mine

I was drunker than I have been in a long time. It was the kind of drunk that sneaks up on you all at once, and frankly, I don't remember drinking that much. (But that's what they all say, isn't it?) I can't remember going to the second bar. I presume that I must've lost my phone and my jacket there. At some point, I had the wherewithal to hail myself a cab, but I could only manage to tell the driver the general area where I lived, so he dropped me off by the closest train station. I stepped out into the cold and promptly threw up all over myself. Covered in my own sick, I endeavored to make the 10-minute trek to my apartment. 

I was so close. Nearly home, my apartment complex within my blurry line of vision. That's where I ran into him. Or he to me. He spoke. About what, I can't recall. The next thing I remember, he's with me in my apartment. Next, I'm naked and in fetal position on the floor of my own shower. He's standing over me. I'm in bed. He's over me. He's over me. He's over me he's over me he's over me. 

In one single moment, life threw at me an affirmation of all my deepest fears about being an inherently unlovable creature whose only chance at intimacy is in violence. And all I can do is think. 

I think that I'm not a perfect victim. I think this is all my fault. But that is not what I'd say to my friends, to a stranger, to anyone who recounted the exact same story to me. I am my own worst enemy—I always have been. 

I think that I deserved this. That my body, which in the past year had begun to feel more and more foreign to me, was conspiring with the universe to show me just how much it was not mine. It belonged to the man who followed me into my apartment, to the other men who have hurt me, to anyone who wanted to use and abuse it. But never mine. 

I think that I'm a grown woman and should've known better. In my head, I hear a diatribe of invisible strangers all saying the same things: "You did this to yourself. You asked for it." They are not voices I know, but their chants are darkly familiar. 

I think about how close I was to my apartment. How hard I tried to take myself home, and how very nearly I had made it. This thought alone makes me weep. Of course, it did not matter in the end, for that "safe" sanctuary of mine was violated as thoroughly and swiftly as my body, and the reason that I am sitting here typing this account from my apartment is due to pure spite. I'm so fucking angry that he dared to assault me in my own home that I want to remain here out of unbridled indignation. I haven't yet been able to take a shower without having a panic attack, and yet I remain. Where else would I go?

I imagine him returning and me ripping out his throat with my teeth. I am not a violent person, but this thought is the only one that brings me any level of comfort.  

And now, four days later, I think that it's one cruel fucking joke that I'm just supposed to go on living. That I have to return to a world that clearly has no love for me, put on a "brave face," proverbially sing and dance for an audience who does not care if I live or die. It feels inherently unreasonable. But then again, so does everything that's happened.

I don't know how to live through this. Not yet. 

This—writing it out—was the only thing I could think to do. It's all I have left. And I know it's not much of anything (not well-written, well-said, or even very well thought out), but it's mine. 

It's mine.