Everything Feels Wrong

over a year later

It's now been over a year since the day he changed my life, and even since the day a woman with a kind smile told me to breathe in and count to fifteen. January of 2018, 362 days after I was drugged and raped, I walked to meet my friends in the usual place before school, so we could walk together in a group. As I got out of the car, a small group of children walked up behind me, on their way to school too. Seeing these kids set me off a little, but I made sure it didn't show. Within seconds, one of my friends shouts, "Hey Al, you look like a mom with her children in tow!"

This was shouted at me by a kid I called my friend. A kid who, three months prior, held my hand and talked me through a panic attack. A kid who, in the past couple weeks, I had asked countless times, politely, might I add, to stop making rape jokes. To stop talking about explicit sex around me, simply because I couldn't handle it.

This, I could tell as it was said, was it for me.

I lost it, and I yelled back at him.

I told him to stop, I said I was sick of this, and I walked to school on the verge of tears, hanging behind our group that was now shrouded in tension.

This day's events caused me to lose the friend who'd spewed the joke at me, our close friend who always picked the loud boy before others, and the other boy, who I wasn't very close to at all, but even his absence stung.

These boys were some of the "best friends I'd ever had", and I lost them because I was sensitive, and what the obnoxious boy regarded as a walking eating disorder that was triggered by rape jokes and anything related to small children.

Today, it is May of 2018, and one of the boys is back, we're close again, and the one who stayed through it all, I can now call my fiancée.

It haunts me, to this day, as you'd expect.

I'm trying, with all of me, to "get over" this "tragedy".

I can't believe I made it through this year and four months, I can't believe I lived to see fifteen. I didn't think I was going to.

I lost some people, I gained some calluses, and I came to terms with feeling dirty.

I can now be touched, by approved hands, without feeling like the world is going to end.

It was a productive sixteen months, if you ask me.

I think this is progress.