Survivor Story 2-TRIGGER WARNING

I’ve spent my life as a pretty girl. I know some of you are rolling your eyes at this sentence, believing that this is another ‘woe is me’ story of the struggles of being beautiful. Instead, it’s yet another rape story.

“Your body is perfect.”

A partner. An empty house. Multiple no’s. Tears. Scars. PTSD.

I don’t want to be doing this.

The thought, clear as day, raced through my mind as I lay unable to move. If I moved, it would be real. If I got up, my life would change. I didn’t know that it already had.

After he was done, I quietly sat at the edge of my bed, my mind and heart racing. He got up, laughing, as if he hadn’t sexually assaulted me, mere minutes ago.

Twenty minutes ago, he’d laughed when I had said no.

“No,” he mocked, laughing. “You’re so cute.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Yeah, yeah, relax bub.”

That laugh, that nonchalant dismissal chilled me for months to come.

“I have the best girlfriend in the world,” he proclaimed, while I smiled weakly.

Maybe he didn’t hear me the first time-or the third, or fourth, or fifth. Maybe he mistook my frozen, stiff body for arousal, maybe I was overreacting. Maybe it was being taught that sometimes you have to encounter pain for the people that you love.

This couldn’t be happening to me. Months prior, I’d had another experience with sexual harassment. But that was with strangers in an unfamiliar place. This was me and him, accomplished, bright teenagers who had been dating for months. He was one of the good guys-right?

“You should probably go.” I cleared my throat, briefly questioning why my smile was slipping so fast. “I have that meeting, na?”

He held me by my shoulders, smiling while he leaned in to kiss me again. Once again, I was frozen on the spot, feeling like an outsider watching a horror movie, screaming at the protagonist to scream, to hit, to run away. Instead, I smiled politely as I led him to the door, wondering why I felt so empty.

I didn’t want to file an FIR. I didn’t want to get a rape test done, or have my childhood bedroom turn into a crime scene. I wanted to run away. I wanted to throw away the body that it had happened to.

A few hours after calling my furious and concerned best friends, I hesitantly texted him, telling him I was uncomfortable with everything that had happened that evening.

I said I was sorry. But you did say yes earlier, right? I love you, I’d never hurt you.

Having your body taken away from you is a dehumanizing experience. It takes your voice, your autonomy, your will to live. I wanted to die on my birthday. I chose not to, for the pain it would bring to my best friend and my mother.

Months later, I still get flashbacks in the middle of the night. The panic attacks did eventually subside, but occasionally visit me, even here, even now.

He still calls it a mistake rather than rape. He prefers to think of himself as an ambitious changemaker rather than a predator. He thinks those are dangerous terms. He still thinks of me as a crazy whore rather than a survivor. He looks back on it as the wrong place, wrong time, wrong girl. I look back at it as the worst thing that ever happened to me.