By Anya
I do not remember the first time I had sex, at the time I didn’t think much of it, we’d only met a couple of weeks beforehand but by the night I lost my virginity I was already so sure I wanted you. I told myself that time that it was okay, that maybe I didn’t seem drunk.
But looking back now maybe I should have realized then that you had no self control.
The second time it happened, it was the night, it was Brighton Pride, and a day that is supposed to be about love and kindness. A day that we spent surrounded by friends. It was a good day. And an awful night.
In the day, we drank, we laughed, we drank some more.
In the night. I remember getting a taxi to your house, being so tired and tipsy that I kept tripping up your staircase. I remember going to lie down on your mum’s bed she was away and who can climb a ladder to a loft when you can’t even walk up a staircase.
I remember waking up to you inside of me, trying to push you off, and you holding me down as a response, me saying no repeatedly and being ignored. After it happened I remember pushing you off me and sprinting over to your little brother’s child-size car shaped bed and crying.
I remember you coming over, in tears crying and apologizing, shortly after that I remember hugging you to make you feel better about it like somehow it was my responsibility to make you feel like less of an awful human being. Forgiving you meant that things could go back to the way they were, that waking up with you inside me didn’t have to mean anything, because if you knew it was wrong and you loved me, you couldn’t have meant to do it.
After that, we didn’t stop having sex, and I can’t say that I never enjoyed sex again with you because that would be a lie. But after that during sex, there were times, too many times, when I would feel scared suddenly, and the worst part of it was that I didn’t know why. It took me months to realize that the reason I felt like that, was because the human body can associate certain feelings with memories, they will linger in your brain even if you pretend those memories didn’t happen.
We broke up before I could ever talk about how I sometimes felt during sex, mostly because I was still in denial. Part of me didn’t believe you could be raped by a boyfriend, by someone you love, by someone who you still fucked, still wanted to fuck, by someone who could on occasion make you cum. My idea of the rapist was the guy who attacks you on the street. We are told to fear that type of rapist, that it is that man that you need to protect yourself from, to be vigilant toward, that men that hide in the shadows are bad, and they are. But so are the friends we trust to look after us, and the boys we assume love us enough to not harm us, the adults we put our trust into and the family who should never want to harm us. We are told with those boys can be excused, are to be forgiven because they can’t control themselves. But the truth we all know is that this is untrue, they can.
If I fall asleep at my boyfriend’s house, too drunk to go up a ladder, is it too much to assume that someone who loves me can love me enough not to violate me, to have that level of self-control.
That’s what I think about.
Do you still think about it like I have to?
And if you do, what do you think about?
Do you like me wonder what your mum would think if she knew what you did to me on her bed? What she would think about the fact I cried myself to sleep on her 4-year-olds mattress?