A Gentle Touch

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “A Gentle Touch” by Courtney Bowers. Courtney is a writer based in Austin, Texas. For her newsletter, Half Life, she writes essays exploring human nature, digital wellness, and pop culture. She has a degree in Creative Writing from Miami University (Ohio). This is her first publication.

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The same week a man groped me in Bali, another man put a gun to a woman’s head halfway across the world in my rural hometown. He waited for her outside the Dollar General, stole all the cash in her purse, and threw her phone away before making her drive him down dark country highways in her little red car.

I was in a hostel cafe in Canggu, nursing a tender, bruised chest and counting down the hours until I could finally leave for the airport when my mom texted me the news. I’d cried a lot since my assault and cried more tears for this young woman, who’d been a few grades behind me in school, whose older brother had once been best friends with mine, whose experience was far more harrowing but still linked us in this great cosmic joke.

Part of the appeal of a small town is that supposedly things like this don’t happen. It’s safe. Only when you leave your bubble do you get yourself into bad situations, something I’d let myself believe for too long, something I returned to in those days as a sort of mantra, as if I’d brought this all on myself by leaving.

Clearly, though, bad things can happen anywhere—even in paradise, whatever that looks like to you.

–

People go to Bali for all sorts of reasons, most of them related to self-discovery and parties. I’d been there for six weeks, presumably to complete a cheap 200-hour yoga teacher training but mostly to delay returning to the US after a year abroad. A tropical island nearly 10,000 miles from home seemed as good a place as any to escape the real world for a little while longer.

Despite envisioning it as a paradise that would bring me Gilbertian levels of clarity and peace, I struggled in Bali, never quite finding my footing nor the sense of belonging it seemed like everyone else had. It was the farthest I’d ever been from home, and it felt like it.

In cafes that were beautiful, if not vaguely dystopian in their identical features, I couldn’t shake the thought of modern-day colonizers. No, the tourists weren’t gleefully burning down entire cities the second we pulled into port, but we weren’t exactly building up the local culture either. We ate mostly Western foods and enjoyed being waited on hand and foot by smiling locals who spoke near-perfect English while we could barely muster a terima kasih.

At the beach, Balinese women swam in leggings and tunics, only their feet and faces showing. If real life were a movie, the camera would pan over from the five or six locals in the ocean to rows and rows of tourists in bikinis at the beach club behind them. If you were blonde, like my friend Klara who looked strikingly like Ashlee Simpson, young Balinese men would approach you in groups of three or four and ask if they could talk to you while their friend filmed the whole spectacle. Initially, it was intriguing: what do they want these videos for, where they’re simply talking to a foreigner on the beach? Before long, you realize it’s to show off to their friends, to prove how much of a ladies’ man they are.

I hadn’t learned any of this when I read endless travel blogs and Lonely Planet guides and, yes, Eat Pray Love when planning this trip. I knew you shouldn’t drink the water and should leave the cash offerings intended for the Hindu gods. I was warned that getting a taxi would be a fraught experience, mafia-like in its operations. No one mentioned there would be plastic bottles and trash discarded in every gutter and ditch and that motorbikes were truly the only way to get around.

You could walk, in theory, but it was generally not advised since you’d mostly be on unprotected shoulders, getting yelled at by motorists zooming by. I’d had no experience riding scooters and shuddered at the burns I saw on peoples’ legs and the accidents I passed every day, so I had no desire to learn. If a girl in my course offered me a ride, I white-knuckled through it, certain we were going to be the next ones found in a ditch, and politely declined the next time to walk instead.

It makes you a target, we’d been told by articles and videos and our yoga teachers. “When you walk on the road,” they warned us, “make sure you walk on the opposite side of bike traffic. Have your bag on the opposite shoulder, too, so they can’t snatch it.”

I did everything right, or so I thought. On the day I was groped, I was walking with a friend from my class, a spirited Aussie named Mia (safety in numbers, check). It was broad daylight (a sunny Sunday morning, check). My clothes were as modest as could be, given the temperatures exceeding 90°F (high-cut white tank top and loose shorts, check). My bag was safe and secure (clutched in my hand on my left shoulder, check).

Mia and I chatted companionably about who knows what, really. Behind us, I heard a motorcycle approach, stopping alongside us and didn’t think anything of it. We were on a main road leading into town, and often while walking one of the girls from class would stop on their bike to say hello or offer a ride. Suddenly it felt like talons were on my breast, and the motorist squeezed and yanked like he was trying to pull it clean off the muscle. I could have sworn it snapped back into place when he let go.

