Trigger Warning: Mentions of rape/SA, mentions of suicidality and mental health, mentions of physical abuse, mentions of blood, coarse language.
Last night, I awoke from a dream drenched in sweat. It’s been five years since he raped me in my own house. On my own couch. At fourteen years old. He wasn’t a stranger, he didn’t kidnap me from the street, he was my boyfriend. My second boyfriend ever.
They say vampires can’t enter your house until you invite them in, then, if god forbid you open the door, you’ve accepted your fate. Do you think people blame those who get bitten? Do you think they asked them what they were wearing? Did they have any bloodlike colours on display?
I wore shorts, a flower-patterned shirt, a black zip-up hoodie and an egregiously large headband to cover my pre-bang, open-air forehead. I had been begging and pleading to get one singular chance to hang out with this guy, seeing as he was my boyfriend at the time. Every offer was met with disappointments, a common theme in my then-teenage life. I had ripped the house apart just days prior, scrubbing every surface, in hopes his promises of movie night would finally come true. March 21, 2020, is when it finally happened.
I was a young catholic girl; I clung to God and the cross and any semblance of meaning I could make out of scripture. But I was also a normal teenager, wearing my long blonde hair and any Garage crop top I could get my hands on. When I first met him, he talked of God. He talked of scripture and strength. The way in which he spoke felt like a preacher was sitting at the desk across from me. He was popular, athletic, everything I was surely not. I was an avid Heathers the Musical fan who spent most days dyeing her hair weird colours or watching Hell’s Kitchen with my friends. I was nothing like him. Yet, we had similar circumstances growing up. We valued our moms like they were gods and had strained relationships with our fathers. For the first time, I felt seen by a guy.
Sometimes, when the night sun is rising, and no amount of melatonin can get me down, I feel his hot breath on my neck. I smell his pungent sweat like a cursed cologne moulded into my soul. The night he came over was the night I lost my body. I was raw to his touch, raw to the world. Whatever God I wanted to pray to, he was surely silent that night.
They never tell you how consent works. Television shows display these insane, but often very real, circumstances of girls being trafficked from state to state, or teachers or social workers being the perpetrators. I never thought that your boyfriend could, or would, rape you. I remember staring at the wall, that yellowed wall. I had stared at it so many times before. A glance to check the clock on the wall or a smile sent to the couch dweller. This was my home, my own four walls. I looked at that wall and prayed. I prayed that it would just end, that maybe I wasn’t being raped, maybe I was just dramatic or tired or needed a sip of water. I remember his eyes, deep, dark eyes thick with lust, like a lion hunting his prey. I wasn’t a girlfriend, a classmate, a friend. I was a lump of flesh, my body raw.
I lay in the bathtub for hours after it happened. Scrubbing, itching, peeling. If I could wash the dirt, the sin, off my body, it would be like it never happened. I thought maybe, us fooling around, kissing, all that before it happened caused this. I thought that, as my boyfriend, he was always entitled to my body, no matter how many times I say no, ouch, stop or pull his hands off of me. I thought that I was the problem. But that’s the thing about rape. It’s not this fantastical thing that only ever happens in your crime novels. It happens to your mother, your brother, your boss, your teachers. It breathes in this world just as you do.
I didn’t tell anyone about the rape until two months afterwards. I was on a virtual therapy session phone call when I told my therapist what had happened. I framed it as my ‘sensitive mind.’ I had almost always been repulsed by sex, to the point of turning the TV off every time they showed any sort of eros. I assumed, because of this, that I was just anxious, that maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. I’ll never forget hearing her soft voice pierce through the phone.
“You were raped Jaden.”
But I didn’t understand. I invited him in, he was my boyfriend, I wore shorts, and we were making out mere seconds before, wasn’t I asking for it?
I was fourteen years old.
My baby teeth had merely fallen out, Santa was still real, and I still wore fruit-of-the-loom hot pink underwear, ones I had worn when this happened.
If you wanted to skydive and they suited you up, took you 300 feet above the ground and held you on the edge of the plane, what would you feel? Well, if you were excited, you’d feel happiness, elation and maybe a sense of worry. But if you looked at the ground and it was spikey, red with blood and hardened with cement, you wouldn’t want to go. You’d look at the instructor and tell them you can’t. Would they push you off the plane? No, they’d put you back in the plane and lower it to the ground. If you were on the edge of sex, if you were in the nude touching skin to skin and you saw that spikey road below, if you told them you didn’t want to, it would end. No ifs, and’s or buts. Being so close to the edge doesn’t make it okay. Your previous history doesn’t make it okay. What you’re wearing doesn’t make it okay. You could be a sex worker with a client, and if you say no, that means no. No means no. Stop means stop. “Ouch, that hurts,” means stop. I was hurting. I bled.
I saw him around every corner, in every puddle of fresh fallen rain, in every front page of a magazine. He haunted me. There were four of us. Four victims by the time it happened to me. Not once was he charged.
