Close Your Feet and Walk Away

I am loved.

I am happy.

At least I think those things are true.

I feel like those things are true.

My boyfriend and I say, “I love you,” to each other every single day, more than once. I don’t know why he loves me, but he does. Sometimes I question this love. Sometimes I wonder if we will get married someday and have a family and live in a big house with a big yard or if we will break up after a big fight and move out of the togetherhome we have right now because until death do us part is not realistic for a raped girl like me. Maybe after our big fight, he’ll ask his boss to relocate him to another state because he wants to move out of California because California is where we became us and where we destroyed us. Or maybe he will go on a work trip and cheat on me because I am too old and I have too much baggage, too many rape suitcases and suicide carry-ons and booze satchels and coke duffels. Or what if I cheat on him because although I am trying to be clean and sober, I might get fucked up one day and I’ll want to do a shit ton of coke or molly or drop acid or shoot heroin. And I’ll choose heroin because I have never used a needle before and I’ll be so upset that I will need that needle to stop feeling the pain of whatever just happened. And maybe when I am higher than I’ve ever been before, I’ll fuck a random asshole like I used to when I hated myself so much I wanted to die. And I’ll fuck that asshole because I’ll hate the world all over again and I’ll need to get so high that I forget who I am and where I am and why I am still alive. Maybe I’ll lose my shit and I’ll shoot up so much heroin, I almost overdose because I’m fighting with God and I’m tired of losing the fight, so I make Her choose whether I stay or go because every time I choose to go, She makes me stay.

We never agree on anything, God and me.

Secrets are my heroin.           

I have too many secrets I have to get out, too much liquid dynamite that keeps pumping itself into my blood and bones, too many holes and too much access to what is inside me. There are too many secrets that are too big and too heavy to be inside one person that I wonder if any of these secrets are even true anymore. Are they real? Or did I make them up because I am one fucked up kid? There are secrets from when I was a little girl and then from when I was a girl turning into a woman and then from when I was a woman who wished I could be a girl again before all the secrets clogged my courage to tell the truth.

I was molested when I was a little girl.

At least, I believe I was molested. I don’t know what else to call it. What do you call a thirty-year old memory that has never stopped making you feel stained and ashamed and horrified at how your life started out? What do you call naked kid memories where you can’t remember if you said no or if you were too scared to say no or if you didn’t say anything at all because you were sure this person would never hurt you?

Littlegirlme:

Why is this a secret?

Why can’t anybody else play?

Why do we have to hide?

Why do we have to take off all our clothes?

Is this how boys are supposed to take care of girls?

Sometimes I wonder if it really happened because to think now about it happening back then is really fucking awful. My brain cannot compute it. It remembers, but I cannot make sense of what it remembers. If I told people the truth about being molested, then I am sure I would get a gun and kill myself. I am sure of it because I have access to a gun now. There is one in the closet eight feet away from me as I sit and write this. It is a gun my boyfriend bought a few years ago. He has a license for it. When he told me he was getting one, I didn’t believe him. When he came home and showed it to me, I tried not to scream. I was caught off guard with how nervous and nauseous I felt when I saw that perfect black gun sitting in its perfect black case. I didn’t expect to feel hopeful and afraid of what I might do with this perfect piece until it was in front of me, inviting me, tempting me, taunting me with all its bells and whistles and tricks, whispering to me everything I could do with it if it was still, in fact, my wish to do those things.

When I was sixteen, I wanted to kill my whiskeyfriend because he drank too much and hurt me.

When I was seventeen, I wanted to kill myself because I was breaking on the inside and outside.

When I was eighteen, I wanted to kill Bill because he raped me on my birthday.

I wished my entire life for a gun so I could kill with authority.

I can talk about the first rape when I was eighteen but I cannot talk about the second rape when I was twenty-eight and I sure as hell cannot talk about being molested when I was five or six. But I can write about everything.

Littlegirlme is the last thing I thought about before my tenth, and last, suicide attempt. I couldn’t stop my mind from drowning with bitter memories about everything I hated about myself. A neonflashing memory of nakedgirlme was at the forefront of my hysteria, suffocating me, beating me to death.  

Then I saw the medicine cabinet.

And I remembered what I had in there.

And I stopped crying.

It takes thirteen milliseconds for the brain to process what the eye sees.

That’s how long it took me to know I wanted to kill myself again, to know this would be the last time because this time I would do it right.

So, I checked all my bags – the rape suitcases and suicide carry-ons and booze satchels and coke duffels – and I made it past security with my ammunition packed into pill piles and walked to my seat to begin the best trip of my life. Life went from freakishly fucked to a magical wonderland in thirteen milliseconds.

