First off, I want to apologise to all my readers – I know some, if not all, of you will find this a very hard post to read.
I thought I’d dealt with this. I thought I’d dealt with this.
However last night, dosed up on sleeping pills, I had a dream. I very rarely dream, and when I do dream my dreams are often full of things with massive emotional weight for me. Past lovers flit through, changing their minds or ignoring me full stop or picking arguments I never thought they actually cared about in scenes full of over-large buildings, trees as big as planets, and tennis courts built more like adventure playgrounds. There is a lot of adventure in my dreams, abseiling down random buildings, skydiving in sports halls big as hangars, leaping across the rooftops and bridges of Venice. However, last night’s dream was, though in a similar setting, infinitely worse.
There was a man – a friend of my sister’s? I’d not met him before. There were old-fashioned canvas tents full of the things you expect to find backstage at a theatre, in the middle of the desert. This man thought he knew what I wanted, though I wanted nothing from him. He kissed me, and I let him, because I thought that was all he wanted from me, but the next thing I knew his penis was right in front of my face and I was covered in his semen and I didn’t want that, I didn’t want that at all, and (why didn’t I do this in real life?) I shouted at him, hit him, got truly angry. He wasn’t in the least bit sorry, and what good did it do except make me feel a little bit better? But I suppose that’s something.
I woke up, crying.
Later today I finally got my phone back (I lost it in the Peaks on Sunday). There was a text, from T (you should all have guessed who he is by now – not the actual person, I mean, but what he did): ‘Do you remember me?’. Too well, far too well. I’m not going to reply.
I can’t help blaming myself, even now: because in the end he was bullying and wheedling and fighting me and I just said, OK then, fuck it, if that’s what you want, take it. I had no idea what the consequences were going to be, and if I had, he’d have been out of the door hours earlier. Hindsight is a terrible thing. As is What If, and If Only.
I suppose I’m only realising now that this is something I’m never going to deal with. The best I can hope is that it slowly starts to bother me less and less often.
2 Comments
March 25, 2009 at 9:38 pm
As I think I said, it takes time, a lot of time, but it does get easier. Obviously, my own experiences were far less than yours, BUT tell yourself you allowed it to happen. Tell yourself that “fuck it, go on” was a conscious decision, a conscious choice, which therefore gives you more power than you did have. Make yourself believe that you did, in part, have something to do with the choice, and that might make it less hard to deal with.
Equally, it might not. I don’t know, everyone reacts differently.
I only really ‘got over’ my own experience when your C told me that “emotions are within our control”. Decided that it wasn’t a big deal and that I was fine. Admittedly, somewhere beneath it all, I doubt that’s actually true. I’m not going to let that stop me being fine though. I just try not to step on the cracks and mostly things keep ticking over in working order.
After I dunno… a year, probably less, the flashbacks and memories become less potent (time = relative in this case, depends on you, your perspective on it and all sorts of other stuff) over time because there’s only a certain amount of times you can replay something in your mind before you just… stop caring? Or rather, not so much ’stop caring’ as, as time goes on we all change, yes? So after a certain amount of time, the person you are in the present moment ceases to bear much resemblance to the person you were then, so you resent what happened not because it happened to ‘you’ but because it happened to ‘her’. And even if ‘her’ is actually ‘you’, it somehow seems to matter less.
Or maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. You can’t ‘deal’ with it, but you can move on.
March 26, 2009 at 12:19 am
You see, I hate that ‘go on, fuck it’ was a conscious decision. That’s almost the worst of it, becuase I just know, actually, that if I hadn’t actually said that it would have happened anyway, so in a way I still didn’t have that choice. And I don’t want to have had any responsibility for taking that choice – the little *I* had to do with it, the better, somehow. I know that’s the opposite experience to you and the other person we both know who ended up in a similar situation, but because I regret the sex itself, I don’t want to think I bear any responsibility for it’s happening, becuase it still wasn’t something I actually wanted and I can’t change what happened but if I could say I didn’t want it, that wasn’t me, then somehow that makes it better, do you see?
I know it’ll happen less and less, I know that that’s how these things work, but I still get flashbacks about things I feel bad about that happened when I was a little kid, fifteen or more years ago. Fifteen or more years from now I guarantee you I’ll still, very occasionally, be hit by this. At the grand old age of 34.
But thank you, for understanding on some level.