When I was seventeen
I will put a trigger warning here, because my terrible day should not make other people feel terrible. I was raped when I was seventeen.
I will be blunt, I was a massive flirt and slept around a lot when I was younger. I did not view sleeping with people as anything other than a thing you did. Spoiler alert, I recently had to go to my therapist and we discovered that I was asexual and also aromantic. I view sex as just a thing that can be done but I personally find no value in it. When I was seventeen, I went to a party that my whole high school (or most of it it seemed to me) had gotten an invite to.
It was a nice party and I had my friends there. A boy I had a crush on was also there and we had begun to flirt. He asked me upstairs and I followed him. We got to his room and this part gets fuzzy. I do not recall most of it. I recall we went up to his room, and as we started something clued me in that I wasn't safe. I think I tried to leave and then everything happened. I'm sorry that "everything happened" is not a lot of detail but I have blocked it out. I can not recall anything except that he had a tacky poster in his room and a part of it was torn in the corner.
I couldn't tell you what was on the poster. I recall that the blinds on his windows were the white kind that can break easily since they are cheap and I was so focused on them. I had a bloody nose at the end of it and I was covered in blood. I know I wasn't covered in blood like in a horror movie, but I was wearing a skirt and you could see it.
I walked into the bathroom and lucky me my friend was in there. She saw what happened and then cops. And then cops and then a kit for rape and then nothing. The boy didn't apologize, everyone knew and the boy and his family moved. A year later I was out of high school and I got accepted to a college overseas. I only came back to America about a year and a half ago. I blocked it out so much that I could not tell you where the house is, or the room, or even what the weather was like. I think it was warm but I can not recall. I put that terrible day away in the room where nothing happened.
I like to call it that because anything that goes into that room is a memory that I can never recall. A way for my mind to keep me safe. My therapist doesn't understand HOW I made that room, but she finds nothing wrong with it. Because the room is for me to be safe. Because the terrible day destroyed me, or it tried to.
Jokes on the terrible day. I was born from stardust and a million lives I had to have lived before that terrible day. I refuse to die. So being told I have MS, being told I can never have children, the day I was raped, I refuse to die.
So yes, the terrible day happened, but it did not define me. It happened. It was horrible. I am alive and I will not stop being happy and alive because that day happened. What happened to me has happened to a lot of people, man and woman and everyone in between. But I have moved on from it because I have a life to live. My advice?
Live your life to prove that terrible day, night, and moment wrong. You have things to do and people to prove wrong. You don't have time to mourn what was taken from you, you have time to make yourself something spoken of with fear and awe and something close to reverence. But if fear is still plaguing you, then please get help. I promise the person who is unafraid is beautiful.
