Content warning: this piece contains sexual assault

I walk up the driveway with a soreness in my inner thighs. It’s 2 a.m. and despite my fatigue, my eyes are wide open. Each move I make towards the front door is so mechanical; it seems that my body has chosen freeze as a stress response. 

I text a friend, something happened tonight that doesn’t feel right. I detail everything you did to me. Megan says, the fact that he tried to do what he did just like isn’t ok.

My friend buys an emergency contraception pill for me so that my mother won’t see the $50 CVS charge on my card. I will pay him back. I swallow the pill alone in my bedroom and throw out the box at a gas station.

Megan shows up at my house the next day with a journal, and on the cover page she has copied a quote from The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, a book that she had gifted to me for my seventeenth birthday: “When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes – often in fact – you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’” At the bottom of the page, Megan has written I’m standing here. Always.

I must put it in writing: July 18th, 2022. I was assaulted this morning around 1 a.m.

About a week later my mother comes into my room quietly in the middle of the day; I have just come home from work. Her cheeks are red, and her hand covers her mouth. She tells me she read the first page of my journal. She knows it was wrong, but she could tell something was going on with me. She’s so sorry. I will forgive her, I think. I tell her that I will be okay as she sobs into my shoulder, and we both know that this may not be true but I know she needs to hear it. 

How could this happen to me? I thought I was smart enough, strong enough. Feminist enough. I read the books. I hear the stories. I know of young women who fall for seductive smiles and money. The electric car and the polo matches were signs of your excessive privilege, but I was blinded by the perceived opportunity to be spoiled. All that I know and I still fell for the peacock, dazzled by colors no one had ever shown me before.

My father blames himself, says he feels like he should have done a better job of teaching me to fight back. My mother thinks it’s her fault, for not teaching me to value my body enough. Who is to blame? Seems like everyone but you. The system, maybe? Which made me think a man who wants to sleep with a girl six years his junior is just charming, just sees me as more than my age, just confirming my maturity? I, of course, think I am to blame. Maybe I should have just said yes, should have been as kinky as you wanted me to be. Maybe I was just vanilla for wanting something gentle, and I should have pretended to like it rough. Since I didn’t physically move away from you, maybe I actually wanted it. Maybe I should have known that a man your age needs sex, needs to finish, and if I wasn’t willing I shouldn’t have come. 

Months later I finally admit to myself that rape fits better than assault. Even still, I find it hard to look back at myself in a mirror and say, “I was raped.” Such an ugly word to read without my eyes quickly shying away to the next one, so hard to push the r through my teeth without hushing my vocal cords. 

Every day I get nervous walking past the Ritz Carlton because I sometimes see a black Tesla parked at the valet that’s the same make and model you drove. When I see it, I am instantly as breathless as I was when my own labored breath fogged up the windows and suffocated me in your back seat. 

My therapist asks me to show myself mercy. “You are only eighteen,” she says, adding that my brain is not fully mature and processing trauma is already a difficult task. But all I hear is that I am so young. I am so young. I find it hard to use my age as justification for self-compassion because doing so makes me look at myself in a way I don’t want to: gullible, and easily targeted. 

She guesses you are charming, seductive, attractive. “Right?” she asks. “Yes.” I whisper. She calls you “slick.” I remember how excited I was to meet you, how you said you wanted to take me out to dinner. But you never meant any of that. All you ever wanted was what you got.

I said I was too tired to keep going, too tired to move from my position on my back across the backseat of your car, and my words meant nothing. You didn’t wrap me up in your arms and tell me that it was okay, in the way I assumed you might. Instead, you moved your hips up to my face and silenced me. I mistakenly admitted to you that I physically could not defend myself, and all you saw was an opportunity.

That night when you drove me home, I found out your last name only by asking, and promptly looked you up as soon as I got out of the car. I found the pictures of you from your father’s campaign, running for Congress on the red side of the ballot, and they haunt me still. Even four years ago, you were still older than I am now. You stand stately, entitled, always with your hands shoved into the pockets of your trousers, never embracing your parents or brothers the way that they embrace you. Your clean shave and bleach-blond crew cut differs from the beard and waves that I met you with, but your smug smile is strikingly the same. The same smile charmed me into the backseat of your car in an unlit parking lot.

You’re the reason my mother tears up every time she asks me if I am okay, and the reason I always say yes because I know she can’t handle hearing otherwise. You’re the reason I hear my father say for the first time that he wants to kill a man. I get so confused coming to terms with this, while still believing that I am the reason. Maybe we are the reason, the only us that will ever exist.

My therapist quotes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk who says, The body keeps the score. She means that the trauma stored in my vagus nerve causes my changes in behavior, that they are not my doing. But I take this to mean something else. The body keeps the score and you win. One point for every bruise you left on me, one point for every dollar I spend on my therapy copays. One for every night out I miss because I am too paralyzed to do anything but shell up in my room, and one for every new man I let inside of me, hoping that just one of them will view me in a way that you didn’t, as something more than an object. 

In the past two weeks, have you had little interest or pleasure in doing things? In the past two weeks, have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless? In the past two weeks, how often have you been feeling tired or had little energy? I’ve all but memorized the questions. Not at all, several days, most days, nearly every day. How about every fucking minute since I lost control of my own body?

The last I saw of the girl who was adventurous and sexy and unreserved was when she sat on your lap with her hands in your hair, you whispering yes, her whispering no into each other’s mouths, sweetly bickering, as if you weren’t asking to violate her body. And even then she was fleeting. She pretended to be flirtatious and unintimidated, but god she was afraid. She never imagined she’d have to say no more than once, never imagined it wouldn’t matter anyway.

You invaded me, pulled me from the inside out and took me with you. I sometimes forget your face, but I remember your voice vividly. “What are you waiting for?” you say, gesturing in between your legs. “Just let me slip it in.” So filthy. So insistent. Sadistic in pushing and breaking my boundaries to stay in control. Always keeping my face out of your field of vision, lost between your thighs or pushed down into the backrest of the car seat. To you, I was inanimate, and for that you are a coward.

Everyone says, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I say, “It’s okay.” Because what else do I say? What else would they say? I don’t know. I sometimes find myself comforting my loved ones, instead, because they truly do not know what to do for me. I don’t think we have it in our vocabulary to express a reaction to this type of incident that fully encapsulates the generations of anguish and grief and rage. 

My mentor – something of a writing adviser, something of a soulmate, something of a motherly figure, maybe – comes close to properly articulating empathy. She cups my hands in hers and stares down at the dining table, utterly hopeless, crushed, despaired because this experience is just too universal. She says, “I would have done anything to spare you.”

Despite all you have taken from me, you will not silence me – not again. For we who were not spared, I will try and find the words, and you will one day hear them.