Riet Not Diot

My hands are crusted with carmine flakes of dried blood coming off my skin, and there are brown stains of dried blood all over my clothes, only some of which are from my periods.
I have been smashing in glass windows like when I was a teenager.
Throwing strops like when I was a little kid.
The taxi driver in the late evening invited me to stay at his house. I took my usual precautions and asked whether he lived with his family. Yes, he said, with his wife and little boy. It just turned out that when we arrived at the apartment, they both had gone to see a relative. He kept saying, “she’ll be back soon”, but the wife never came. The inevitable happened: The guy tried to sneak a look at me when taking a shower, asked me whether at home in Europe I would wear what I was wearing and not shorts ending above the knee, -as if that would make me an extremely easy girl-, and was actually holding his hand on his crotch while he was asking me that, too. Ultimately, of course, he asked to sleep next to me. Usually I would leave the house in such a situation, but it was after midnight and he hadn’t actually tried to touch me, so I quickly took a room that I could lock from the inside and went to bed. It turned out fine. I slept till the morning and left the flat.

Nothing worse than that. However, as I stepped outside the house, I picked up half a brick and tried to smash in his car windows. I left out the windshield which is built of safety glass, with layers of plastic between, and so basically unbreakable. Althought they sometimes break with a single large pebble launched hard enough, this time around it took me several tries on the side windows, but I finally broke one of them, plus the car’s back window. I had to use both my hands to hold the stone, since my right hand was already weak from the previous day’s excesses –A soft drink vendor asked me for sex and I punched in his shop window with my bare fist. That the shop window actually broke was to my own surprise. I had to pull out my hand bleeding all over.
My second to last week in Iran, when my nerves were already thread-bare, I threw an item of canned food at some old fat guy who annoyed me with nothing more than a muttered "Masha'allah" (the equivalent of a wolf whistle in Europe) as I walked by on the street. A tree of sparkling blood branching down his forehead soon became the most appealing aspect of his physique. Had he been young and cute, I would have still thrown the can, although I might have cared less about throwing it that hard.
Other misadventrues include slapping as hard as I could a man sitting behind me on the bus trying to grope me, and emptying the content of an ice-cold water-bottle on a man in the city offering me a hundred dollars if I fucked him. The other three times someone grabbed my ass on the street and the other sixty-seven times I got verbally sexually harassed are, of course, not even worth mentioning.

By the way, I had a much better memory of the behavior of Iranian men from my first trip four years ago. That just goes to show that the tombola of one-off trips can yield very different impressions.