Category: Rape
The Misguided Truths of After
Below is my personal essay that I referenced in my last post. I worked through emotions and day-night to bring it to life. Always spread love. +warning: can be a trigger so please read with caution+
L&L,
Dre
It rises slowly, and then it’s washing over you like rain and thunder rolls and you aren’t sure when it’s going to stop, so you wait and you wait and you learn to love the rain because you can weather the storms that have yet to come. What no one tells you after is all the things you have to work through. For instance going to bed became torture, it felt like everywhere someone was breathing on me, making it impossible to sleep. Instead filling my nights that would turn into days with heavy eyes. Or when you have to buy plan B in hopes that you aren’t pregnant and it feels like your skin is crawling as you stand in the line at CVS hoping no one pays attention to the box in your hand or the fact that they undoubtedly characterize you as careless. No one explains that the feeling of numbness will be there long after, and no matter how hard you try to explain it feels like no one understands. There isn’t a pamphlet to walk you through the steps of after at planned parenthood where you go to get a free STD screening because god forbid you have been plagued with a disease you didn’t plan on, but I didn’t plan on being raped either. It’s uncomfortable having to explain that no you’re not sexually active, but someone decided that you were ready, and that their hands could race over your body like race cars and with every no, they found a way to muffle your voice and take away any sound you could have made. There is no right way to explain to your mother every time you call her and burst into tears, because you don’t want her to accuse you of “being too drunk” or “giving the wrong impression”. It never gets easier when you struggle with men’s intentions, or deciding if you can somehow learn to not be so tense. It makes you feel cheap, dirty and unworthy of anyone who may seem to want you. I never read in textbooks about the insecurities you’ll have or a guideline on how to tell your friends. There was never the perfect response for why you never brought anyone home from the bar, or why you didn’t flirt a little more. It becomes a series of doubts and questions followed by the confusion of if you’ll ever get to just enjoy going out. It feels like you are constantly running on E, and looking for a stop to get gas in the middle of nowhere and you panic. It builds a wall inside you with the bricks growing each day, and then you have to learn to break them down again.
It makes you question why more people aren’t talking about this, instead of feeling ashamed and hidden. Why aren’t we coming from behind the cracks of the walls and asking for answers that have been placed on the exam we didn’t study for because we never knew we needed too. Yet, there’s this expectation that we knew the answers all along. They were outlined on the walls of the dirty bathrooms in dive bars and in the reflection of the mirrors we find ourselves staring at. We are just foolish to think it could never be us, and then it was. The PTSD comes in waves, like when you’re alone for the first time with a boy, and you cry or the thought of him removing your clothes makes you want to scream. Casual sex is no longer an option. It is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving that you didn’t ask for, and the shelf full of the knacks that come with it are making a collection. All you are really waiting for is the sun to touch your skin, and warm the places you’ve allowed to become cold. All you want is a hand to intertwine with your own and hold it everytime it starts getting dark and the sun starts to hide behind the clouds like your thoughts. You learn to mask your disappointment, your hurt and the pain and layer it with the illusion of happiness and eventually it works and you have out done yourself for being able to manipulate your own feelings and mold them to spare others from bearing the weight you are carrying and will carry with you. Often times you will find yourself doing this more and more until there just isn’t anything to feel and you just pass through.
Rape is lonely, and quiet. Yet it finds a way to remind you. Each time someone gets close, you find an excuse to turn them away. You no longer see people with the same eyes, or trust with the same heart. It’s funny because for the longest time, I didn’t talk about any of it.
Time seemed to overlap, and days became weeks which turned into months. It was like breaking a bone. The pain excruciating for months, then it heals and sometimes you’ll feel a weird pain but it’s never the same pain, it’s more manageable. I started to write more poetry, because I found it an escape from a harsher, colder reality. Through my writing I realized I craved intimacy, but not enough to explore it or go out of my way to find it. It scared me more than anything, the idea of giving myself to someone in a way that I couldn’t take back. I am constantly surrounded by the temptation of one night stands, warm bodies that will find their way to the door the next day only creating a tic for tac, a number to add to a growing list. I am constantly searching for more in a place that doesn’t seem to offer it, making me wonder if my standards are too high.
