My Rebirth

"Sorry, I'm a guy."

That's what some boy sighed after he put his hands on me. As I stared at him in shock, in horror, those are the words he chose to say. He probably didn't think I would play them over and over again in my head, that the moments which preceded those words would recur to me in flashes, in bits and pieces that would come to embody the shattered fragments of my life. Or at least what was left of it.

I thought love was always what it looked like in the movies. I could not have imagined that a boy would instead force his love into me through my spine, pinned against a concrete floor. Love would be introduced to me at the age of seventeen, when my wrists were held down so that I couldn't keep him from kissing me. With his hands, he rammed love into every part of me that he could reach, all the places he thought his love belonged—into places I could not tell my mom about, places even my therapist could not convince me to say aloud.

I couldn't tell them about the spine against the basement floor, about the pinned wrists and the spine and the hurt. If I did, then I'd contaminate myself further. I was convinced that I had to stay quiet or else I would become the villain, or else I would somehow become the intruder.

After it happened, there was no ghost that followed him home. He got to forget and forget and forget. But me? I laid awake and remembered. I remembered and remembered until the minutes spent terrified in that basement amounted to a lifetime.

That is where his narrative ends and mine begins.

I had to teach myself that there could be good love. I am the one who stitched the ribs back together and revived the home within them. I am the one who had to remember. And maybe I'll always be stuck in that moment. Maybe I will spend eternity cracking wrists, punching walls, fearing even the kindest touch. Yet even if I am trapped perpetually in the basement of my childhood home, he will not stay there with me.

I get to grow up. I get to create this patchwork existence from the scraps of myself left in his wake. The privilege of rebuilding, of finding new love in remarkable places, is mine and mine alone. With me, I will carry the scars of what some boy believed deeply to be love. It will not wither to hate inside of my bones.

I get to remember those moments with spine pressed against concrete as ones of great bravery and resilience and strength.

And so I am sorry for him.

All he gets to do is forget.