My senior year of high school,
I let my boyfriend rape me.
We went from fooling around to me pinned to the ground
In the blink of an eye
And I lay there, his weight on my chest,
his “manhood” stretching me and filling me again and again,
my brain trying to catch up to the movements in my body,
I learned that Numb
is a place.
After,
I drove him home
and responded to his “I love you,”
with “I love you too”
Because what else is their to say
when your heart and your brain and your body are on
different continents
and your mouth is trying to stay sane?
For the next year
I found solace each night as I retreated to the comfort of
living in Numb.
My traitorous body giving the proper cues while my mind
screamed in anguish and my soul danced across the frozen wasteland that is Numb
The no’s and stops getting no further than the first spark
of a brain synapse because Numb stops everything good in its tracks.
I finally left Numb when his hand met my face.
Slapped back into a reality that I had hidden from for so
long
my anger finally managing permeate the permafrost of Numb
it became nothing more than a puddle of tears and the pain
of a year and half of avoidance hit me like a freight train.
Rocking my body in a way that made every nerve ending sing.
I’ve never felt such pleasure as I did in that moment of
pain.