The insecurities didn’t start when a piece of me was taken. It started long before any of these things fell into my lap, at a kitchen table. When I think of my kitchen table, I look at all the things it robbed me of; confidence, love, and instead replacing it with doubt, confusion and hurt. I haven’t sat at my kitchen table in over eight years and somehow it still wins. The kitchen table raised me, it brought me up to feel that my image and my looks were greater and more important than my intelligence and heart. The worn out seat that I sat at every night became the place I dreaded, the insecurities I formed sitting in my chair only developed as I got older. It became harder to not see me sitting in that same chair feeling defeated and alone. More times than not it has carried this weight physically and mentally in me. In my life I have let people hurt me, and make me see someone I wouldn’t recognize in a mirror. It makes me wonder if I have allowed that feeling of defeat that I felt in that chair so many times carry me throughout my life and every time I tried to leave it was crawling back to me. Like it was waiting for me like an old friend, worn and patient wanting another chance to remind me why I left it behind to begin with. It makes me wonder the what ifs, something I try not to dwell on too much. But what if instead of making me feel like I was and always would be unlovable, the possibility the I could be loved? I wonder if I wouldn’t suffer from complexion and self-worth issues, or if I would have learned to love myself a little more? It makes me wonder if I had taken a stand in that worn out, wicker chair would I have been better at letting people hurt me and made the right friends?
My dad is the kitchen table that I constantly find myself pushing away from. I struggle to find this relationship with my dad in a way that in my age of twenty-two I wouldn’t believe possible. We are more alike than we are different, yet can never be on the same page. It doesn’t matter how hard efforts are exhausted on both sides, it just matters that they always end in silence and dead dial tones. As I’ve grown older, I realized how much I excused much of my dad’s behavior out of love. To love someone who constantly hurts you, and ultimately takes your innocence to replace with confusion. I find myself making excuses for him, he was never an alcoholic, or even a drug addict. His illness is deeper, cutting forms that came out in rages,broken plates and fists against plaster walls. It was the release of bruised eyes I ignored growing up, and the control that no one had the manual to except for him navigating his way through us. I was never on the other end of those rages, and then I was. With every fist, and kick and scream he picked me away until I wasn’t there. We have struggled every day since. His illness is torture and beautiful all at once. One minute he is the tornado destroying the path in his way, and then he is water, calm, emotional and sensitive. I fear love in the way people fear dying. My instability with my dad has caused me to picture all men as broken frames. I have categorized them as confusing, and sometimes when I know it’s wrong I refuse to give them a chance. It’s the reason I held onto my virginity and didn’t let anyone in. It meant that I was waiting for someone to prove me wrong, to show me that they earned the trust I try so hard to find in blurred lines. I can’t even say that I think love exist without being cynical of someone’s ability to truly give themselves to someone else and still say that they are reaching their own dreams without compromising, or were the same person before they fell in love.
He smelled like Jack Daniel’s and cheap beer, something that earlier in the night I hadn’t bothered to really pay attention too. We had only really said hello because of formality, my sister had insisted she introduce me to all of her friends. I usually tend to cower behind her, where she demands attention as soon as she walks into a room, I tend to fall back, an observer whose hyper aware of surroundings. Like the fact that their was wrappers all over the counter, or more pillows (fifteen to be exact) on the couch. Time became a blur and it felt like we had only gotten there a short while before, but really had been there for four hours and while everyone found themselves in slumber I was too wired to find the comfort of sleep.
