I have dreams about you. I lie in bed and can’t stop squirming, tears running down my face in a cold sweat. Love is not the right word for the emotions that keep me tossing and turning. Love is the farthest thing from the reaches of my vocabulary when describing what I feel for you. I’ve been told I should feel angry, hurt, sad, but all I feel is emptiness and an aching pain that has resided in the center of my chest for more years than I can count. I don’t want your pity. I want your vocal chords to be sliced so that you can’t be heard when you need voice the most. That is, after all, how you left me -- without voice, without words, without feeling. Lying on a bed in a haze with nothing but grief for what had been done to me. To the man I can’t stop thinking about, you took something from me that I can’t figure out how to get back.
Loving myself or anything else since you ruined me has been nearly impossible. I have a new lover now who is kind, gentle, sweet, funny and knows when I need him the most. However, remembering that he won’t leave me when I’m broken, won’t hurt me, is something I struggle with. I know this is all because of you. For the longest time, I denied myself reality. I hurt myself and let myself fall apart while refusing to realize why. I know now how much you affected me. I know now how much you broke me. I cycled through hate and love, trying to find peace with myself but not knowing how. I always believed that something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t perfect and that’s what made me broken. I always believed people didn’t like broken things. Maybe I never would have thought that if I’d never met you.
The reality of what happened still shakes me. My lover wakes in the night to hold me, to tell me that everything is okay, that my nightmare isn’t real. Sometimes I mistake him for you and I fight back, trying to protect myself with the strength I didn’t have when you and I were together. The reality is that in one night, you took away all the self-confidence cultivated in my years on this Earth, that you stripped me of my backbone and replaced it with a mush of insecurity and fragility and expected it to hold me up for the rest of my life. You took my virginity, my happiness, my kindness, my trust, my faith, my love, my innocence. I don’t have very many words for such a stain on human existence. I don’t have many words for what happened to me in general. I only hope that you lie awake some nights and remember what you did, remember how you ruined me, and feel half as much pain as I do for you.
Your rape victim,
Sydney
