To lie is to not tell the whole truth. This means that when someone asks you if you're fine and you say, "Yes," when really, you're on the verge of breakdown, you are lying.

To lie is to protect. When the police ask you to choose the man in a line up who most closely resembles your attacker and you say that you don't know, even though you know exactly who it was because he had those eyes — those eyes you can't forget no matter how hard you try — you lie, because you don't want him to go to jail; you lie to protect his rights to a life, a happy life without jail time.

You lie because you don't want to face the truth that you, beautiful smart you, was raped.

To lie is to avoid further conversation. Like when Rebecca from Spanish asks you if you're okay because your eyes are bloodshot and your wrists are bruised and you force a smile and nod yes.

To tell the truth is to expose yourself, making yourself completely vulnerable to the coyotes we call society that rips us to shreds. To tell the truth is to continue the conversation with Rebecca from Spanish class about the bruises on your wrists. To tell the truth is to expose the person who hurt you.

To tell the truth is to expose you.

I lie to Rebecca from Spanish. I tell her the bruises on my wrists are from falling. I tell her the reason why it looks like I haven't slept in days is because I just had a rough night. I tell her that the reason I am so irritable is because of PMS. I lie to Rebecca, countless times. I lie to the girl in gym class the morning after the accident. She asks, "Hey, are you alright? You don't look so well." I lie and tell her, "I'm fine."

But the truth is, I'm not fine. The truth is, I didn't fall, he held me down by my wrists, my wrists so fragile, so brittle, they felt as though they were going to snap beneath the weight of his body. The truth is, I haven't slept since Thursday; it is now Tuesday. The truth is, I am not okay. I smile and tell her instead, "Yeah, I'm fine!" with an unnatural forced smile. A smile so forced that I could pass as a Jack-o-lantern sitting on the steps in the dark, in the cold, alone.

Truth is, I am a Jack-o-lantern. I sit on the outside steps on a frosty October night. in the dark. In the cold. Alone. The only difference between the Jack-o-lantern and I? His smile was less forced than mine. Although, both smiles were fake. We both didn't have a reason to smile on October 17^th, 2015. Maybe it's because it was cold out, or dark out, or the mere fact that we were alone. Perhaps, we just had no reason to smile. Not even a forced smile, because the Jack-o-lantern had just been stomped on and broken. I had just been stomped on and broken. You don't smile after you've been broken, instead you sit in the dark. You sit in the cold. You no longer force a smile. You just sit there, waiting for the cold, dark of the night to whisk you away from reality.

"No" is not a lie. It is not a lie, unless of course someone asks if you're crying and you say "no," in an attempt to avoid further conversation. It is not a cover-up for a shy yes. "No" means no. "No" does not mean "yes" or "maybe;" the truth lies not within the shakiness of my voice whimpering, "No, stop it," but the truth lies within the police records. The truth lies with me on sleepless nights. The truth lies in the bruises on my wrists, on my blood-stained sheets, and in my mind.

The truth, remains.

To lie is for you to deny. It is for you to place the blame onto me, "If you wouldn't have left your bedroom door unlocked, I wouldn't have been able to get in and consume your body which resembles a temple." You place the blame on me so that the coyotes of society have a reason to rip me to shreds for being so "naïve" and "reckless." After all, if you don't lock your bedroom door in your own home at night, you're pretty naïve and reckless, right? This is a lie. You shouldn't feel unsafe enough in your own home to where you feel the need to lock your door at night. You didn't lock your bedroom door, because you never imagined this would happen. Reality's truth is that it can happen to anyone.

To lie for you is to be scared. You don't want the truth to be spoken, especially if that meant that you lost your free-ride to college. To lie is for you to tell everyone it was me, not you. It was me who came onto you, into your home, while you were sleeping in the bed you called home for sixteen years. To lie is for me to say, "You're right," in order to make it all stop.

To tell the truth is to cause drama. To tell the truth is to be seen as the girl who cried rape. So why tell the truth? Why not lie?

We don't lie, because if we did, it would consume and destroy our well-being. If we did lie and say that this accident, this rape, this attack, didn't happen, we then have to live for the rest of our lives with the thought that he isn't being held accountable for the mess that he made. If we did lie about him and say that it didn't happen, it would be in an attempt to avoid further investigation, further questioning. If we lied for him and said he didn't do it, he didn't know what he was doing, we would be killing ourselves and allowing him to get off the hook. We are lying for him to benefit him, when all he did was destroy us for his own personal satisfaction.

He knew what he was doing. He knew that you sleeping was not giving consent. He knew that you didn't want this based on how you fought back. By lying for him, lying to ourselves, rather, we, as victims, are saving him from a "miserable" life in jail. When we lie to save him from a miserable life, often times we don't think to consider how our lives from now on may not be miserable, but rather different — different in the sense that we now have new triggers.

We now have places we can't go to without crying. We now can't see the color yellow without seeing him. We can't see yellow because yellow was the color of the comforter that caressed your body and protected you against the cold. We can't see yellow because yellow is the sun and the sun represents warmth and new beginnings. We can't see yellow or the sun without seeing him. We are now the ones with a difficult life.

By lying for him, we are taking on the pain that he caused to a whole new level. After all, how can we live with ourselves knowing the man who raped us is not going to be held accountable for it? How can we, as victims, live knowing that he is going to do it again, maybe not to us, but to someone else, someone equally as innocent and pure as we were?

