The Chosen One

TRIGGER WARNING: This post is about experiencing SA and rape. Reader’s discretion is advised.

She’s scared. She is terrified. To fill out a profile with some nice pictures. To go outside. To socialize. To talk to anyone she doesn’t know. To be misunderstood. To be assigned an identity she did not choose. She is terrified to be seen as a vessel of flesh. Something to be caught. Something to be used and abused. A glorified hole with ‘nice tits.’ Another tic on someone’s body count. A convenient fuck. 

“You look attractive. It’s nice.”

It’s reflected in the way she dresses. Always wearing the ‘comfortable’ thing. The large black sweaters. She wants to express herself, something she has only started to indulge herself in, but it’s still too terrifying to wear in public. Because then she will be noticed. Even the people she trusts will acknowledge it and that terrifies her. To be the focus is terrifying. To be recognized is to be vulnerable. Like a fawn in an open field filled with hungry wolves. The stares, the glances, the quiet remarks are like paralysis demons, burning through her clothes with their eyes. She has nowhere to go. So she hides. She hides so she doesn’t have to be noticed. She will not become prey, not again. 

“It’s like you come to your senses, but then you say no.” 

To trust people is a death sentence. People she trusted turned on her. They fucked with her head. They made her believe she was sick, degraded. They made her feel like the devil by abusing her. They forced her into unfair positions. They manipulated her with kindness. Putting the entire weight of years-long relationships between her legs. But she put herself there. She chose to trust the person she thought she knew for years. The person she bonded with. The person she thought she could trust. The person who forced her to decide the outcome of their inevitably doomed ‘friendship.’ They paralyzed her in her own home, a place she thought was safe. Only to discover that words would not save her body from seemingly endless groping. From bruises that seemed to etch her skin forever.  

“I want to show you something.” 

The worst betrayal of all, possibly not even real. A truth she will never know. She will never know if it was a figment of her mind. A sick delusion. The worst betrayal of all – her own body. Her own mind. Was it him? A sick fuck drugging and raping a 13-year-old in her own home? In her own bed? Just across the hall from her mother and sister? Or was it a horrific nightmare? Was it just her? Did she make it up? A disgusting joke, whose punchline is told every time she tires to pleasure herself decades later. A joke that makes her relive the guilt, the shame, the terror of it all every damn day. Or was it her fault? Because she ‘seduced’ him. Because she’s a homewrecker, and this was the training she didn’t sign up for. To her, it was not simply a teaching moment. To her, it was not a joke. She’s the chosen one. The one to bear another’s sins for the rest of her life. A martyr to another’s sick and twisted desires.

“How are you with nudity?”

A simple tool to support the cis-male agenda. She is deceived at every turn. When she thought, “he seems different,” reality hit her like a torrential rain in March. Cold, exposed, shaken to her core. Like cold fingers penetrating her flesh through to her bones. Losing connection with her body simply to survive a split-second flash of her phone screen. Heartbeat banging at the cage of terror, screaming, “LET ME OUT!!” only to be stuck, unable to move her shaking legs. Unable to wipe her violated mind clean. Frozen, cold, dragged down an endless pit of groping, cold hands… a living death. A death of the innocent girl. The one who just wanted to make friends. Blamed for being stripped of her innocence even by those of her own age. A death of genuine intimacy. A death of her hopes, her dreams, ripped from her clutching, bleeding, tiny hands. 

“You have to pass the test. Bend over.”

She is terrified because to trust is to be robbed of her identity. She is terrified because she can only anticipate pain. She is terrified because she can’t trust anyone. Not even herself. How can she, when the common denominator is her? She sometimes thinks life would have been easier if she was the slut everyone wanted her to be. If she was the emotionless whore they all pushed her to be. If she would just forget her values, her hopes and dreams. If she would devote her life to her ‘womanly duty.’ If she would just shut up and bend over.

Life would be easier if she wasn’t me. 

The song that got me through it:

Featured image is a digital collage made by me utilizing images provided by Lingua Ignota from her Caligula set in addition to stock images. Thank you Kristin.