TR’s Story: The dirty truth: I was raped continuously for over a year by my own boyfriend.

I was a victim of rape and domestic violence for a year and a half. It’s been two years since. I apologize for the explicit details but I just feel I need to liberate myself from these things that I cannot tell my family, friends, or fiancé.

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Sometimes, there are days when you just walk around like any normal person going about his or her business, enjoying your time, talking, laughing, and then there are other times when you just stop, go back to some dark cloud for a few moments, and rewind to those days of guilt – guilt of someone else’s control over you.

I was in an abusive relationship for a year and a half. It began when I was somewhere midway through depression and indifference, a personal crisis that I look back on recalling nothing but the echoes of emptiness of thought, feeling, and desire. I was latching on unknowingly to a thing, a being, a dark element that I was hoping to restart that want for change, for action, for excitement. So for the first three months, I went through the motions of the insidious excitement of knowing I was with someone clingy, someone who wanted me badly, someone who would show some form of jealousy at my lack of attention. Slowly, I also went through that realization that I was waking up to a stranger every day that my arms were wrapping itself to an unfamiliar form, that the things I had in my previous life were gone. Slowly, the emptiness turned into sadness, into despair for the familiarity I once had. In my effort to reconcile my splitting universe lost in the brew of depression, I talked. I talked to the only person I knew to link my pain with my anger and my sadness. I talked, but it wasn’t allowed. That jealous being that was providing me that excitement for three months turned into a monster – a monster that would strike and strike and strike until I was knocked down. Strike until I was barely unable to move. Strike until all that was left was me, in a dark and empty room, with words coming from a voice calling out my uselessness, unworthiness, dirt, like a harlot waiting to be stripped for the world to see my insides, black, dirty, and disgusting.

And then it happened. At first it was a strike of a hand to my head. And then another. And then another. And then a whisper in my ear that I was a whore, a slut, waiting to be fucked from behind. And then he entered, he penetrated. I felt like I was being ripped apart from in between my legs. And then he whispered again, “this doesn’t feel like your first time.”

In the next few months, I battled between staying and leaving. But who do I run to? Everyone at that point had just snubbed their noses and asked, “Why are you such an idiot for being there still?” They stopped talking, stopped wondering, and stopped asking. So he would say again, “Nobody wants you. You don’t have friends. You don’t need friends, only me.” And it would start over and over again. Being locked all day in a dark room, naked, forced to have sex until my skin was raw, until I was bleeding and hurting, until there was only a fine line between pleasure and pain so that I could tell myself, “It’s not so bad.” There were days when it was okay, happy even, and that was what I craved for. Every time we hit a rock, I would say, it’ll come back to the happy days because he’s not so bad. I felt alone, isolated, felt like a whore, a slut, someone who was too loose literally for any man to enjoy the pleasure of having sex with me. There were days when he would just force himself on me from behind, which he knew I hated, which he took pleasure from. There were days when I just sat there blankly, with his cum dripping from my wet slits, thinking, “What has become of me?”

But I came out of it. I don’t know why to be honest, just the how. My dad saved me. And I feel relatively unscathed – except for a slight mark on me, that lingering feeling or desire to be wanted sexually, the desire to be punished as I was punished before, because after all, that’s what I deserve, that’s the only thing I deserve. It scares me because for the first time in my life, I am happy and healthy, and with a person who loves me completely. But my deep dark secret? I am not over my sexual abuse. I still imagine my abuser in the middle of the night, imagine that it is still happening, and then wake up thinking, “it should happen again.”