Burn It Down

by Lily Fyfe

  “Cool, so just anal, got it,” he replied.

  “Haha. I’d be willing to give you a blow job, and that’s it,” I typed.

  “Come over,” he replied a few minutes later, along with his address. This was also unusual; he usually came to my place. It was already late. I took a cab.

  He had been drinking, which was the first thing I noticed when he met me outside his condo door, once I had finally figured out the elevator. I had stopped drinking about a year prior, because, as I explained to my friends, “I feel like I always do dumb things when I drink that I regret the next day.” The second thing I noticed upon seeing him was how much I missed him, specifically, how much I missed having sex with him. He told me about the hard time he was having; trouble at work, a friend who was in an accident. I told him I was sorry and asked what he wanted to do. He replied by kissing me.

  He pinned me down on the bed, which was normal for us. He took off my clothes, which was normal for us. He flipped me on my hands and knees and hit me a few times, which was normal for us. I felt him spit on me, then finger me. I was confident he wouldn’t try to have intercourse with me, as I’d already stated I didn’t want to do that tonight. But then there was pressure. And a lot of pain. I was confused, a sense of disbelief, as I realized he was trying to have anal sex with me. He wouldn’t do that, I told myself, as he continued to do just that. This isn’t happening because he wouldn’t do that. I must be confused. I was dead sober but didn’t trust my immediate experiences. He hadn’t even put on a condom, he had just gone for it. He pushed in farther. I started to yell.

  “NO!” I shouted. I couldn’t think of any other word in that moment. I was panicking, feeling like a kid who had just touched a hot stove. “No no no no no.” He stopped and pulled out. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said quickly, before he had the chance to explain himself. I left the bedroom and sat on the kitchen floor by the fridge, arms around my knees, trying to process what had just happened.

  Did I go into too much detail there? I have never really told the story in full, and part of me wants to make sure you get the full picture. I still feel an impulse to protect him. It’s important for me that you know he was having a bad day. It’s important to know that he did stop, eventually, when I said “No,” even though I know he shouldn’t have penetrated me in the first place. These are the details I obsessed over in the days, weeks, and months after.

  Eventually, I went back to the bedroom, convinced I was overreacting. I spent the night. His alarm went off just after six the next morning. I was out of it, sleepy, “Can’t we sleep in?” but he said he needed to get ready for work. He was solemn, quieter than usual, as I blinked myself conscious, remembered where I was, and suddenly felt a pain where he had penetrated me without any lubrication. I quickly got dressed as I mentally replayed the events of last night. I hugged him and kissed him goodbye, and started to walk home. Minutes later, my phone buzzed with a Snapchat notification.

  “I’m embarrassed about what happened last night,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  I wanted to be cool and tell him it was no big deal, that I was already over it, look at how chill and nonchalant I could be, let’s hang out again soon. I took a deep breath.

  “I believe you’re sorry,” I wrote back. “But maybe it’s best we don’t talk to each other anymore.”

  My mind oscillated obsessively between two thoughts: The first was that he had just made a mistake, that he misread the situation and immediately regretted it, and that I was being unfair. The second was that I never really knew him at all, that this was the person he really was, a person who liked to see how far he could push things during sex, to find out what he could get away with, that the only reason I hadn’t noticed it before was because I had been game for anything, and that if I didn’t say or do anything he would do worse things to other women and it would be all my fault. I wasn’t sure what steps I was supposed to take next, or how I was supposed to feel, so I waffled in a state of suspension, trying to jam the “doors open” button on an elevator that wouldn’t budge.

  I had been in bad situations with men. I had been groped by strangers on the sidewalk, and repeatedly threatened with rape by an angry high school classmate after I turned him down for a date, and coerced into performing acts with a date that, though they might have been hard to argue under the legal definition of assault, left no doubt in my mind that the guy was an asshole. Those were men I already disliked, or were relative strangers, and it was easier for me to think of them as Bad People. I didn’t feel the urge to defend them as I did this time around. I still guiltily thought of him with affection, especially the early time we had spent together.

  My best friends talked me through it. “I mean, I went over to his place in the middle of the night to hook up, what did I expect?” I said.

  “Yeah, but it still doesn’t mean it was your fault,” said one friend.

  “He’s just, he’s normally such a good person,” I told another.

  “He can have been sincerely nice to you in the past, but his actions that night weren’t the actions of a nice guy,” they said.

  They were patient with me. They knew I didn’t want to demonize him, so they didn’t either. They knew that I felt uncomfortable using the word rape, a word that was dramatic and criminal, that would posit me as a victim or a survivor when I didn’t feel much like either. On a mental level, I knew better. I had held signs at Take Back the Night and the Women’s March, I read and retweeted all the right think pieces about the ambiguities of sexual assault, I had held my own friends’ hands when they had had similar experiences. But on a gut level, I kept fighting with myself. Are you saying what happened to you is as bad as what happens to real victims? And if it was that bad, shouldn’t you want justice? Shouldn’t you want him to suffer?

