Pieces

And essayish story for a class, on my sexuality.

    My earliest memory of sexuality was as a first grader, kissing my best friend Rachel under the jungle gym. She was telling me about the college students she saw making out. We pressed our faces together as long as we could before bursting into fits of laughter.
    Four years later I was molested by an older student. Trapped in the dark closet behind the set of the school play, I said the Saint Michael's prayer over and over, but no angel came. It happened repeatedly over a period of several weeks, but became to me like one huge black hole that I, as a socially awkward Christian girl, did not have the ability to comprehend or handle. When he would look at me across the room in school, and I felt sick to my insides, I would tell myself he could never get to me again. I didn't know what sex was, I didn't understand the difference between bullying and violation. The best that I could do was keep telling myself that I was safe and forget.
    Two years later I was riding in the car, my brother next to me in the back seat. He was reading some magazine, telling me about an article that said 1 in 3 women had been sexually harassed or assaulted. Everything came back to the surface, barging out from the door I have tried to seal so tightly. Two years older, I knew now. The weight of what had happened sunk in. This thing, this emotional behemoth made of my shame, fear, helplessness, and anger, it was because I had been sexually assaulted. My brother commented that he didn't agree with this statistic, it had to be exaggerated. I looked over at him, with so many things ready to pour out, wanting so badly to disagree. But I turned away and looked at the hills zooming by outside the car window. No words came out.  The moment passed and I never again found a moment to speak. The feelings became worse. Suddenly, this thing I had suppressed became like a second skin and I couldn't shake it off.
    Several years passed and I remained speechless. Sometimes the memories were dormant, sometimes they were all I could think about. Still, I unavoidably became a teenage girl, crushing on boys and daydreaming about love like well-adjusted girls do. But the though of physical contact beyond a kiss held no interest for me, not even a blushing girlish curiosity. Sex seemed something shameful, disgusting, the actual task itself an unromantic, a violent act of control and domination over another human being. I wondered if I could find someone content to read me just love poems and hold hands forever.
    Somehow I managed to stumble into love anyway, a couple boyfriends and even a girl once. I thought that maybe a girl wouldn't scare me so, but I was so uncomfortable with my own anatomy that all my issues were compounded. I envied lovers in the Petriarchian romances I read in English class; flowery, obsessive affairs that rarely came to fruition. When I did finally develop somewhat stable relationships, my desire seemed unable to become anything more than just a mirror of my partner's. I was trying to be normal, trying to make them happy, trying to want what girls should want.
    It has taken me years of stumbling to come close to feeling normal. But even now, when I look over at my boyfriend, I wonder if he'll realize that even after four years of trying, I'm never going to be enough for him. I wonder if those few weeks of my life have taken a piece of me forever.