By By Elizabeth Peters
I didn’t know…
I didn’t know…
I didn’t know that he could have done this…
On that evening in his room
While we are supposed to just study
He began to touch me wrong
I told him to back off
I didn’t want to take things this far this early,
But then he wasn’t the one to listen.
He took off his branded leather belt
And suddenly started to beat me like a dog
I cried and begged him to stop
“I will do anything”, I said.
He asked me to take off my clothes
He continued to beat me further
Laughing and told me this is what I deserve for not co-operating with him.
The belt landed on my bare skin
I was beaten again and again
The lashes fell on me, all over me.
Once satisfied, he threw me on the bed
And started doing it.
It hurt!!!
God! It did hurt.
Blood flew like that for the first time from my privates…
And I was first pleading him to stop.
But then, I just gave up and looked at the white ceiling
Tears ran down from the corners of my eyes
Burning my skin
My ears became wet and deaf
He was calling me names
And when he finished, he just got up
And threw my clothes on me…
Shhh!!!
He made the gesture and laughed again
The marks of his teeth upon my breasts
The bleeding nipples…
I saw the look in his eyes
There were marks – red
And swollen all over me,
And all I did was to put on my clothes and run away
Away to my home
Blood still oozing between my legs
Tears still running from my eyes
I don’t know what I am going to do
I don’t know anything
The insides have rotten away.
She had been violently raped
And although the physical violence of the act (and it was more than brutal) happened at this particular time
Set in stone by the season of goodwill and celebration…
The emotional violence of it continued to happen for ever after time and time again in her mind.
She became displaced from her sense of self.
And could not feel at home in her own body.
As if she were a hermit crab who had crawled inside an old tin can of baked beans on the bottom of some ocean.
After that,
Her self was something she had to always suffer from
Her mind, an emptiness that could not be endured and yet had to be endured
She continued to exist and cease to exist as the self she had known
She became a stranger to herself.
This was perhaps the cruellest aspect of the act that she had been robbed of herself
Had her self-stolen
She couldn’t bear the thought of sex (she who had so loved the act of making love)
And her sex life ceased
She hated her body
It angered her with its needs to be touched…
To be loved…
Her happy relationship broke up and she never had another relationship (of any sort) again
She had cut herself off from life at the root
Died to herself and lived on only in her hated body
Mental health became unstable
A death in life.
I still mourn the loss of her as if she were dead though she has still to die.
Broken Glass