On the last day of senior English class in high school, we went around in a circle guessing who would be the first to join a sport, start a relationship, make the Dean’s list. Eventually, the class was asked who would be the first to get a tattoo and facial piercings. My teacher jokingly suggested me, knowing that I would never modify my appearance permanently.

Later that summer, over Dairy Queen blizzards and summer skin, a handful of my girlfriends and I mused about who would be the first to date. I’ll be the last, I insisted.

***

In 2014, a little over a year later, I sat on the cracked leather seat of a tattoo shop in another state and received my first piercing, a pink nose stud nestled next to my cheek like an Irish rose. Only a month after entering college in 2013, I was the first of us to enter a relationship. He was my orientation leader, a year older than me, and I’d caught him staring at me during the first week of activities. During one particularly sweltering day, with the campus trees forming filigree shadows on the lawn, he told our group of first year students that he had never drank, and as a college student he was proud of it.

I fell in love quickly. On our first date, we stayed out until 1am, and rode the bus home after a movie with our knees pressed together in silence. I felt electrified. Towards the end of high school I had struggled with depression, and touching him felt like a bloom of dopamine. I was hyper-aware of my surroundings. The movie, Insidious, was nothing special and I’d spent most of it painfully holding my breath whenever he shifted beside me.

Earlier in the evening, while still on campus, he told me he’d found drugs in his parents’ garage. He wasn’t sure what it was, something white and powdery like sugar, maybe cocaine. Bags and bags of it. He was telling me this, Just in case I can’t pay for next semester and we can’t see each other anymore. It was the first time we’d talked on our own since orientation.

There was a text message every morning after that. Good morning, he hoped I would have a good day. Long gone now, along with the phone, the thrill of those messages still quiets me. He moved quickly, so subtly I hardly realized, much like my initial fear around starting college, which soon dissipated. A month later, on a bench behind campus, he told me he was in love. There was a prairie next to us, sloping down into a gentle pit. Every year it was burned to the ground to clear invaders.

I didn’t know what to say. The gentle exhilaration of the previous month suddenly stilled in my stomach like a root. I wasn’t ready.

Later that night, he messaged me how stupid he was, how silly, how he couldn’t believe he’d been so foolish to think I might love him back. He hated himself. The messages spiraled through my phone in increasing intensity. When we first met, he mentioned wanting a small semi-colon tattoo, the symbol for solidarity against depression and suicide. I knew he had a history of self-harm. He was distraught, lobbing insults at himself over and over. Meet me in the courtyard in ten, I said.

Outside, on the cold grate in the dark, I said, I love you too. I was just nervous.

***

In that same high school English class, my teacher had shared with us the book Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a faded yellow copy that brought together Zen meditation and writing practice. Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open. I loved that.

I had a writing blog by then, and I followed Natalie’s rules religiously, writing about everything from abortion and eating disorders to love, grief, and nature. A few weeks after he told me loved me, he mentioned my writing blog. He wanted to buy a copy of my book, which had been published at the very beginning of the school year. He wanted, in his words, to support me and us. I wasn’t aware he even knew I had a writing blog.

In December of 2013, something changed. He had spent hours one night telling me about his previous suicide attempts. We had still only known each other for a few months. I felt out of my depth, cold and strange, listening to him describe the mechanics of his noose. He talked about how his sister was a psychopath, how his father hated him, his mother neglected him. Over Christmas break, I visited his family for the first time. He walked me down to the tree through the snow, motioned to where he had hung the rope. A painting of the tree from his ex-girlfriend sat atop his dresser.

But I was in love. While the cold currents still ran through me, I felt that I had never wanted anyone else this much. I’d lost my virginity to him by then. I had bled just a little, and afterwards he retreated, sullen. I wanted it to be perfect, he said.

Standing in the bathroom downstairs getting ready for bed after he took to me to the tree, he told me he’d given me everything. First love, first sex, first smoke, first shower with someone else. The next night, he gave me my first drink. It was dragonberry vodka. It took me three shots to dizziness and bliss. Somewhere between orientation and winter, he had had his first drink too.

At some point that night, I had more vodka. I don’t know how much. I remember feeling myself pushing him away. I asked for a condom. He inserted himself inside me anyway. It wasn’t perfect this time, and the love wasn’t enough. After a few seconds, he got a condom, but I was numb. I told myself he had just been excited to be with me and got carried away.

In the morning, his father knocked on the door. He’d heard me crying. I didn’t know I had cried. I don’t remember much of that night, or what happened after he got the condom. I remember he helped pay for my Plan B. There are holes sloughed through my memory like eyes cut into a child’s t-shirt ghost.

***

I didn’t follow Natalie’s rules the rest of that December. My blog was carefully curated every day, but at the same time it was also empty. I knew that writing down the bones meant accepting what had happened.

I became the person my high school English teacher had never dreamed of. I became an alcoholic. There were several hospital visits and alcohol poisonings in the spring. I am still ashamed, deeply ashamed, when I remember how the nurse called my father to tell her I’d almost died. I almost died a lot of times. I wished I had, a lot of times. Once, I left the hospital and walked in my gown with bare feet to a nearby bank. I asked the teller if I could borrow the phone to call my sister. Surely it was someone else in the bank, with dyed black hair. Someone else calling. Someone else waiting in the lobby for her sister to pick her up. It wasn’t me.

I wasn’t the person who drank into oblivion, who lost myself, who got the nose stud. And then another nose ring, and another, and then more piercings. I wasn’t the person who once lifted an empty bottle of gin to my mouth that had been left in a closet for months, hoping for one last drop. That wasn’t me. I did not know that person, and yet she stood on the other side of an abyss, waving.

***

In June of 2014, toward the end of our relationship, he raped me. I don’t call the first incident, the one in December, rape. It was only a few seconds, after all. So too was the time he aggressively groped me while drunk before my first winter ball. Afterwards, I asked if we could stay in and watch Breaking Bad instead. I didn’t want to show my face or wear a gown. I didn’t call the incident after that rape either, when he didn’t use a condom. Again.

But the last incident was something different. I won’t tell it again. I can’t, at least not yet. He had raped me in his bedroom. I was lifted from that same bed weeks later by paramedics after telling his best friend about the rape and swallowing so many jolly rancher shots that the world broke into glass.

I finally wrote down the bones after that. On June 16, 2014, I wrote in my blog, “How do I even look at you again?” Years later, the post remains in my archive, suspended like an insect in amber.

***

He had a tattoo when we met, a brain, tucked beneath his shoulder, high on his abdomen. When he first lifted his shirt to show me, I felt myself falling a little deeper. He was in love with neuroscience. I thought he understood people, and could read them. A few months later, he had gotten another. “We’re all mad here” from Alice in Wonderland. The girl predicted to never get a tattoo, dating the boy with two.

***

Many days, I wonder if I am mad here. I felt crazy. I was crazy. I was told he denied everything completely. He told me he would be raped in prison if I reported, that he would kill himself if I reported. His friends learned different versions of my story from an unreliable narrator, while I learned about gaslighting, and the story of the man who dimmed the lights until his wife went insane. There are bones in my blog, and some days whole skeletons. Other days, I question who built them, and what purpose they serve.

I was the first of my friends to date, and the first to break. I wonder, if I visited my English teacher, whether he would even recognize me. Some nights, though, when I turn down the lights and move through the halls of my blog archive, I recognize that girl writing all those years ago. On August 31, 2013, two days after her first college class, she shared a quote by one of her favorite authors, Richard Siken. “Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore.”

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Part of our Winter 2025 Issue. New stories, poems, and essays now through February 2025.

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