When I looked up, there was a faceless man, his helmet visor pulled low. Still, I felt like he was looking straight into my eyes, gauging my reaction, before he drove off and disappeared around the corner. Maybe it seems silly now, but for a second I found myself thinking, Was that Klara? She had a habit of showing her affection by leaning down from her five-foot-ten-inches to rest her head on my shoulder and lay a gentle hand on my chest.

It wasn’t my friend, though. Of course not. It was a random man, I assumed Balinese, and then I assumed he’d had really bad aim since he’d grabbed the breast closest to the road when my tote bag was on the shoulder farther away. Mia put her arm around me and guided us to a driveway across the road. I’m fine, I’m fine, that’s so weird, he totally missed my bag, I remember saying in a ramble, as we walked on to meet friends at yet another open-air cafe.

Was my face blank the whole time, distant and dissociated? Did I chat at all or attempt to crack a joke? What did I order, and did I eat any of it? I couldn’t tell you. I was just waiting for it to be over, hoping someone would take me back to the shala. In the end, I walked back alone, clutching my bag to my chest and clenching my shoulders and jaw anytime I heard the tell-tale rumble of a motorbike approaching.

What had happened was probably my mom’s worst nightmare, what she feared most when I told her I was going to Indonesia in the first place, so I knew I couldn’t confide in her. Instead, I messaged one of the teachers running the training. An older Scandinavian woman, she had a kind face and had told us she was always available to us, which I’d believed. Even though we rarely spoke, and sometimes I felt like she was looking beyond me during class, I hoped she would have some comforting words or else some yogic guidance to put it all into perspective.

Hours passed before her reply came through: I’m sorry this happened to you, it’s very common here, it’s a compliment, don’t worry, you’re safe, no one is going to kidnap you.

–

It hadn’t been an accident. It wasn’t a robbery gone wrong. He had always meant to assault me, to make himself bigger at my expense and without my consent. I hadn’t known that could happen in Bali either.

Our teacher never checked back in, even as I sat in the back of the room by myself during most of the remaining classes. At our graduation ceremony, I accepted my certificate from her with limp wrists and avoided her eyes, then checked into a new hostel where I spent most of my time watching old episodes of reality TV, crying to Simon & Garfunkel songs, and counting down the hours until I could go look for America myself.

–

A few weeks after returning home, I got a text from Klara, who’d moved on to Thailand after our training and was generally having the sort of magical time one attracts when one is easygoing and self-assured. She’d already detailed meeting many new friends, seeing incredible local dances, and immersing herself in Thai culture. I was both happy for her and a bit jealous that she was having the experiences I first imagined when I flew to Southeast Asia, and I opened the messages expecting more of the same tales.

But this was a different story.

“What happened to you in Bali just happened to me here,” she wrote and then described her own assault, this time in a local market. Our stories were uncanny, nearly identical, but she’d been totally alone. No one tried to help. No one comforted her in the aftermath.

It’s hard to know how to hold someone’s pain, how to make it better. Mia, who’d been with me on the way to brunch that day, later said to me, “I put my arm around you right away afterwards on purpose. I didn’t want his hands to be the last ones that touched you.”

I wished I could hug Klara, put a hand on her shoulder, tell her it was all going to be all right, that it wasn’t her fault. I wanted to tell her that things will change one day, and I wanted to believe that too.

But it’s now been more than six years. I never told my family what happened to me in Bali and have hardly told any friends. The beaches are still full of women covering up, and the society we live in still encourages behavior that demeans women. The world still teaches us at every turn that it’s unsafe to be a woman in this world, that you should stay in your little bubble lest something bad happen and that you shouldn’t speak up because anything that’s happened is

all

your

fault.

–

In the end, my former high school classmate got away and was okay, physically unharmed by some miracle. Legally, it was all pretty straightforward. Her kidnapper turned himself in to the police, apologized at his trial, and went to jail.

It was her faith that saved her, she later said, speaking at a local winery about the whole nightmare. When she asked God what to do, He told her to pray with this man. With one hand on the steering wheel, she reached for his and began to pray out loud. The kidnapper ripped his hand from hers, put his gun to her head, and ordered her to pull over where he jumped into the driver’s seat and sped off into the dark night.

It was faith, she said. That’s what she believes, and that’s what matters. But sometimes, when it’s late at night and I’m thinking of walking along the side of a road in Bali on a sunny Sunday morning, I wonder if it were simply the touch of a hand—gentle, soft, human—that jolted him awake and reminded him of his humanity—and hers.