Once Upon A Time...

Once upon a time, there was a girl, a very messed-up young girl. At seventeen, she went off to college. She was haggard and tired of her life and felt so old. She felt so old that she was blind to how naive she really was.

           

She had always been a daddy’s girl. She had yet to realize that the things her father did with her weren’t quite right. She didn’t realize that her father was a little too loving. She didn’t know how profoundly it had compromised her, wouldn’t know for many years.

           

She got to college and found freedom. She had been used to such confines that she was overwhelmed. Everyone else takes that same journey their freshman semester. She was one of those destined for particularly trying times.

A few weeks into the semester, she met a man. He was a few years older, had been at college a few years longer. He was recently out of a relationship considered famously disastrous around the campus. He set his sights on her and she was deeply flattered.

She wasn’t really ready for a boyfriend. He told her that he wouldn’t share her with anyone else. They spent the night together.

He was just so into her. She was confused by that, flattered and disarmed. They spent a lot of time together – she didn’t know how to navigate college yet and he wanted her.

Time passed.

They ended up in a de facto relationship. Her roommate had gotten fed up with being locked out of their room for sex and she offered to switch rooms with the man.

He confessed things to her.

“I was arrested for threatening my ex and her new boyfriend with a gun. Does that scare you?” he asked.

“No,” she said, sure she could handle this. She’d handled worse. And, after all, he told her he loved her. Surely that meant everything would work out. Surely.

The girl was not just metaphorically tired of life. She was always exhausted. After a couple months, when she tried to beg off his sexual advances, he stopped being kind.

Not long after, he became cruel.

“I’m too tired, I just want to go to bed,” she whined.

“Why won’t you ever fuck me?”

“I’m tired a lot. I just can’t tonight.”

He leaned in close in the dark. “I’m not letting you sleep until you fuck me.”

She turned over and faced the wall shrugging the blankets closer to her face. He kept picking away at her, getting louder and louder.

“If you’re a dyke, just tell me you’re a dyke. Then we can tell all of your friends you’re a fucking dyke and then I’ll let you go to sleep. Are you a dyke?”

“No,” she said, tears in her eyes.

“Then fuck me,” he shouted.

Eventually, inevitably, she would let him do what he wanted.

Exhausted, trying to not audibly sniffle her nose or shed any tears, she would let him.

Four, five o’clock in the morning with classes fast approaching, after hours of trying to maintain her own dignity, she would let him.

Numbing herself, slipping away in the dark, she let him.

Almost every night, she let him. She always tried to resist. She tried to exert some power, some agency in the relationship. He was never too tired to grind her down into compliance – he had seemingly limitless energy for that.

Eventually, she needed some sexual release that wasn’t emotionally crippling. All she had was herself. He found out and flew into a rage.

“You want to masturbate but you don’t want me? What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking broken?”

The only answer she could come up with was “Obviously.”

She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t yet know what the word “coercion” meant, and she’d never heard it paired with “rape.” Rape was rape, getting beaten up or tied down or drugged. What they had was “relationship problems.”

           

She tried leaving. He would always pull her back in somehow. She didn’t know how to leave. She had no idea how to even talk about what was happening. She was consumed by shame. She felt like an ingrate, as if literally anyone else would be lucky to have a man who wanted her as much as he did. She felt frail and flawed – a failure.

           

She couldn’t let go of trying to be happy. She was stupid and stubborn. She believed that she was an adult, not a barely eighteen year-old idiot with a martyr complex. She fucked up her second semester, hard. Over the summer, she went home while he stayed at the college. He visited her a few times when he could get away from work. All they did was fight.

The next school year started and they moved back in together because she didn’t know how to say “no.” But that was sort of the theme of her life. They picked up right where they left off. No end in sight.

Any time friends would come over to their dorm room, she would put on this huge smile, afraid that if she didn’t perform he would take it out on her later. She always tried to keep the friends over as long as possible, to delay the inevitable. He could always outwait her.

Towards the end, he stopped making her have sex with him. And she, fucking idiot that she was, took it personally! She actually got self-conscious, thought she wasn’t pretty anymore! Can you believe this moron?

At the end, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they were done. She had fucked up school pretty bad and was going to be kicked out. He, well, who knows what was going on with him. He never seemed to go to classes. He was always just there, waiting.

She wasn’t sure if she had tanked school as a way to get away from him or because she just didn’t have anything left to work with. Either way, she was leaving and they were done, whether he wanted to accept it or not.

The dorm they lived in had separate rooms. The night she finally had enough, she locked her door. After an hour and a half of him banging on her door, she snuck out her window and walked around the campus.

It was early winter in Florida. A cool, clear night. She walked to the large center court and stared at the few stragglers wandering through under the dim orange lights. She said her goodbyes to the college, the first place that she had, however briefly, known freedom. She berated herself for squandering it. She resigned herself to the fact she would forever regret fucking up her full ride to college because she made the wrong choice in a person.

But she was done.

Fourteen years later, she’s friends with him on Facebook. Because she feels that she has to be. Because it might seem petty of her to not forgive. Because not forgiving might mean weakness. Because – well, fuck if anyone knows.

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This is how I failed out of college. And this is why it matters so much to me that I am graduating in two weeks, fourteen years after the fact.

I couldn’t write this with the proper genders, because the rape of men by women is still minimized and scoffed at. Especially when it can be qualified and diminished as something like "coercive rape." 

I still feel like a worthless thing when I think of her. I am still friends with her on Facebook, because I feel like I would be less of a man if I weren’t – however that makes any fucking sense.

I’d prefer if no one showed this to her. I’m still, despite all my growth, afraid of her.