I wish I knew where to get it.

It wasn’t long enough to wash away how disgusting I feel.
It wasn’t hot enough to burn away all of the pain.
I didn’t shave enough to scrape away all of the memories that haunt me.

I don’t know what to believe anymore.

“Do you think there’s any possibility it didn’t happen?” I asked Jen on Monday.
She thought if she should answer, and decided to. She knows I was asking her opinion and not for fact. I won’t be “forced” into believing whatever she does.
“No, I don’t” she replied.
“I know you want me to say yes,” she continued, “But I really don’t think so”.

I thought about what she’s told me in the past, when I was worried she might think I was faking.  Or when I’ve also asked her why she believes it’s something that has happened to me and not something my brain has made up.
I know that I see your reactions to what you’re seeing and feeling, she’s told me. You’re not that great an actress, Heather. Your reactions are so very strong. And it fits. It fits to why you feel and think the way you do. It fits too well to be made up.

She has never pushed this. She only answers when I ask for her opinion; and she makes sure to add that she could be wrong. She doesn’t believe she’s wrong, but she could be.

It does fit too well.
That’s too easy, my brain tries, They’re always looking for a reason you’re screwed up. There is no reason. You just are.
I still can’t deny that it explains so much.

Sometimes I think the things they’ve told me are worse than the things they’ve done to me. It’s the words they said that repeat in my mind. It’s the things they whispered over and over that make me hate myself the most. And I still believe it. The things they say are the things I’ve always believed about myself. Where else did I get it?
“It would have been so much easier if they were silent the whole time; if they just shut up and did it” I told Jen, “Their words seem to be the hardest to get over”.

I cry when I have flashbacks alone. Not always, but usually. Not many tears, either, as I’m still learning how to cry again. I’m grieving.
It hurts, but it’s freeing as well.
I am learning to let go.

I want to write about last night’s flashback. Just the one… or maybe both.
I can’t seem to do it, though. I want to get it out, but there are so many things holding me back again. Mostly, I’m afraid that I’m a liar. I’m standing on the edge of denial right now.

I wish I could talk to somebody about this. About… about the details. But it’s so gross and nasty and terrible and makes me want to curl up and disappear and die. It’s embarrassing. It’s… It’s just…

I need a hug. A real hug. A long, comforting, safe hug.

The more I hear this; the more I say it to myself; the more I am starting to believe it.

The core beliefs are still so strong in me, but I can finally feel them breaking. I can finally believe that maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was a liar.

He was a liar.

It was not my fault.

He’s licking me. I hate that. His whiskers rub against me and make me sore. It gets all red and hurts to pee for the next couple of days.

I hurt myself now at this thought. I hit myself. I hate myself.

I don’t want this out there, but I’m having trouble staying in the present and no one is awake right now.
So I write.

He… He..
I can’t do this. I can’t just write it. I need.. someone. I need someone.

-And so I move this from an entry in I am Living, to an email. I don’t even know to whom yet-

He puts his fingers inside of me. First one, then another. The second hurts and I realize it’s because he is stretching me open.
I know why, and I hate myself. I know what’s coming.

“Doesn’t that feel good?” he’s asking. I hate his voice like this.
I want to scream, “NO”, or at least shake my head, but I’m too scared to move; to breathe.
I want him to stop.
I WANT HIM TO STOP.

I know he won’t.

I keep stopping, digging my nails into my head & telling myself I can’t write this out.
I honestly don’t know what else to do.
No one is awake. If I don’t get it out I will go there.
I don’t want to go there.

I can’t do this. I can’t write any more of this out.

And there’s no one I can stand to know about this anyway.

-So I move it back to wordpress. Hold my breath & hit “publish’
No rereading it 15 times for errors, because I’ll just delete it.

“He’s choking me” I tell her, “He is telling me how easy it would be for him to choke the life right out of me”.
“Oh God” Jen whispers so quietly I almost miss it. She sounds devastated.
She rarely responds like that and I find myself wondering what was so awful about that. I’ve told her worse. Maybe it’s perspective.
“You must have been so scared” Jen says, which makes me realize I am shaking and rocking.
I take a second to feel, and I nod. I am scared. Very.
I am so used to surviving by pushing my feelings aside and pretending that everything is alright, that sometimes I have to just sit and feel before I can realize what it is I am feeling.
“What word & picture match how you are feeling right now?” we were asked at Innovations (an intensive outpatient program).
Like children, we had to learn to express how we feel with words.

She tries a new approach with me.
“Look at that little girl,” she says, for the first time referring to her not as me but as a little girl, “What can you say to help her; to comfort her?”
“Nothing,” I find myself responding, “She doesn’t deserve it”.
Jen tries more, but the self-hatred is so strong.
“I hate her” I say, “I hate her”.

And then I’m gone.
I was able to separate myself for that time, but then I’m gone. I’m her again. I’m me again. I’m lost and alone and hurting and dying. I am dying.
Or maybe I just wish I was.

I am alone in my room and he is holding me down by my throat. He is trying to force his penis inside of me, but it won’t fit. I am crying, or maybe just choking, I can never tell anymore.

