Me Too

My youth minister once told me that seventeen was too young to have felt the pain that I'd felt. She told me that seventeen was too young to be so corrupted, so scarred. According to her, seventeen was supposed to be a year of self-discovery and growth. But yet, to me, seventeen was the year spent at the bottom of a full glass, with my screams only rippling at the surface. Seventeen was the year a boy failed to view me as a human being. Instead, this boy viewed my drunken body as a playground. Despite my cries, he decided it was okay to swing on my swings, slide down my slide, cross my monkey bars. Despite my avid “no’s,” this boy decided didn't stop. To him, I was inferior only because my body was slumped and his wasn't. I remember my best friend attempting to bang the door down and you telling me shut up because my friends would think you were raping me. I remember light flooding into the room, my best friend’s silhouette and angry shouts cascading over the darkness. I remember my other friend, gently cradling my head in her lap. I remember shakily looking in the bathroom mirror, dizzily staring at a hickey on my neck that I hadn't consented for. I remember returning home the next day, not remembering. I couldn't recall if you had raped me using just your hands or if we had become one flesh. I remember crawling into my bed, draping my lavender butterfly comforter over my arms and legs, basking in the darkness of my room. I remember coddling my faded, green stuffed frog my aunt and uncle had given to me as a present on my first birthday. I remember laying there, feeling intruded, invaded. I remember touching myself, tracing my once well known freckles. I remember that for the first time, my freckles didn't feel like my freckles. My hair didn't feel like my hair. My stomach didn't feel like my stomach. I wanted so badly to rip off my skin and put a new layer on, yet I couldn't. I was trapped in my own body. I wanted to scream, to cry, to run away. Yet I stayed there, laying in my bed, thinking of all the reasons why you decided to come onto me. I put all the blame on myself, my skin forever scarred with assault. Your voice haunted me, your touch lingered on my body. If you had known what your actions would do to me, would you still have done them? If you had known that I, now a sophomore in college, still occasionally trace my skin and feel you, would you still have so forcefully touched me? I try to believe that you wouldn't, and that you simply didn't respect me as a woman. I hope that you read this, and I hope that you ask God for forgiveness and that you find forgiveness within yourself. I hope that you find Jesus’ loving grace because without it, I would still be at the bottom of that full glass, with my agonizing screams only rippling at the surface. I'm a firm believer that God can make even the ugliest hearts beautiful, so I'm a strong believer that He can transform yours, too. #MeToo