It felt like he came out of nowhere, one moment he was coming through the sliding backdoors and then he was on top of me. It’s strange because I’ve always been told how strong I am, yet I couldn’t get the weight of him off of me. After what felt like forever, I became this state of numb. I no longer resisted what I knew was coming. Up until this point I had only been kissed once and it was in a game, so it was silly. All my life I had envisioned this moment to be like everything I had ever read about. Instead it was on this dirty couch, in a stranger’s home. This kiss felt empty, nothing like the sparks or feeling of magic. I remember feeling defeat, my mind working through things I still had to work on for class the next week, it’s funny how in situations your mind finds things to escape you from the moment. I gave a final attempt to move from under his humidity, and it felt like he became a boulder. Then it was the removal of clothing, my mind still stuck on assignments as I organized them in my mind. I kept telling myself if I closed my eyes, it couldn’t be real. I wanted so badly to call out for someone, in hopes that they would wake up and help me but couldn’t find the words. Yet I just focused on closing my eyes, and when I opened them his face was still breathing into mine, so I would close them again and when it was finally over and he finally let go of my wrists I moved from under him, I stumbled out of his reach and picked my clothes up from the floor, I stumbled from my legs shaking so hard and crawled to the bathroom trying to save any dignity I had left. I threw up twice, and didn’t know what to think as I put my clothes back on and slept on the bathroom mat. The next morning, I told my sister I had drank too much and got sick and fell asleep on the floor. She laughed and told me what a rookie I was, I smiled and pretended my chest wasn’t going to explode.
I lost footing trying to find a direction, and then I was face first in the pavement. I have been making excuses ever since. I buried this deep inside, constantly pretending that it didn’t happen. I even romanticized it because it was easier and less scary. I blamed myself for over drinking, and sleeping on the couch. I started to tell myself that if I had worn jeans and not leggings or a t-shirt instead of the v-neck it would have been better. I lied to myself when I said that “we were just drunk and it meant nothing” when it in fact was everything. I became angry and tired. I was exhausted of always giving myself away and wanted so badly to just be seen. I excused my dad’s hands as in the moment, an act of love in the form of violence. How could the same person who held you at birth, carried you until you could walk and kissed your forehead goodnight be the same person whose hands treated you like a stranger. It was blinding, but my vision has always been off. Even now I constantly find myself forgiving him and making excuses in hopes that I can somehow erase what has been done. I find myself imagining this world in which my dad turned out to be the guy I grew up thinking he was before I realized the truth. I set myself up to be disappointed, and it has caused for me to carry a blame that I haven’t found how to shake. Through therapy I was suggested to learn to have open dialogue and express the way I was feeling in order to move forward. For a long time I kept those thoughts in my journals because I didn’t want what I said to come off as hurtful. The irony in that even surprises me as I write this now. Every time I have approached my dad, he finds a way to shut me out. He makes me feel like I have imagined these dark, hateful thoughts and that I have created him as the villain of my story and he wants a better ending and I don’t think I can give him that. I’m not even sure that I picture any relationship, and that is sadder than what I have now. He is still navigating my life, and I am the boat lost at sea trying to find my way back.
Over Thanksgiving I visited with my sister. Everyone is out and this time I am old enough to go to a bar. Our eyes met the whole time, he’s always had that charm since I met him three years ago in the Spring. He’s throwing back vodka red bulls like they were unlimited and at his dispense. He controls the room, not intentionally but he is charismatic and draws people in. Last call was rang, and we made our way to ubers to get us home. We made it back to his apartment, and did what we always did since we met. We listened to music, and danced around the living room weaving ourselves in and around the couches pretending that the neighbors couldn’t hear our terrible voices singing “Take Me to Church” and drank a little more. I had done this so many times before, that it was what I looked forward to the most. Singing, dancing and talking about anything because it was easy, there was nothing hard or complicated about it. Yet none of those times felt like this. This was different. One minute we are around the coffee table bumping knees, and the next we are hands in hair, grabbing onto each other, biting lips and breathing heavy. Yet, even as I held him closer, I started to feel myself fall into this dark hole. The closer we got, the more my heart raced and it felt like I couldn’t breathe. All around me I felt the way I did in elevators. Stuck and waiting to get to the floor I needed before I panicked from the closeness. I was in control this time, and didn’t know what that felt like. It was empowering and scary all at once. I got to decide what was next, or what wasn’t and it was beautiful.
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