In the heart of Las Vegas, there’s a hotel with a phone that never rings. It’s been silent for over four years. The hotel, a huge casino resort, is busy. Guests check in and check out; gamblers come in the early evenings and stumble out the next morning; and hundreds of rooms are endlessly dirtied and then made clean again by hotel workers. But the phone remains silent. I like to think that the rotating check-in staff are always alert and prepared even for the call that they don’t know is coming. Meanwhile, all the way across the country in New York, I wake up every day and wonder if today is the day that I’ll finally make the hotel phone ring.

Of course, I know that isn’t true. The phone has rung countless times since that morning in June of 2021 that I checked out of that hotel, and nobody is waiting for my call. But to me, it’s frozen in time.

There in that hotel, a little over four years ago, I was raped by a group of men during a three-day trip I took to Las Vegas with two of my best friends. Of the rape, which lasted all night, I remember both too much and too little. I never did anything about it. I didn’t tell anyone who could have done something about it, either, such as the hotel staff or the Las Vegas police. I never considered taking any kind of action at the time, but ever since the possibility has haunted me as a particularly cruel version of a path not taken. And although in my mind, the hotel phone remains permanently available to my call, that isn’t true either—and in more ways than one.

With the passage of time comes the passing of statutory deadlines. There’s no room in the law for my personal combination of indecision, confusion, and avoidance. Put differently, the legal frameworks we have for processing crimes often conflict with our emotional and affective responses to those crimes. But more than anything, the passing of the statutes of limitations for pressing criminal charges against those men has forced me to confront the reasons why I never pursued legal action against them in the first place, although it hasn’t yet allowed me to accept that I never will. To me, there will always be a phone in a Las Vegas hotel waiting for my call.

The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.

The difference between those two answers—prison abolition or that other, never fully articulated sense of my existence in relation to other people in the world—is not a question of competing ideologies. It’s not that on a personal level I want to prosecute my rapists but that instead my intellectual and political belief in abolitionism prevails. Rather, it is a different and more complicated question of what it is that separates a feeling from a thought: what separates an inchoate mess of affects, drives, impulses and sensations from the clear-mindedness of a deeply held political ideal.

https://archive.is/5AgDv#

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5827519&forum_id=2).#49624613)