date, the most painfully beautiful and apt fictionalized description of disassociating and the kind of out-of-body experience that I experienced for years in the worse moments of the sexual abuse:
Someone takes her arm. Good. To be held safe, good. Her arm is held tight, impatiently, and she feels her body emptying out, her head emptying out...her body turns into a delicate, fleshly shell and is very thin. A man's voice is saying something near her ear. The tinkle of coins. Traffic horns. The smell of exhaust smoke. She is already on the bus, with her mother still gripping her, when she turns and sees her self step out of her body, with a sudden convulsive movement, freeing itself, escaping. This self is her. It steps down to the sidewalk again, pushing past other people who want to get on the bus. It glances back up at her. Everything rushes out of Maureen now and joins that other body, that free body, running away...it is like the terrible pressure of water wanting to burst free. Now she yearns to join that body, get loose, scream with pain and terror of getting loose...
SIT HERE, SIT STILL. FOR CHRIST'S SAKE, says her mother.
She sits. She turns wildly to look through the window, to where her other self stands on the sidewalk. Crowds pass. People, strangers, seem to break around her, not touching her. They pass around her. They become invisible while she herself, that other self, becomes vivid and dazzling, standing on the sidewalk with her head turned back at a painful angle, looking at Maureen on the bus, her face guilty and wild.
excerpted from Them by Joyce Carol Oates.