We often lie for him because we are so emotionally worn that the thought of having to put up yet another fight makes us want to be done with the questions, the rumors, the scars, and quite frankly, life itself. We don't lie for him because we feel bad for him. After all, why should we feel bad for someone who broke us as woman? Why should we feel bad for someone who knew what they were doing when they raped us?

We should not feel bad. The truth is, victims shouldn't have to feel bad, emotionally exhausted, or remorseful when someone else, someone who didn't have permission, came in and trashed the temple we call our bodies. The truth is, we shouldn't be the ones testifying on the stand for our rights to our own bodies, when he knew what he was doing when he trashed the temple I call my body.

When you are raped, it is like someone shoves a spoon inside of you and guts you of all of your innocence, all of your purity, all of the will-fullness you had in you. Now, that's all gone. When you are raped, your mind plays tricks on you and tries to tell you, "It's your fault" or "If you would have just acted like a lady, this wouldn't have happened to you." These thoughts, these lies, run around in my mind, in any victim's mind, much like how we want to run when someone asks us, "Are you okay?" Although my mind screams these lies in my head over and over again, I wouldn't tell these lies to another survivor. I wouldn't tell these lies to a survivor simply because it would destroy them, if they hadn't already heard these lies before and allowed these lies to eat them from the inside out.

The truth behind these lies we tell ourselves is that these lies are lies in themselves. It is a lie when we say that "we deserved it" because the raw truth is that we didn't deserve it. No victim asks for it, whatever "it" is. Whether that "it" be rape, harassment, or assault, we didn't ask for "it" to happen to us. No victim asks to be raped.

The lies we tell ourselves as victims are lies because nobody asks for something so tragic to happen them. These are lies because nobody asks for their psychological state to be broken. Nobody asks for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, or anxiety to be served to them on a silver platter and to be spoon-fed, every hour on the hour, a tablespoon of panic or a tablespoon of depression.

Victims are liars. Victims are liars that society wants to delete. Victims are liars because they are always looking for attention. Victims are liars because the captain of the football team would never rape a girl, let alone five girls. Victims are liars because anybody who is raped was asking for it. If you didn't kick, scream, and end up with bruises and bleeding that can be seen, you are lying about being raped. If you don't have nightmares immediately after it happened, your rape wasn't traumatic enough and therefore doesn't even classify as rape, but perhaps unwanted sex instead. After all, isn't unwanted sex "less dramatic" than crying rape?

Victims are liars if they do not cry after they are raped. We are liars if we are in shock about what happened. This shock has no timeline. Victims are liars if they're drunk when they're raped. Even though the attacker, the rapist, the violator, knew better than to take such advantage of a woman when she was drunk or asleep. We are still liars. Perhaps we shouldn't have been so provoking to his mind. We shouldn't have been drunk and more easily accessible. If we just had been sober, this wouldn't have happened to us.

Victims are not liars. Victims speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth, once they feel as though they can be taken seriously without being judged, laughed at, or spit at. We speak the truth about rape, not when the time is right, but when we feel as though our voices will be heard.

All we want as victims, as survivors, is to be heard.

You can listen all you want to victims as they ramble about their attack and how it affects them three years later, but that won't mean anything to us. We speak the truth when we feel that our voice has to be heard by someone who is willing to put forth our truth, to be our voice, to be our person we can rely on to make sure that this won't happen to anyone else. We speak the truth because it helps us heal, it helps us recognize that what happened, what he did, wasn't our fault.

Victims aren't liars. Victims are scared, but strong. Victims are broken, yet ready to be victorious. Victims are so worried about what society will think, yet when we speak our truths to the right person who will hear us out, we become brave. When we gather the courage to talk about our attack, we lose sense of doubt, anxiety, and sadness. We lose these feelings of anxiety, sadness, and worry when we tell our truths and know that our truth is empowering others to speak up.

When we, as victims, lose these feelings, these feelings that have put a damper called depression on our lives, we gain strength, power, dignity, and courage. These are feelings that we didn't know we were capable of feeling. When we lose the feelings of hopelessness, depression, and anger, we gain confidence in these new-found feelings of love, empowerment, and courage. We lived our lives for so long thinking that we will never overcome this.

It is when we are made aware of the power we truly have that we lose so much, but gain much more. When a victim lies, she gains these feelings of empowerment, because victims, they don't lie. We don't lie.

Perhaps I am a liar when I write this. I am a liar because I am a victim of sexual assault. I am a victim of rape. I am a victim speaking out about her own truths, what she knows to be true, to strangers. Any victim who is willing to preach about her experience is a liar. She is exaggerating the truth. She is exaggerating what society calls a lie. Her truths are society's lies. My truths are society's lies.

My truths are my experiences. My experiences, my scars, my truths are what make me, me. They are what unite us as victims and survivors. One of those rare things that share universal personal feelings of fear, anger, and even remorse for actions we did not commit, yet still feel sorry for, is sexual assault.

We are sorry for these common universal feelings because we don't know what else can be said. Even though "sorry" is a lie in itself — just ask our attacker if he is sorry for what he did to us. I am a liar. I am a liar because I can freely talk about my experience without completely breaking down.

I didn't realize that society has the right to put a timeline on my grief and pain. I didn't realize that in order to be raped according to societies standards means to check off boxes on a checklist, and if you don't check off at least seven boxes, you weren't actually raped. It wasn't rape, just unwanted sex, regretful sex, drunk sex.