I was not raped by someone you know. Just a few days after my fifteenth birthday I was raped by a boy who was scared of ghosts and hung a tin cross on his wall. When I was raped it felt like drowning. I could not breathe. My body twisted in ways I was not in control of, and in the fleeting moments when I realized and re-realized what was happening to me I gasped for air. I cried.

I ran home that night, the entire way, afraid he would chase me and wondering why I was afraid. At home, I fell asleep on the staircase leading to my room, exhausted.

This is why I am angry at you. I still loved him, even after that.

I felt dirty and paranoid without understanding why. I didn’t go to school the next day, and I took the weepy, scalding shower I had seen in movies. Over a month later, after I had finally realized that what had happened to me was rape and after I told what had happened to my parents, I sat in a green, paper dress to be tested for STIs. Pregnancy. A middle-age nurse glowered at me because I was a child. I could imagine her telling her friends what she had seen that day, the child slut. Even then, I loved him.

You love him too. You still do. When attackers are outed we fix on their names, their faces, their stories. We have asked how long they have to wait in the corner before we can smile at them again. I have made myself ill looking at them. I want you to look at me. I want you to love me.

Imagine. I celebrated with my friend when I found out I wasn’t pregnant. I got a call outside of the Band Hall at school and we hugged and cheered because I would not be having my rapist’s child. Why weren’t you there for me then? Why didn’t you call an authority? Why didn’t you tell me it wasn’t my fault? I had to search for people to tell me these things, anonymous people in support groups online. I had to hunt for them for hours, peeling off the trauma in hot, acrid layers.

I ask knowing the answer. This has happened regularly, quietly, for a long time. Repeatedly, people are bled to death with sexual violence. Daily. Hourly. I felt the pressure to soften it, ignore it, deal with it on my own. Forgiveness would heal me. Not living life as a victim would strengthen me. But I am a victim. What happened to me was mundane and it dragged me into numb misery for more than half of my life. I was hurt and I am furious because you watched and did nothing. It never meant I was weak. It meant you were.

I had to work to stop loving him, to stop blaming anyone but him. I made myself very small, very easy to manage. When strangers touched me, I froze. When I had a panic attack, I secluded myself. I have struggled to breathe in cars, in closets, in bathroom stalls. I should have made you deal with it, deal with me. I should have done it in the street. You should have fixed this before I was hurt, before my mother was hurt, before either of us was born.

I don’t want to see their faces anymore. I don’t want to see his face. I don’t want to think about his daughter. I am the ugliest thing in the room and you are responsible. Look at me. Fix it.

-Arlyn LaBelle

Arlyn LaBelle is a queer poet and writer living in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in the Badgerdog summer anthologies as well as The Blue Hour, LAROLA, JONAH Magazine, North of Oxford, The Oddville Press, Songs of Eretz, Grey Sparrow Press, Cease, Cows, Panoply Zine and The Southern Poetry Review.