I don’t like to talk about it. I’ve never talked about it at Tufts, actually. I don’t like to think about it either – I always end up crying, to some degree. I said it out loud 300 miles away for the first time, looking into a mirror. “I was sexually assaulted.” And I told the friends I’d made about it, eventually. In a mall outside the city, I slid it into conversation. They never knew him, and it felt safer that way.
So yeah, we met on an app. But our first date was cute – we went hiking, if you can call it that. It was pretty, and we made plans for a second. Traded contact info. The second date was my idea, since the first had been his. There wasn’t a third date.
My friends were friends with his friends. I recognized him from IR, and thought I’d give it a shot. After it happened someone posted a Tufts Compliment about how he’d be missed abroad. I wasn’t really sure it would be safe to come back. But here I am.
There was a party next door, and someone accidentally banged into my door. He paused and looked up from what he was doing to me. He didn’t want to get caught in the act. I had locked the door, but wished my roommates would burst in. I didn’t even care they’d see me naked. I just wanted someone to make him stop.
I never wanted to be a statistic. A number. I wanted to be myself, something more than. But he took that from me. He made me a survivor. After he left, I lay down on the floor and cried. I washed myself off and threw my sheets in the laundry basket and went to bed.
I saw him in Carm a few months later. He didn’t even look at me as he bounced by. It took a year for me to say it, to say I was sexually assaulted. It didn’t take him long at all to make it true. When he comes back, it’ll have been two years. I still cry about it.