the tinyblog

nothing interesting happened

I figured the gun must have been in the car; why else would it feel so cold? I could feel the vapor condensing on its barrel as it rattled against my teeth and bounced off of my tongue. I imagined him getting my call a half-hour ago, and then deciding to go out to his car to get his Glock. It was cold in the house, and even more so since I had just removed all of my clothes.

"Lay down on the bed."

I thought about a lot of things. I wondered where everyone else was. Since he had been discharged from the Seals he had been living with his parents until he could save enough to move out on his own. And there were usually other people around, such as his sisters or his mother.

I wondered if the gun was loaded. I couldn�t think far enough ahead to decide if I wanted to find out. I figured it was; he was just crazy enough to keep a loaded gun around all the time.
I wondered what I�d be doing right now if I hadn�t lied to my mother and told her that he was just a harmless kid of nineteen, instead of a grown man of twenty-five. What if I had gone to class instead? Instead of going to my junior English class I chose to break up with my boyfriend, in the middle of the day, at his house.

"You think you can break up with me and just walk away, huh?"

It was hard to talk around the gun so I chose to keep quiet. With every stroke he took its end jammed into the roof of my mouth. Drops of his sweat fell onto my back and rolled down my sides. It was the most physically painful thing I had experienced up until that time, but I kept quiet and did not cry out.

I thought about how we met; my mother took me out to lunch and he was our waiter. While my mother was in the bathroom he brought me a little cocktail napkin with his phone number on it, and winked at me. My mother commented that he was the best waiter she�d had in a long time. I threw the napkin away.

A month later I went to the movies with one of my friends. He was behind the counter, selling popcorn.

"Why didn�t you call me?"

"I don�t make a habit of calling strange men."

"Aww, c�mon. Call me, I�ll take you out."

We went out to dinner a few times. He picked me up from school and we had sex on my lunch hour, and I would get back before sixth period. He told me that I was beautiful, that I fucked like a porn star, and that when the lights were low I looked just like Julia Roberts. I didn�t find his flattery particularly interesting or believable. Even when I was sixteen I knew when a relationship was just about fucking.

I grew bored with him; my wandering eye lit on someone else. I was tired of his Navy stories and his acid flashback stories, and his spiel about how life would be so much better if he still lived in Scotland. So I decided to break up with him.
My thoughts were broken by his orgasm.

"Get out of here, you bitch."

I stood up and noticed how my legs and arms and everything was trembling. I imagined that even my organs were trembling, jiggling around inside of my body. My mouth, now empty, felt somehow like it was permanently pried open. Blood ran down the backs and insides of my legs and into my socks, which were the only things I was left wearing. I shoved my limbs into my clothes, without putting my bra or underwear back on. I scooped up my shoes and ran outside of the house, stopping only to vomit into the snow-covered bushes next to his parents� front window.

I got into my car and started it mechanically. I hoped I was okay to drive home. I remember worrying that the blood was going to seep through to the car�s seat. How would I explain that to my parents? I smoked cigarette after cigarette while waiting for stoplights to change- I felt like everything was happening in slow-motion, and that I was moving through a viscous gel.
I took a shower. Was I all right? Was I ruined now? Would people look at me and tell that I�d been raped? I discovered the answer was "no" that night at the dinner table.

"How was your day? Did anything interesting happen?" asked my mom. He was one of the few boyfriends I had in high school that my mom really liked.

"No. Nothing interesting happened."

Why did I say that? Why didn�t I tell her, or anyone for a whole year after it happened? At the time, I was afraid people would look at me differently, as if I had made a mistake. I thought only weak idiots got raped.

Some people have said to me, have you considered therapy? Have you thought about taking a self-defense class? I thought about it, but I look at it as a learning experience. I have become comfortable with my anger and I can reroute it. It fuels me and what I do; if I wasn�t so angry I couldn�t be so single-mindly focused on what I do in life. I know I will never be raped again, because I will eviscerate the person who tries it. I will rip out his neck (let�s face it, most rapists are male) and wear it as an armband. And if I fail at that, and I find myself with my mouth wrapped around a barrel of a gun again, I will find a way to pull the trigger, or throw myself on a knife, or chew at my wrists until they bleed profusely.

What I want to say is, don�t do this to a person.

--- Anonymous