How to Love Claire Mason

That Was His Room

I could not wrap my mind around the glaring fact that he might have cared, so I put it off, dismiss it, and told myself he only wanted to be humiliated, a second time. That isn't the end of it, not by a long shot, but storing the thought of it away in broken safe of my mind for a little while helped me to focus on Annie's words.

I took in what she said, really took it in and analyzed it, registered it in my brain, a few long moments after she'd first uttered them. Raped. Sexually abused. Words I'd heard and seen a thousand times in doctors' offices, magazines, health classes, my therapy place, books, movies, television; yet I felt that I was hearing them, as they echoed in my mind then, for the first time. I had never dreamed of applying them to myself. Claire Mason and rape don't belong in the same sentence.

What was it then? A voice deep inside my head cried. What are the nightmares, the constant fear about, Claire? What happened when you realized you hated your body again?

I wanted to answer her, to say something, anything, but I didn't want to lie. I didn't want to victimize myself when I wasn't even sure what happened. I had never thought of it like that, the way she thought it was. When I filled out that paper I was only extracting from my mind the bits and pieces of the memories those words stirred up inside me. I didn't look at them, all those words and sentences, as a collective, a whole, didn't give a name to it all. And though she had put words, names on the table for me to choose, I still didn't know what to make of it all. So I told her so.

"I..I don't know."

She nodded and asked me to describe it to her, gesturing to the paper as a guide for me, as if I could forget it. I had every intention of telling her the truth, the whole, raw truth, the truth I'd never dealt to anyone before. And so I began to carefully open the locket that I purposely threw back into the cobwebs of my mind, and unleashed the memory; a flaming red ball of light and dark, of whispers and sharp voices, of fear and unease, of longing and confusion, of lust and hatred.

We had spoken of it the night before. What it'd be like. How we were so in love that it was almost inevitable. And I, knowing I loved him something fierce; that I loved him with the kind of love you can't forget for a second, the kind that hangs over you like a brilliant, soft pink cloud wherever you go, the kind that let me cast aside and forget the times when he was suicidal and angry and controlling and a mixed up, paranoid and accusing tsunami of a human being, never once thought I wouldn't be ready when the time came.

Tomorrow, he said. I thought okay. But I didn't mean it, of course I didn't. Something that seemed so ludicrous to me seemed out of the question, and so when he said tomorrow, I never thought of tomorrow, the next day, the one approaching in mere hours. I thought of something distant, something almost untouchable. Because that's what a moment like he described seemed to be. Out of reach. But he did say, clear as day, tomorrow. I guess I must be the only one to blame, for not taking his word, not taking it seriously.

School finished the next day and he met me outside my last class, a rarity because he usually had to bolt off to work the second the bell rang. But he was off that day and I was giddy, ecstatic even, with the thought of more time with him. He looped one long, lanky arm around my then healthily-sized waist and led me across the street and around the corner. His notoriously loud and easily irritated step father lived there, in a house on a street I'd never dare recall the name of. The step father wasn't home. This was a detail I should've recalled from the night before, but somehow nothing was connecting in my mind then.

I couldn't put the pieces together, couldn't relate the talk to the events that were unfolding before me. Not as he expertly opened the door and locked it behind him again, while I marveled at the beauty of the house, not as he led me down the hall with the gorgeous wooden floor. I could not even imagine what was about to occur as I stood in the threshold of his bedroom and heard him say, gruffly, "This is my room." I stood there, stupidly, for a moment, before saying, "Nice." I, in that moment, for God knows what reason, could not think of what else to do or say. I genuinely thought he was merely showing me his room. All intelligence I might have had earlier that day, all consciousness and awareness, had left me as I stood there dumbly in his doorway. But reality was soon thrust upon me against my will.