Content warning: sexual assault

To the gentleman who winked at me as he was walking down the aisle of a Boeing 737 looking for his seat:

I was 14 the first time I thought I understood – and then actually understood – a guy’s wink. A freshman in high school, I initially felt flattered that a senior had asked me out. After dinner, I thought our date was over. I expected him to drop me off. He had other plans; he turned down my street but continued driving past my house without slowing even slightly. Then Brent winked at me. Your wink floats me into that same nauseating vertigo I felt as I saw the safety of home retreating behind me with the seatbelt holding me firmly in the passenger seat of his old VW van, and later as I stood over the bathroom sink, desperately trying to brush the taste of him off my tongue. Your wink presses against my thigh like the fingerprint bruises left by a college boyfriend. Your wink clicks like the office door Dr. Jones locked behind me when I had brought him the edited version of the cardiology research he would submit to the Journal of the American Medical Association for publication. Your wink squeezes my ass like the wandering hand of the professional who had represented my husband and me in a real estate transaction. Initially, I doubted myself. I thought, That did not just happen. He squeezed again. My husband was standing just a few feet away.

Think about this: if this plane – center aisle with three seats on each side – were full entirely of women, everyone you see gazing out from a window seat has been sexually assaulted. No, wait. Imagine instead that the women in every aisle seat are the sexual assault survivors. They stare at you, not smiling, as you make your way to the back of the plane. Their eyes are wide open. Don’t you dare blink or look down at your shoes or above their heads to find a seat number or an empty overhead bin. Look into their eyes of every shape and color and imagine what they’ve gone through to get here.

I recently met a woman, a sexual assault survivor herself, whose mother had been raped and then murdered. She told me she decided never to have children, because she knows that she could never protect a daughter from rape. This seems to me to be a completely rational decision in a world of men who wink.

Charlotte Maya is the author of Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Resilience (Post Hill Press, 2023). She has published essays on grief, loss, suicide, and hope in the New York Times (Modern Love and Tiny Love Stories), Hippocampus Magazine, Brevity Blog, and Writers' Digest. Charlotte earned a B.A. in English literature from Rice University and a J.D. from UCLA. She lives in Southern California with her husband and enjoys hiking in the local foothills and downward-dogging with her so-called hunting dog.