The school was a war zone. An active enemy in every classroom. If it wasn’t him, it was his friends. If it wasn’t his friends, it was his sports team. I was tortured. When I was called into the vice-principals office bright and early in the morning during my junior year, I knew it couldn’t have been good. Fresh out of math class, my friend who was sitting in the office informed me that he was going around bragging about raping me. My soul drew cold, my palms ached with sweat. I’ll spare the details, as rewriting a bad novel is just more torture for you and me. The VP looked me in the eyes and asked, “So why isn’t there a police report?”
I didn’t know I had been raped until two months afterwards, half because of the ridiculously vague sex education provided in catholic school, half because I was filled with false information that I wholeheartedly believed. I was already the weird queer kid, and he was the star quarterback. I thought all hope was lost for me. I did find out that my underwear and well as my vagina were inadmissible as evidence, as whatever would have been used to identify him had been washed out or scrubbed away. It was a he said, she said.
The VP blamed me for not reporting it; he believed that I was suffering the consequences of my actions. Could he ever imagine sitting in a confessional booth, in front of God, or at least God adjacent, and telling him of your dirty sin? Telling him that the body he had crafted for you was tarnished, that you had defiled him. God wasn’t there. I couldn’t feel him in my heart anymore. All I felt was life-changing, paralyzing fear. A fear I had never known before. That’s when the texts started.
“God knows the lies you tell,” he said. “He knows you were begging for it.”
Non-stops, for days on end, he texted me. Bible quotes, shitty backhanded motivational Pinterest quotes. It was ridiculous. Our local anonymous secret-spilling Instagram page had also jumped onto the growing trend of hating me.
Someone had posted, “My ex sexually assaulted me.”
Obviously, this was anonymous, so no one knew who they were. The comments, however, were quick to assume.
“I bet this is that bitch Jaden,” the first comment read.
I can assure you, it was not that bitch Jaden. Nor was it any bitch. It was someone suffering the same fate I had. Perhaps it was one of the other four victims, traumatized and lost from his violence. Perhaps it wasn’t. All I knew was that the entire high school was reminded of what had happened to me. My body was once again raw.
I was detached from my body, like a TV show playing in the background with no interactivity. Many took advantage of that, seeing weakness in my eyes, a weakness I couldn’t mask with any theatrical technique or clothes or makeup. Four years after my rape, I was beaten by someone I thought was a friend. I was alone, suffering from severe depression and suicidality; he was my rock. When he hit me, I saw my rapist’s face. Just for a second, I was there again, on that couch, alone without God to talk to. When my vision started to blur, and my ears began to ring, all I could do was cry. I cried for my grandmother, I cried for my mother, I cried for myself. That day, just before he choked me out and hit me, he said to me, “Don’t stay here. Go to Toronto, go to university there, there is more for you than this city.” But what more was there for me when I fell victim to the same demonic violence I had dealt with since I was a kid?
I didn’t go to school for half a month after this. I needed the hand mark left on my neck to fade before I could face any of my peers. And when I did, I was a shell of a person. Somehow even more of a shell than I was just months previous.
Who was I? What about my body was so wrong that this continued happening again and again? I was slim when I was raped, so I gained all the weight to hide. No one would want to assault a fat girl, I thought. Now I was sixty pounds overweight, had chopped my hair and dyed it black. I was unrecognizable, so why did he have to hurt me?
I’m nineteen now, a second-year journalism and women’s & gender studies student. I still see them both in my dreams, not every night, but when I’m a little too tired, or when a certain song plays or when a rapist gets voted to be the president. The day after it happened, I couldn’t stop thinking about butterflies. They begin again. They cocoon themselves, they absolve their past body, and they bloom from egg to larva to butterfly. They go through rebirth no matter how ugly and painful their past was; they spread their wings and move on. I knew I could be reborn. I knew I could take back what I knew was mine, my body. In my sophomore year, I created a consent education campaign within my school. During the #MeToo movement, I shared my story for the first time and was blessed to be able to connect with others who thought they were alone in this struggle. I went to the SlutWalk for the first time in my first year of university and was able to perform my poetry at the walk just this past fall. The truth is, I’m still scared. I’m still that little girl, alone in her head. But I don’t let my fear consume me. Torture is nothing without powerful art spewing from it. I needed to turn my suffering into something, anything that would grow bigger than myself. I found that in grassroots activism and poetry. With my writing, I aim to spread awareness about consent and educate everyone who was victimized by the hazy sex education system. It is not your fault. Under any circumstance, it is not your fault. I am here for you, I hear you, and I validate you. I promise you that your strength is recognized and that you will survive. I spent years bracing myself, preparing for what I thought was the inevitable, until I finally bloomed. It could be your father, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife. It could be your teacher, boss, therapist, or doctor. Sexual assault isn’t black and white. Recovery isn’t black and white. Do the things you love, and if you can’t, then do the things you can. Surviving despite them is the strongest thing you can do. Survive my love, I know you will.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit http://hotline.rainn.org.