Can we talk? Yeah. About that night, on the hill? Mhmm. We had just gotten kicked out of DU because I tried to do a kegstand. Tried being the keyword there. Well who knew you had to hold on the entire time, they didn’t exactly go over that during orientation. Back to your point. Fine, fine. I’m assuming I blacked out or was maybe just knocked unconscious due to me dropping myself onto said keg but right in front of Fletcher I blacked back in and that was when I told you, that was when I said it, “I was raped.”
I don’t remember what came before or right after, though I do remember the feeling of cold wet soil as I tried to bury myself in some garden plot crying about killing myself and relaying a sprinkling of details, I remember telling you the perpetrators identity and I remember that girl coming up and being utterly concerned that you were one of those same people who feel that they have the right to someone else’s body and trying to take me away from you because by this time I was essentially a single huge tear drop covered in blood and beer and earth and you trying to convince her “no no I am trying to restore this girl back to her body after it was stolen, I am just finding out about this and am just as distressed as you though for different reasons.”
I know you remember this well because it was the first time I really crumbled showed you that I wasn’t the sexy little party pony I had always pretended to be, but I’m telling you it anyway because you need to understand how far gone my inhibition has to be for me to even consider speaking of it. Do you know what it’s like to live under the control of shame?
To have a belief so deeply rooted in you that you cannot move because of it, even thinking of it candidly to yourself is something that paralyzes you with icy little needles that stab through your ribs and puncture your lungs and stop the little heart that by this time is beating manically. People say denial is bad but at least it gave me a little bit of peace, because ever since I first allowed those words, that confession, that “I was raped and I want to die” to escape, the shame has controlled me and I cannot escape it, cannot tell it, even to you, my perfect bean, without shaking and near-vomiting and that is only when I say the words, sans detail.
You say, comfortingly, to leave it in the past, that I am okay now, that you won’t let anything like that happen again- all things I know to be true. But every morning I stare at naked me in the mirror and have to count my fingers and toes and repeat to myself “you are here you are okay you are here…” and still I see shadowy wisps of Shame looping around my ankles, a vice grip.