I wonder if this is how long it took my abusers to know they were going to hurt me.

The thing about being molested is that you don’t know what is happening but you hear something secret inside of you tell you this is a bad secret to keep. Except you don’t know how to get rid of it because now there are two secrets – the thing inside of you that is telling you this is bad, and the thing outside of you that is touching you and telling you this is good. You don’t even know yet that girls and boys have different parts until this person shows you the different girlboyparts and tells you their names and explains what you are supposed to do with them.

The thing about being molested is that you lock away the secret memories in your babybank and you go on with your life but as you get older and begin creating newnaked memories with people you think you like or love, the newnakeds meet the old secrets and the two begin to talk and share and compare notes about what is right and wrong, so you create a new grownup bank to separate the two. But the conversation has already begun, and you can’t stop it or force it or erase it. You just have to wait for them to stop talking.

And you hate remembering and feeling and seeing everything that was supposed to stay locked forever in your babybank. But babies don’t stay babies forever. The secrets have to grow up, too. The secrets have to catch up to grownup you so you can all grow up together, or else the babysecrets will die inside of you and begin to rot until you are so rotten inside, you can only think thirteen milliseconds at a time.

He called it “making love.” I don’t remember a manboy penis inside my babygirl vagina. But I do remember what it felt like to be naked. The manboy said we were going to play a game but we had to do it naked because that was the only way the game could be played. And I liked playing the game because it was a secret. I liked how my girlbody felt against the manboy because I had never felt skinonskin before and it was cold and new until we were warm and it felt fresh and clean like a trophy or a big prize or something else that was shiny and special and just for me and nobody else. But I didn’t understand why it had to be a secret if it was a game. Weren’t games supposed to be played with a lot of people because they were fun? Weren’t games usually played in big living rooms or backyards? With clothes on?

And then one day a grownup saw us.

We were playing our secret game in the bedroom under a desk when we heard grownup footsteps coming down the hallway. The manboy directed me to not make a sound. He was on top. The grownup steps came closer and closer. The bedroom door was almost closed, so the grownup pushed it all the way open and then… nothing. No movement. No sound. All I could see from under the desk was two grownup feet wearing flip-flops. I don’t know if the feet belonged to a man or a woman. They were facing us, as if their toes were grownup faces and eyes trying to focus and understand what they were looking at. They were interrupting our game, judging our secret.

And then the feet turned around and closed the door and walked away.

A theme in my life.

Turn around and walk away.

Pretend like it didn’t happen.

Don’t talk about it.

Don’t think about it.

Why can’t I talk about being molested? Why can I only talk about one rape and not the other rape? Why is sexual violence a recurring theme in my life? Did I ask for it when I was growing inside my mom’s belly? Is sexual violence hereditary? Can you get it if it happened to your mom or dad, too? Because my mom was raped twice when she was a little girl by their servants in India. Did I catch it from her? And did she catch it from somebody else in her family?

I don’t like thinking about the makinglove game. I don’t like thinking about nakedgirlme. I want to forget everything about it because it happened so long ago, sometimes I question if it really happened at all.

Is my mind playing tricks on me?     

Is it possible for one person to have been sexually violated so many times?

Could the secret game have been a recurring dream I had when I was a kid and because I had this dream so many times, I actually started to believe it?

Not a dream.

A nightmare.

A manboyfucking nightmare.

I can’t talk about this anymore. This is all I can say about it. I never want to talk about any of this again. If you are reading this and we meet one day and we sit down for coffee or tea or, if I am drinking again, wine or vodka or tequila, and you want to ask me about manboy and what else I remember and why I didn’t tell anyone and who it was and how old he was and who the grownup was and how it started and where it happened and all that other SHITSHITSHIT, know thatyou are a fucking piece of shit for asking me too many questions that are none of your goddamn business and know that I will probably most definitely punch you in the face and break your nose if you demand answers because there are some things I will take to my grave and there are some things that remind me of the grave I just crawled out of and if you ever dare try to take me back to that grave, I’ll fucking kill you. I have a gun now.

I am loved.

I am happy.

At least I think those things are true.

-Perveen Maria

Perveen Maria is a California based writer with a passion for sharing true stories. She began writing her memoir during her MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. After graduating in 2015, her manuscript took a back seat while she focused on starting a family with her husband. They welcomed their rainbow baby in 2022, and shortly after, Perveen quit the corporate world to focus on what is most important to her - her family, writing, and helping survivors of sexual assault get their strength and life back. Her work has been published in the Manifest-Station.