Sexual abuse, assault, rape

The first time I was raped, my boyfriend wanted to show me ‘something’ so we drove to a wooded area and parked. He then started kissing me, his usual behavior, despite pushes and moving his hands. He took off my swimsuit. He asked me if he could, I said no. He huffed, hit his hands on the steering wheel, and looked out the window pissed, his usual behavior when I turned him down. He must have asked me again because I remember the words ‘fine, whatever’ escaping my lips. So he did. I remember laying on the truck bench seat, physically there but no where present. It was interrupted by someone parking next to us. I put on my swimsuit as fast as humanly possible, grateful for the excuse and looked out my window to hide the nausea, the tears. He still wanted to ‘show’ me, so we walked down the road to a dock, that was the ‘something’. Pointless. I was silent, he could tell. We got back in the car and he started complaining that he didn’t finish and asked me to give him head. I told him no repeatedly as he complained and asked him to take me home.

My mom had been gone, across the country taking care of my cousins for over a month at that point, not that I could have told her anyway. She’s religious and the shame was too deep to bear. The pleasure and your body’s natural response to stimulation makes you feel like it’s your fault, not to mention the complicated feelings of love for my rapist. My sister and siblings were out of town for the week. It was just me and my dad, another one of my abusers. So I just laid on the couch and cried all week, blaming it on my chronic pain.

I remember my first shower. I couldn’t get in fast enough, wanting to wash the experience off my skin. I sat there and felt the water run over my hands until it turned cold. My tears lost in the water. I felt so broken. So dirty. So used.

I was scared of being alone with him, I didn’t want it. I never wanted him to finger me in class, I never wanted him to reach up my shirt on the bus, or rub himself on me in the hallway. My teachers put the responsibility to control him on me. My parents did the same. I was crying out that I didn’t want it and no one would listen. I was too young to understand rape isn’t love. Too indoctrinated by a cult to understand it wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t a slut.

After he raped me, I couldn’t go back to normal. Constantly he asked, why don’t you love me anymore? You just think I’m disgusting. I did. I do. I broke up with him before my senior year.

He was my first kiss, my first sexual encounter. I remember messing around with my next boyfriend before college, and I felt a sense of relief, ahh so this is what consent feels like.

Then I married my ex husband at 19. He called me a sex addict and shamed me for my sexuality. I became a shell of myself. Broken, abused, lonely. He refused to have sex with me and when he did, he wouldn’t touch me. There was no love. And the only thing, the only man I could ever remember loving me, actually wanting me, was my rapist.

When I divorced my husband, my rapist reached out to me and I allowed him back in my life, we dated again. He raped me continuously throughout our relationship, a relationship of pouting, manipulation and control. If I said no, he would pull my pants down and rub himself on my back, while I tried to sleep. One time I woke up to him raping me while I was blacked out and passed out, when I woke up again he was gone. One time after invasive endometriosis excision, he asked, I said no, so he felt for the scars on my pelvis and pressed his fingers into him, laughing ‘does that hurt?’ While my freshly cut scars throbbed and shot pain deep into my abdomen, I flinched and cried, while I cried he kissed my neck, pulled down my pants and rubbed himself on the outside of my healing body. I laid there like a lifeless corpse.

I feel so shameful for going back to my rapist. I feel unlucky for never feeling love from a man except from the one who raped me. What’s wrong with me? Is it the years of childhood sexual abuse? The lack of protection from predators? Do I just live in a state of fear, which inevitably leads me to abusive men?

Now my body is their tomb, a shell of their abuse. I have to reclaim it from the men who destroyed me, but how? My promiscuity is now my power, my control. But the power is gone when I’m afraid, my voice goes silent. Will it ever get better? Will I ever know what love is? Does love ever not hurt?

The people who’ve claimed to love me the most in this world have hurt me and scarred me the deepest. What do I do with that?