  I told my therapist, “I just don’t know what to call it. I mean, was it rape?”

  She said, “You don’t have to call it anything. Just focus on how you feel right now.”

  I felt angry, though I wondered if for the wrong reasons. I was angry that he had ruined what we had, that I could no longer text him, that I felt the need to defend him to my friends. I was angry that if I wanted to use the word that best fit the situation—rape—then I would feel myself pushed into a category that I wasn’t even sure I belonged in. I felt failed, above all, by language and the lack of words available to me. To speak matter-of-factly about what happened felt glib. To analyze it felt indulgent. It was a minute of your life, I kept repeating to myself. Why can’t you just get over it?

  I was angry later, when I told other men about what had happened, future sexual partners and friends, and they replied with male bravado and grandstanding—“Want me to beat him up?” “He can’t get away with this!”—that seemed to center their machismo over my feelings. I remained externally placid in these situations while these men were allowed to display unfettered emotion and it was my job to calm them down and tell them, “No, no, it’s okay.” And I was angry still when I joined in tweeting during the #MeToo movement, at having strangers in my mentions saying “I believe you” as if I was seeking their validation when I was just stating the facts about my life. I was angry because I, too, have told strangers I believed them, because women are so often disbelieved when stating the facts of their life, and because the language around sexual assault is so limited that eventually everything starts to feel like a platitude. Again, I would smile calmly and say “Thank you” when what I really felt was the urge to tell these polite strangers to fuck off. I was angry at the sleepless nights spent interrogating my own reactions, always, “You’re overthinking it” or “Not enough,” and I would lurk on his Twitter feed and see him updating his banal thoughts, business as usual. I was angry when I went to get an STI test, while waiting three months for the HIV test, and I was fucking pissed off when one of my other casual partners told me we should “hold off seeing each other” until I got the test results back. I told him he was being an asshole, the o
nly time I expressed any anger during this time, and when he apologized the next morning, I swallowed my anger again and told him don’t worry, it’s no big deal, I’m already over it.

  My anger was not a constant, all-encompassing presence, and so it felt like I had dealt with the problem as much as I could. It presented itself like a bruise on the shin, blended in with other emotions—almost easy to forget about, unless something bumped into it. I didn’t think about it for days, and then burst into tears at a screening of Colossal when Jason Sudeikis’s seemingly aw-shucks-nice-guy character gets drunk and lashes out at Anne Hathaway’s aimless heroine. I felt on edge when a drunk man tried to cut me off on the sidewalk in broad daylight, a common occurrence that now left me feeling shaken and distracted for the rest of the day. At times my anger felt lacking, taking a back seat to a cloudy, ambiguous shame that quietly instructed me to shut up and let the women with the real stories talk, the ones with real PTSD, who had suffered real consequences from their assault. I was fine. My life was fine. So I had bad moods now and then; wasn’t that just life?

  I was angry when I read statistics about the number of rapists who actually go to prison, but I was also angry at the idea that I was supposed to want him to go to prison, as if putting a person through the carceral system was supposed to be some form of justice. I was angry at myself, then, for using my anti-prison politics to downplay the actions of a straight white thirty-year-old male sex offender. I was angry that I was being made to feel like a judge. When people asked me what I wanted to happen, I said, “I want for this not to have happened in the first place.”

  In her book The Reckonings, Lacy M. Johnson says of her own abuser, “I don’t want him dead. I want him to admit all the things he did, to my face, in public, and then to spend the rest of his life in service to other people’s joy.” More pain creates more sorrow, she writes. I think often of the limited avenues provided for victims of sexual assault, even in more progressive spaces. We are supposed to be bloodthirsty, to want revenge, to find closure in the suffering of those who wronged us. The punishment of the assailant is prioritized over the healing of the survivor. I understand why some women want these things. At times, I find it a natural impulse. But my rage manifested differently; I was angry less at a person and more at a series of ambiguities, unsure of what to do beyond sitting around and stewing in my own helplessness. The moment had replayed in my mind so many times, alternating crystal clear and like a fuzzy videocassette.

  Almost a year after that night, I had downloaded a new dating app on my phone. It was one of the ones where you can only message the other person if both of you have consented to the match. I had idly been scrolling through for half an hour when I saw his face. I froze. I hated his face. I missed him so much. I was tired of being angry. I hesitated. I swiped right. We matched immediately.

  I had never blocked his number or his Snapchat, but he hadn’t tried to contact me before this—I had told him not to, after all. He messaged me, to say he owed me an apology. He said he was so sorry.

  I told him the truth—that I couldn’t make up my mind whether he was a bad person or not, and that I didn’t know if he had done this to other women as well.

  “I’ve never forgotten that night,” he said. “I’ve been much, much more careful since. I never want any other woman to feel how you did.”

