A Short Story
Life started like most do, filled with dreams, hoping for the future and loving those that loved me. Surrounded in a cocoon of love I experienced childhood hurts, a pet dying, a grandparent passing away. As children, we start life so beautiful.
Then at 14, I died. I still remember his hot chocolate breath whispering "tell another soul and die" (Must be why I don't like chocolate). His fingers clasped over my then tiny lips and I believed he would kill me, I believed I would die. But I was already dead, he plunged in and took out my spunk, my joy but most of all my heart. I was dead inside, cold, bitter and very jaded. I blocked out the hurt and never spoke of it (probably better that way). Fifteen years later, as I told the person I thought I could trust, he dismissed it (I guess because too many of his friends had told him stories similar to mine).
Blocking out that event, I almost never remembered, I never identified myself as an abused woman or a woman with a scarlet 'R' on her chest, but I was. I had become so detached that I would not allow myself to be loved, only starting relationships with people who were unavailable, emotionally and otherwise. I could not and would not let myself be loved. Love was for fools who wanted to be hurt. I thought I dreamt of finding the right soul, but in reality I did not want to. I would 'love' a man who was married to his work or who was never in the country and I just loved men who had complicated relationships. I kept wondering why they did not give me what I needed but in truth they did. They gave me the detachment that I needed, but I could not see that.
Nine years later, the same thing occurred again. Different man but once again, someone that I knew. You know, our mothers and elders tell us all to beware the stranger, the one lurking in the darkness, waiting to pounce on us when we are not looking. This evil man, waiting to take what we hold dear to us. So we walk around with mace in our purses and whistles around our necks, ever on the look out for the stranger in the bushes. No one tells us about the neighbor next door whose children we play with, that cousin we see at the family reunion or that guy who has always been just a nice friend to us and who has no designs on us. No one tells us about the stranger that we know, the one who could violate our very being and leave us shadows of our former selves. And as this one lay on top of me, I was 14 again and as he stabbed, the dark circle widened...they grey matter spewed, broken into a million pieces.
This time I spoke out, not to the police as you would expect but to one of the unavailable ones who did all the right things, threaten to kill him and all that. For me, it was done and it was over. I would never be that girl who dreamed of being a fireman/journalist. I would never be a beautiful girl because all i am and all I ever was, was an object to be used for the gratification of men.
Still I kept on with men who were always 'complicated' wondering why I could never find what I desired most. Then, the Knight came, cleverly disguised in another complicated mess but he said all the right things and did all the right things, until he stopped and became what he always was (an unavailable one). He became the Dark Knight and I decided to wake from the nightmare that began seventeen years ago, when one teen decided that he must have what he shouldn't.
I decided to stop dealing myself the short end of the stick, I decided to get help because no matter how I look at it, I was abused, I was raped and no amount of pretty words will fix that. I decided to take myself up from the ashes of my former life and begin to carve out some measure of happiness which I have not seen for over fourteen years.
I decided to live.
