If Fire Was A Lover

January 26th, 2021

I went home early that morning. I showered for two hours. The water turned cold but I didn't care, I had to be clean. I washed my body and scrubbed it until my legs started to bleed, I wailed and screamed as the water hit my back. I let it all out, I knew that if I didn't I would die. Eventually my body gave up and I sat in the shower, memorizing the pattern of the water hitting my neck and dripping down my back to my bum. I held myself and rocked back and forth on the floor after I got out. Then I laid on a towel and cried quietly. My phone kept vibrating with notifications from Logan, all of which I ignored. He kept apologizing for the night before, but I didn't even want to address it, I was happy to pretend like it never happened.

For the first time it sank in that sex with Logan wasn't just uncomfortable, it wasn't just demeaning. It wasn't sex at all. It was rape. You cannot have sex with a person who is crying, you cannot have sex with a person who said no multiple times before you guilt tripped them into saying yes, you cannot have sex with a person who is silent and frozen in time, no. You can only rape them. And he did, he did so many times. And my God, when I realized this, I wanted more than anything to cease to exist. How could I let him rape me, and why did I mistake it for love? What the hell was my problem? And why did I still crave him, why did I know that I would show up at his doorstep again like a lost dog looking for its home? I hated myself, I disgusted myself, I despised myself. And I feared that I always would. I wanted to hate Logan so much but how could I? How could I hate him for what he did when I kept coming back to him for more? He said it himself, he thought I liked it.

My entire body was shaking as I laid on the bathroom floor, hyperventilating and praying to God to let me die. My eyes hurt and began to swell from crying too much. I wanted to stop crying but I couldn't, my body wouldn't let me. It was angry with me, it wasn't about to forgive me for the hell I had put it through. At that moment I already felt dead. I could survive everyday, breathe, feel my heartbeat, but I knew that I was dead. I think God knew that too, and he cried. So did the angels. They watched me from above and they wept, and they threw themselves down and became shooting stars made out of rage and human emotions, and they wailed as they burned until they hit the earth and became nothing at all. And I wanted to do that, too.

I memorized every detail of my bathroom that day. I stared at the walls until shapes formed and started speaking to me. I noticed how the towels were all slightly different shades of brown, and all of the colorful decorations that used to make me smile, but now they just reminded me of him. Somehow everything reminded me of him. He was there in all parts of my life. Even when I slept I was not free of him, no, quite the opposite. He manifested himself into my dreams, reminding me even when I was subconscious of the power he held over me, the worth that he had that I did not.

Eventually I stood and dressed myself, and I planned to spend the whole day in my bed. I would not go to school, I could not. My mother knew something was wrong, so she didn't question it when I told her I was skipping school that day. I guess she had texted Blake and let him know that something was wrong, because at the end of his shift he came by with flowers and a redbull. I was beginning to run out of vases, but that was a very romantic problem to have. He sat with me in my room as I talked about my problems in metaphors so that he wouldn't understand but at least I was venting in a way.

Blake listened very carefully to what I was saying, and I think that maybe he did understand it but he was too scared to say anything. I couldn't blame him, I was too scared to say anything too. Speaking in metaphors was the only safe way to talk about Logan.

"Sometimes," I said, "I feel like an open wound. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's just how I feel. And I want to tell you something, but I don't want you to see me differently." I whispered.

"Elizabeth, nothing could make me look at you differently. I adore you, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, I chose you." He said softly.

"I was sexually assaulted," I started. I didn't want to tell him when or who but I had to say it. "And since then, I feel like a black hole of a person, and I keep ruining everything I touch, because I am already ruined." I confessed. I began to cry.

He came to my bed and held me and reassured me that I was not ruined, and that I was beautiful. "Elizabeth, I don't tell many people this. But I've been there too. It takes time, but I promise you won't always feel ruined." He whispered.

And suddenly I saw him in an entirely new light. Even though he was a man, he knew exactly how I felt as a woman at that moment, he listened to me and he actually understood my pain instead of questioning its importance. His eyes were suddenly more captivating, his smile more handsome, his whole nature was more appealing. I had finally found someone who got it. He really got it. You could not pretend to understand the aftermath of rape and sexual assault if you had not experienced it, but he understood it completely.

I wished Logan could understand what he did to me. He didn't even know it was wrong. Nonetheless that it killed me each time, his bedroom a bloody crime scene that only I could see. He saw a bed, I saw a grave. He saw pleasure, I saw blood, so much blood. Where he saw love, I saw murder. And we were always looking at the same things, we were just two completely different people. The abuser and the abused, of course the lenses in which we viewed life were nothing alike. His world was black and white, and my world was blue, blue, blue, blue. Blake sat with me in silence, but it wasn't uncomfortable or awkward, it was just quiet. We let ourselves feel everything there was to feel, and we smiled at each other anyways. Then of course he went home, and Logan returned to his rightful place in my mind.

I heard his voice in my head. "Did you miss me?" He taunted me. I cried and whispered "yes", but soon realized I was only talking to myself. He did not exist, not in my room, not in my bed, not in my home.