  He could easily have been lying. I had dealt with men who would say or do horrible things and then come to me later, asking for forgiveness, promising it would never happen again, falling into a cycle. But he had left me alone when I asked him to. He wasn’t seeking anything from me. And so I told him that it was good that he had thought so much about it. I told him it was good he felt bad if it meant he was more careful with women in the future. I told him I wanted to move on with my life. And I told him I forgave him.

  Typing those words out was an experiment. I wasn’t sure how much I believed it myself. It felt like I had downed a dozen shots of espresso rapid-fire, and up until that point of the conversation I couldn’t really distinguish one emotion from another. Yet after hitting send, I was imbued with a sense of power. I wasn’t absolving him from what he had done, but he would no longer be my responsibility. He had acknowledged his wrongdoing after nearly a year of occupying so much space in my head, and I was declaring myself ready to move on. It was a different, clearer sensation than the anger that had burrowed itself in my gut for the past year—not total relief, but gratitude that I gave myself permission to turn my thoughts away from what would and could happen to him, and instead focus on myself. I was able to sleep okay that night.

  We haven’t spoken since then—again, my choice. I told him I still didn’t want to hear from him, and kept him blocked on all social media. I want to believe that people who have made mistakes—including horrible mistakes, at the expense of others—have the capacity to change, grow, and better themselves. My entire worldview is based on this belief. But it is not my job to personally rehabilitate the man who has hurt me.

  In the last couple of years, as we’ve watched celebrities attempt to return to their cushy careers months after admitting guilt, much of the cultural conversation has revolved around, “What, so we’re just never supposed to move on?” But moving on doesn’t mean acting like everything is as it was. It doesn’t mean continuing to force victims to repeatedly interact with those who hurt them. I never want to see my rapist’s face again. Too often, narratives around sexual assault and rehabilitation are focused on getting the abuser’s life back to normal as quickly as possible, sometimes without them ever having admitted wrongdoing. I dream of a world where questions about justice are centered around the needs of the victim, not about the personal journey, if any, of the rapist.

  I don’t know if I’m completely okay, or even what “okay” looks like. I’ll tell myself I’m fine, only to have moments when I remember how my trust was violated, my selfhood violated, the physical pain I felt, and yes, I still do get angry sometimes. I wonder if I was lying when I told him I forgave him. Are you still allowed to have bad days when you’ve supposedly moved on? But my priorities have shifted, and my thought process with them. I’ve learned to replace the torpedo of intrusive questions—Is what he did really that bad? Has he been appropriately punished? Is he going to do this again?—with a single, simpler one—How are you going to take care of yourself today?—and I remember that I’ll be fine. I can always take the elevator back down to the lobby and walk out the door.

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  About the Editor

  Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor and writing instructor at Catapult, assistant books editor at Barrelhouse, and former memoir editor at Narratively. She’s at work on a memoir about her father’s art, heroin addiction, and death, and everything—tangible and not—that she inherited from him. Her essays and features on culture, sex, politics, and literature have appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York magazine, and more, and she hosts the popular monthly reading series Memoir Monday in Brooklyn. Lilly lives in New York City with her husband and her cat.

  About the Contributors

  Lisa Marie Basile is a poet, essayist, and editor living in New York City. She’s the founding editor in chief of Luna Luna Magazine and the author of the poetry collection Nympholepsy (Inside the Castle, 2018) and the collection of practices and rituals for intentional living, Light Magic for Dark Times (Fair Winds Press, 2018).

  Dani Boss is a former high school English teacher who lives in the Pacific Northwest. She has an MFA from Goddard College and is currently at work on a memoir about social class and belonging.

  Keah Brown is a journalist and writer whose work can be found in Glamour, Marie Claire UK, Harper’s Bazaar, and Teen Vogue, among others. Her debut essay collection, The Pretty One (Atria Books), was published this year.

  Rios de la Luz is a
queer Xicana and Chapina living in El Paso. She is the author of the short story collection The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert (Ladybox Books, 2015) and the novella Itzá (Broken River Books, 2017). Her work has been featured in Corporeal Clamor, Broadly, WEIRD SISTER, WOHE LIT, and St. Sucia.

  Evette Dionne is the editor in chief of Bitch Media. She’s the author of the forthcoming books Fat Girls Deserve Fairytales Too: Living Hopefully on the Other Side of Skinny (Seal Press) and Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box (Viking).

  Lisa Factora-Borchers is a Filipina American writer, editor of Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence (AK Press, 2014), and a contributing editor at Catapult magazine. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and online in The Rumpus, The Independent (UK), Refinery 29, In The Fray, Truthout, The Feminist Wire, International Examiner, Mutha magazine, and Ano Ba magazine.

  Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), the essay collection Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017), and a second essay collection, Girlhood, forthcoming in 2020. Her essays have recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, and the New York Times.

  Anna Fitzpatrick is a freelance writer and the digital media editor of The Believer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

  Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of the novels Harmless Like You (W. W. Norton, 2017), which won an Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award, and Starling Days (Sceptre, 2019). Her other work appears in Granta, The Atlantic, and The Guardian.