‘If You Don’t Understand What It’s Like to be Sexually Abused, that is a Privilege’: To The First Boy I Loved After My Assault

By Kerrie Portman

You and I met thirty-six days after I was assaulted. The assault in question was not the first, but it was the most violent. I was less than a week off crutches, the bruises had barely healed and I still couldn’t sleep through the night, though perhaps the latter isn’t really a marker of time – I still can’t.

I didn’t trust you when we first met, under the ruby Christmas lights in the warm shed just outside of the pub. It took one-hundred-and-five days after we met for me to feel comfortable enough with you to want to get to know you, and it was one-hundred-forty-six days after we met that I started trusting you.

The first time you held me was on a bench, in the dark, by the church overlooking the river. You asked before you held me and that was partly why I said yes. When you put your hand on the back of my head, I was very aware you were stronger than me and that you were the first man I let touch me after the assault. It felt nice being held by you; it didn’t feel like a threat.

I got drunk shortly after that, under the blue, red and yellow disco lights, and I curled up against you because you felt like home to me. You felt safe. I couldn’t focus my vision and the edges blurred. I watched your hand on my thigh, and thought that if I weren’t wearing shorts you would be fingering me. When we spoke about it afterwards, I accepted your blame wordlessly because I touched your knee first and what you did wasn’t the same as being pushed into a wall – and I had been wearing shorts.

That was the night I fell asleep on your shoulder, the first night I slept near someone since I was assaulted in my sleep. I spoke that narrative as a trophy of trust and swallowed down the bitter aftertaste that part of that trust was because I knew you could have raped me then but didn’t, so I thought you wouldn’t. I ignored it and pushed the words away because I couldn’t understand them. I assumed that it was a sign of how broken I was.

It was one-hundred-thirty-five days after I started trusting you that you broke my trust. I told you I felt triggered and couldn’t have a conversation about people who had raped me. You kept pushing. It was the first time that I felt afraid of you. I knew there was no point in saying no to you. Instead, when I could no longer take it, I broke down crying and told you exactly what happened. I thought if you understood you would stop talking about it. You didn’t.

Do you remember what you said to me? You asked me how a man would feel if he knew that and you went on a ‘not all men’ rhetoric. Do you remember when you said you were ‘disappointed’ that I couldn’t work with the people who assaulted me? I didn’t stop crying for forty-five more minutes until you finally stopped. And then you left me. Then all our mutual friends left me. Everything beautiful in my life got dragged into the stupid political righteousness. I didn’t understand why and, in the pieces that I was left with, I realised that you left me because I was raped. Maybe that’s not a fair conclusion, but you left me with no other narrative.

Instead of doubting you, I doubted myself. It wasn’t until I heard what you did to other women that I felt like what had happened to me was valid. In all the sweet nothings I wanted you to whisper to me, you decided you wanted nothing to do with me. Our relationship lasted two-hundred-eighty-one days. You burned everything; you burnt me with it. I saw clarity in the light of the fire, but my face used to light up every time I saw you.

You were the first boy I let myself care about since the assault. You used to say that I was so sweet and innocent, that you wouldn’t know what you would do if anyone hurt me. But you hurt me, and you kept hurting me. You used to say that you felt protective of me and that you cared about me. I believed you. That’s why this hurts so much. I did everything you asked me to, though that wasn’t good enough for you. I never imagined you would be capable of anything you did; I felt scared of what you would do next.

If you don’t understand what it’s like to be sexually abused, that is a privilege. It shouldn’t be, but it is. You made me feel that rape will always win and there is no point in trying to rebuild my life. But I don’t want to believe that.

Although I don’t want to care about you anymore, I don’t want to regret having loved you. I want to be proud of myself for standing up for myself as a rape victim, even though I never should have had to stand up to you. I want to be proud of having gotten through the tough times, even though it never should have been you that made them hard. Sometimes I think I miss you, but I miss the you that I knew before I truly understood what you were capable of.