Poltergeist

Materiel may be triggering to some readers

There are many things we dislike about ourselves. Maybe you're too shallow, self-absorbed, you only care about yourself. Maybe you get angry too quickly, lashing out at the people you care about. Or perhaps you do both. The thing is, we all share these horrible qualities, to a degree. We all do these things. We are all more concerned with ourselves than other people. We all get angry too fast. But, my least favourite aspect of human nature, is the way we constantly attempt to ignore things that are hard to deal with.
On the day it happened, I tried to tell my three best friends. They didn't really want to hear it. The responses were mixed, but all boiled down to the same thing, they didn't want to hear about something like this.
Meghan and Lucie reacted in a way I never expected my friends to react. I should have seen it coming though. See, sex and relationships are hard. When I told them that my ex-boyfriend had showed up at my house uninvited and forced his way in, they immediately assumed they knew what had happened. I'd had a moment of weakness, and jumped into bed with him.

“You're an idiot.”
“I know.”
“I don't like this stupid self-pity thing you're doing.”
“Sorry.”
“You still did it.”
Silence.
“That was dumb.”
“I know.”
“If you know then why did you do it?”
“I don't know.”
“Well did you want to?”
“No.”
“You obviously did, or it wouldn't have happened.”
“I didn't.”
“Well, you did.”

It was cyclic. I was telling them, or trying to. I told them that I felt so vile afterwards that I showered straight away, attempting to scrub away the dirty feeling that covered me. I told them I felt so sick to my stomach about it, to the point that I couldn't keep food down. I told them I cried after, even when I was walking down the street. I can't even count how many times I told them I didn't want to. But they didn't want to hear that.
Alicia was different. Not so harsh. She didn't understand either, though, but for a different reason. She was innocent. Inexperienced in every aspect of life. I guessed that this was something she'd never really understood much about, but I still tried to tell her, I still needed to talk to someone. She repeated the same thing over and over, telling me that I'd stop feeling so bad in a few days, it was just the regret.
She told me it was okay to make mistakes, which I agree, it is. But it wasn't a mistake on my part. To make a mistake you need to make a choice, between at least two things: the right, and the wrong. I didn't have that luxury.
The only person who understood what I meant when I told them was the new boy I was seeing. Ironically, I didn't tell him what really happened that day. I gave him as little information as possible. No details. No explanation. Nothing. Just an apology.
It was awful of me to be so vague, but as soon as I could I ran to tell him. I needed to. I felt guilty. It took me days to process everything, to realise what it really was. A few weeks later when we talked about what truly happened he was furious.
I didn't actually say the word. I still try not to. It's too harsh. Too certain. When I say certain, I don't say it like I'm not sure it happened. It's pretty much the only thing I'm sure of. I just mean, I feel like it defines me in a very final way. As though I could do any number of amazing things with my life but I would still always be that girl who was raped.
I think it's worse, to an extent, because we used to be together. People assume that just because you've slept with someone once you automatically want to sleep with them again. They don't see that you can say no and I don't want to as many times as you like but when they're on top of you, you don't have a choice.
It's ghostly familiar. The way they take their clothes off, the texture of their skin, the way they moan. But it's no longer satisfying. There are new things, the way their entire weight is on you, the lack of comforting words, the gleam in their eye that lets you know that they know they're wrong, but they don't care.
Now, it's like a poltergeist. It all feels like a sick joke. The person who would never hurt you, doing this. It does hurt, too. You're not into it in your head and your body knows that. There are no goosebumps or butterflies. There's no pleasure. At least, there wasn't for me. I came close to pretending there was, purely in the hope that it would end faster if I did. But it wasn't about me, it was about him.
Now, so many months later, my friends still ask.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do you regret it?”
“You must have wanted to.”
“It's not like he could have forced you, he's like, two inches taller than you.”
Eventually, I stopped fighting it. It's more comfortable, I guess, to pretend that things like that don't happen. Or at least, that if they do, they don't happen anywhere near you. Especially not to your friends, especially not by someone you know. Because if it happens to your friends it could happen to you. Because if it was done by someone you know, does that mean you could be capable of something like that too?

Reviews

[Holy Gma]

I really like this story. In the beginning the reader, at least I think any female reader, knows where it is going, but still hopes it isn't. We don't want to know. And then when the woman doesn't fight to make her friends understand that she was raped it is confusing. But then by the end the reader understands that because the woman did not want to believe this could happen and because it felt too futile, too unreal, too confusing to fight her loverr/rapist, it also felt too futile, too unreal, too confusing, to fight the disbelief of her friends who don't want to believe it could happen either. So, the woman finds herself in an unspoken contract to protect everyone from knowing at the expense of herself.But there is a green of hope for her healing in the new man who was willing to know, to believe.
I did find a few technical errors:
1. In paragraph 2: ..."The responses were mixed but they all bottled down..." That should say "they all boiled down to"
2. In Paragraph 7 "The only one who understood what I mean..." That should be meant instead of mean. And in the same paragraph:..."no explanation, no detail, no nothing..." No nothing is a double negative. It should say: " no explanation, no detail, nothing."
3. In paragraph 8 "...They don't see that you can say no and I don't want to... I think those should be in quotation marks: ...You can say, "no" and, "I don't want to"...
Otherwise great work

[Molly K]

Thank you so much!
I've corrected the errors, thanks for pointing them out

[Holy Gma]

No problem, I was hesitant to point out the errors because I wasn't sure if that was what you wanted. But I decided that I would want that so I went ahead and stuck my neck out. Keep up the good work

[Molly K]

Well thank you for doing so :)

[Dan Burrows]

This story is amazing! It tackles a real underlying dilemma in our world at the moment, the thought of "Well its not happening to me" is one that we all experience from time to time whether it is to do with rape and the horrible feelings that must surround it or even if it's to do with other events in life like war and 3rd world countries. I love how you use rhetorical questions at the end, I can't speak for anyone else but it definitely made me question the way I look at these horrific situations! I can't wait to read more from you!

[Molly K]

Thank you so much! I think it's definitely a trait that everyone tries to ignore and that's why I wanted to write about it. Thank you for your feedback!