“Can you hear me?” I hear Jen ask from a distance, “Nod if you can hear me”.
I contemplate if this voice is real and where I am and who I am for what seems like hours.
I remember I am in Jen’s office. I am not at home. He is not really here. Or his he?
I remember I was asked a question and I nod. I nod to let her know I can hear her.
I wonder if my response took too long; if she remembers what I am nodding in reference to.
Then I remember it’s Jen. She is so patient with me. She knows. She was waiting and watching for that nod.
I feel her hand in mine, and I cling to it. Safety. I am safe. This is my reminder that I am in Jen’s office and not really where I am seeing & feeling.

I am both then and now. Mostly then.
I flinch in the now.
“He got it in” I tell Jen, and I realize I am crying.
I am crying audibly. If ever I cry it is only ever silently, and now here I am crying audibly. I feel shame, but I let it continue. I need to cry. It hurts. Everything hurts. And somewhere in there I am crying for what was lost.
I am crying for my childhood. For my daddy. For all the things that should have been and weren’t.

I have been gone again and Jen is calling me back.
She is asking questions, trying to get me to talk; to get it out; to share the pain so I don’t have to go through it alone again.
But I can’t. I try, and I was for some of it,  but I can’t when it gets to this. When he is starting to orgasm. I can’t share this because I feel so disgusting. I feel so ashamed.
But I try.

I can’t quite remember the dialog, as I was so far there. I am there and I am talking, knowing Jen is listening.
I tell her how he made me thank him.
How he came in my mouth and made me thank him.
“He tells me I’m not even worthy of his cum” I was telling her later, or perhaps it was then. Time is so confusing for me. It’s not linear, it’s random.

“Is he gone?” she asks when she senses it is ending.
She knows I get silent and still when it’s over. I feel dead. I feel awful. She is patient and waits for my response.
Finally I nod and I sit up. I keep my arms crossed over my chest, but I sit up.
I realize now that this is an improvement. I can’t sit up during it, I curl up as tight as I can, but I’ve gotten to a point where I sit up afterward.

I am silent. I am thinking. My brain is processing and remembering; and I am feeling.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“His threats” I respond, “To put the knife in me. To kill my mom. That everyone will hate me if they find out”.
“That right there proves that you did not deserve or ask for what he did to you” she says.
“He had to threaten you. And he knew that you cared about other people. You cared enough to endure so much pain to save someone else. He knew you weren’t bad. He knew you didn’t deserve it, and he proved it by threatening to hurt your mom. He wouldn’t have had to do that if you were a bad person, or wanted it, or deserved pain like that”.
I think about what she says.
“But he doesn’t lie” I tell her, almost repeating his words to her, “He doesn’t lie to me. Other people do”.
I find myself believing these words less than I ever have before and I can almost feel hope. Almost. It’s hard to feel anything good after a flashback.
“He just… He repeated over and over and over and over. He repeated so much.” I told her.
“I know” she said, remembering, “He sat down and told you those things over and over”.
“He repeated them while he was doing it,” I revealed for perhaps the first time.
“The worse he made me feel, the closer he came to-” I cut myself off,  unable to say it.

“Do you understand what I was doing in the beginning?” Jen asked me.
I shook my head no.
“I was trying to get you to separate yourself. To see it like a movie instead of going completely there” She revealed.
“Did it help?” she asked.
I thought about it, and nodded.
“It did help at first,” I told her, “But then it…”
“It just got too overwhelming” she said, finishing my sentence.
I love that I don’t even have to explain things to her most of the time. She knows. She knows me and she understands.

He told me he was going to cum on my face. I told him he’d better not. No way.
He did anyway. It got in my hair and I got upset.
He laughed.
I asked for something to clean up with.
He threw me a dirty sock. It had actual dirt on it and when I tried to wipe myself up, the dirt came off on my face.
He laughed at that, too.

There are many things about him that haunt me now, but that one is the worst.
I never saw that any of this was wrong until someone spoke up that he seemed to have complete control over me.

He had all of my passwords to everything, including my online journal because “we should trust each other”.
The person said almost everything I said started with, “Well ____ says…”

I didn’t see it.

Then again, I learned a long time before that this was how guys were supposed to treat me.
Why would I think any different about it that time?

The thing I hate most about this was that I was an adult. I should have spoken up. I should have fought more. I should have seen him for what he was. I shouldn’t have let him treat me the way he did, or control me the way he did.

Once I started to see things from the outside, I started to stand up to him.
One night, he wouldn’t let me leave his house. I told him I wanted to go home and he said that he didn’t want to take me home, yet.
He had a friend over, and she said she would take me home.
He said that he would call my mom and tell her I had been out using drugs with this friend, so that when she brought me home my mom would think I had been out all day using drugs.
I didn’t want my mom to think that, so I stayed. The friend tried to get me to leave, but I couldn’t.

At first he wouldn’t “let” me break up with him, but eventually he gave up. I think the novelty of being able to control me wore off, and he went looking for his next victim.

In the beginning he had searched me out. He knew who I was. He knew what I was.
Day one he told me he was going to marry me. He kept up with that. Eventually I started dating him. I hadn’t even liked him and even then I couldn’t tell you why I started dating him. It was just in the way he spoke, the way he was.
The entire time, he reminded me of Charles Manson, or what I’d heard of him, as I never knew him.

Which reminds me, when this guy was in 8th grade he was suspended from school because he had a bunch of “followers”. I guess I wasn’t the only one his charms worked on.

I deserve pain and starvation. I deserved to be abused, molested, and raped.
I deserved it all. I still deserve it all.

He and at least 10 other men abused me and two other girls for the weekend. Two and a half days.

I’m still deciding how much I believe this.