Before You

My biggest problem in my junior year of college was that my closet was too small. The faux wood dresser was barely three feet wide and two feet deep, a far cry from what I needed to contain my wardrobe of collared shirts and jeans in pastel shades. On move-in day, Raina and Sam sat on an elevated twin bed and laughed as I tried to stuff all my Ann Taylor Loft dresses into the narrow space, until I gave up, and collapsed on the ground. Raina took a photo of me, surrounded by colorful clothes and people I loved, a smile creeping onto my face through the exasperation.

Back then, my favorite way to unwind after class was by devouring blogs with names like “The College Prepster.” My friends teased me for wearing fake pearl earrings to the beach. I spent hours straightening my hair every day, frying my mousy brown waves straight until the ends split with damage. My daily wardrobe consisted of pencil skirts and cardigans, skinny jeans, and boat shoes. Even on weekends when I’d go to Allston to drink rum and cokes in the cramped and sticky kitchen of someone’s seedy apartment, I wore lacy tops and chiffon skirts.

I dreamed of becoming a fashion blogger or maybe an essayist. I didn’t care if all my most personal secrets came tumbling out of my mouth or onto the Internet. I believed my thoughts should be heard. I dated a boy who dumped me first thing in the morning while I still lay in his bed with my eye mask on; I yelled at him about it in front of all our friends.

I danced down city sidewalks with the assurance that they were my own, my pleated skirt swishing by my knees.

You

Who better to trust with your body than your first love? So I thought until I was alone with him and his lips were on my neck and his hands were pulling off my shirt, a soft, stretchy gray one that showed a sliver of my pale stomach when I wore it. When I asked him to stop, he put a hand over my mouth.

I used to dig my fingers into the thick knit of his sweaters out of desire. Now my fingers twisted knots in the yarn out of fear. I read the spines of his Kurt Vonnegut books, listened to my phone buzz with unanswered texts, and waited for it to be over.

I got rid of that shirt later.

After You

When I told my friends, I described what happened as “bad sex.” Sometimes I would write “rape” in the margins of my notebook during class, the word the bridge between what I said happened and what actually did. I would always scribble it out.

I stopped straightening my hair. I bought a floral-scented shampoo that promised to repair the heat damage. I used it every day, though I didn’t think damage like that could ever be fixed.

For my birthday, I gifted myself a nose piercing. I went with my friends who told me not to tell my mom beforehand, that otherwise she’d talk me out of it. Easy: I knew how to keep secrets by then.

After brunch, we took a rumbling Green Line train to a piercing salon near BU where the gruff employee yelled at me for flinching as he punched a hole through my nostril. I swallowed my scream.

After graduation, I took a job writing for a newspaper three hours away from my friends and family. Here, I got to hide behind other people’s stories. I wasn’t the subject of my writing anymore; my presence in each piece was reduced to a blurry byline stamped to the top of each article.

I dyed my hair, adding coppery streaks to my dark waves. This was not enough. I added more until I was nearly entirely blonde. I started wearing floppy felt hats, to conceal my roots. I phased out the cardigans and khakis in exchange for flowy floral wraps, my button-downs and pearls relegated to my work wardrobe. I avoided anything that showed my figure.

When people called me to complain about something I’d written, I’d listen to their shouts in silence. Why would anyone want to hear what I had to say if a boy I loved and trusted didn’t want to hear it?

Seven Years Later

It took six years and a pandemic for me to find the courage to move back to Boston. This time, I trudge down the concrete in warm L.L. Bean snow boots with the weariness of the same cynics who I once pranced by. I weave in and out of clusters of stalled tourists and meandering college students, my black winter puffer keeping me warm. I have places to be; I have no time now for carefully assembled outfits of thin tights and skirts that’ll leave me shivering at a bus stop.

I’ve found words to tell stories about grieving mothers and lives taken too soon. My voice has grown big enough to ask for space when needed and to say the word I once scribbled out in my notebook. I’m writing again, mostly about other people, but sometimes about me.

But I do not have the words for what to say when I see my first love, my rapist, standing in the darkened room of the brewery I’ve just entered.

He is still wearing Clark Kent glasses and bulky sweaters over slim-cut jeans. His dark hair is cut the same and his frame is as long and slender as it was in all my memories of him.

I run.

Once I’ve shut myself in the bathroom stall, I go through panic attack prevention: What can I see? What can I feel? What can ground me to this Earth so I don’t leave my body again, this precious thing I’ve reclaimed?

I look in the mirror and take stock of what I see:  hoop earrings where I once wore pearl studs, a seventies-style green floral dress paired with worn-in motorcycle boots, blonde-brown hair with long bangs I never had before last year.

I did not have the luxury of staying the same. I had to shed my skin or else suffocate from the touch you left upon it.

I go back out to the restaurant and eat my meal. You sit ten feet away and do the same, never looking my way. I cannot tell if this is by choice or ignorance. Perhaps you do not recognize me. Perhaps you too are haunted, looking for my ghost in every corner. But while I am searching to protect, you are bracing for a comeuppance, looking for a girl who no longer exists, one who pranced down the street like an empress in well-polished clothes.