Vertigo

Once there was a boy who maybe loved me but stumbled into a very wrong way of showing it. Try as I might I couldn’t make him understand how he had been wrong, he didn’t want to see and when I finally said what I really thought, when I gave it to him strait and pure and undiluted, he couldn’t hear it right, he just couldn’t, and now there is nothing left to say. Though so many words wish to be spoken, what once was is now too broken for repair, any new attempts to explain, to mollify, to communicate will only reopen the wounds and start the battle raging again.

Mostly I keep this broken thing hidden beyond the reach of memory’s eager fingers but occasionally it comes back to me, a dusty old VHS tape that I must watch again every time I stumble across it, an album of snapshots that my mind must flip through slowly, running those inquisitive fingers over each photo, absorbing, remembering, reliving every second. Sometimes, I go out and, for no good reason, I think, with heart faltering shock, that I see him everywhere: sitting on the bus I am about to board, passing me on the sidewalk as I’m walking to a dance class, and I remember everything, the good and the bad, how I must have hurt him, how he hurt me, how it seems to have been beyond us not to.

I’ll rechristen him Dizzy, I know it's a goofy name but he was a goofy guy, like a big dog dizzy from chasing his own tail, or bounding back to you, with a stick in his mouth, full of mud and smiling a big, sloppy, doggy smile like that stick he’s bringing you is the best thing in the world.

He was big, tall, red-auburn haired which I loved, being in a rather Weasley-loving phase of things, though he refused to admit his hair was anything but brown.

He wasn’t pretty. Even my mother, who seems to be far more capable of finding physical beauty in a man than I, never found him attractive. He had horrendous feet, huge bent toed things with graying, talon nails that I could imagine lurking in a swamp waiting to drown some innocent creature for their dinner. He had a big belly which managed to look rather charming under a blazer, but not terribly so when flapping about naked. He tended to dress very casually, jeans, hoodie, T-shirt, but ended up out of the house in PJ bottoms and slippers often enough as well.

He was friendly, teasing, and happy. He had an adorable, warm, friendly smile that lit up his plain face and transformed him, for that brief time before it all went to hell, into someone I could see as beautiful.

He was my boyfriend. Kind of. Actually he was my boyfriend for all of a couple weeks before we broke up and, then in a very complicated dating maneuver which I will not even attempt to explain now, got back together as friends with benefits, only we ended up being about the most boyfriend/girlfriendy friends with benefits I've ever seen. This suited both of us just fine. I was a sophomore in college, he a fifth year senior and we knew whatever kind of relationship we ended up having couldn't last long because he was going to graduate in a matter of months and move to live far enough away for things to not work out so easily.

When he did move, I was, at first, desolate without him, so lonely I spent my whole winter break hugging the family pet chicken to my breast as much as she would tolerate. I begged him to come to visit me, to go to bed with me, to let the relationship continue in one way or another but as much as I begged, he refused me until, by the time school resumed, that desire had faded and my attraction to him with it. It was as if I had suddenly put on new glasses with a better prescription, I went back to feeling about him more or less as I had the first night I met him, and I wondered what I had liked so much about him anyway?

Yet just as I was beginning to feel less attached to him, he seemed to realize that he didn’t want to let me go. He began to come, every month or so to visit and every time he tried to seduce me.

The first time I refused to be swayed. I was just getting over losing him the first time and I didn’t want to make it harder for myself to say goodbye to him again. He had a very hard time taking no for an answer. He kept trying to convince me to convince me to sleep with him but the more he pushed the less I wanted to give in, it would have felt wrong too.

But come February I began to soften, he sent me a Valentine’s Day card- it had a picture of Winnie the Pooh on it and it said "you're sweet as honey", and naive, silly me, having never had a personal Valentine Card from a boy before, I proved far too easily swayed. Though it probably wasn’t just the card, I was wound up with desire like a wind up toy ready to be set loose, he was coming that weekend and I couldn’t wait to have his hands all over me again.

He drove me nearly an hour to a fancy restaurant where his friend worked as a waiter. The restaurant hadn't opened yet, they were running a kind of preview to make sure that everything would run smoothly when they did and all employees were encouraged to invite guests for a free meal. It seemed so grand, we tried nearly every appetizer, and liberally sampled what must have been very expensive wine. I left floating in a haze of satisfaction, utterly stuffed.

Back in my little dorm room, he covered me in kisses, licking and caressing my throat, my breasts, my tummy, my thighs, my cunt. I lost interest when he got there, the old intimacy that had made it all feel so good when we were dating was gone and I was thoroughly bored by the time I came. His cock burned when he put it in me, it just felt bad. I gritted my teeth and took it and the next morning I told him I didn't want to have sex again. Only that evening it somehow managed to happen anyway.

He left again and I was glad. When he told me he was coming to visit again a month later I found myself getting anxious, any last vestiges of attraction I’d harbored for him had faded, I was done but it didn’t seem like he was. Then he called to say some girl he'd slept with before had asked him to visit her and would I mind? I was so relieved "Please have sex with her." I told him. "I don't want to have sex with you, I’m really ready to move on, aren’t you?"

But he didn’t visit her, he came to me instead and that night everything broke.

I remember seeing Sunday in the parking lot as we were walking to Dizzy.'s car to go out. I hardly knew Sunday then but he must already have begun to have an effect on me because I was suddenly embarrassed to be seen with Dizzy., his arm wrapped around me as if he owned me, as if he were showing me off. I remember wanting Sunday to think I had better taste in men. "Don't see me, don't see me," I thought at him but he did. "Hi" he said and my name. I waved defeated and wished there was no Dizzy, wished, though I didn’t entirely know it yet, that Sunday had taken his place.

I shouldn't have let Dizzy. into my room that night. I shouldn't have let him kiss me on my bed, shouldn't have let him lay me down and trace tingling curlicues into my flesh, each touch exploding behind my eyes in delicate patterns and deep colors. It felt so good and I had already told him quite firmly that I didn't want to do anything sexual, no clothes off, no touching genitals- I had thought that would be enough.

It wasn't.

His fingers brushed my pussy once, I pushed them away. They were back all too soon, I pushed them away again. And again. And when they came back, oh so sneakily, slowly working up my thigh until my pelvis was so enflamed with desire that I couldn't tell what he was touching and I felt like I couldn't say no, not because it felt good, not because I wanted him to keep going but because I forgot how- I had put so much faith in my request that something in my brain short-circuited and I couldn't make myself open my mouth to speak, couldn't make my arms work to push him away, to kick him out- that's all it would have taken- but at that moment I couldn't even think to do anything to stop it.

I was wearing a skirt and all he had to do was pull my underwear aside to start caressing my pussy. I didn't open my legs for him, I just lay there frozen while a voice in my head told me "act natural, he can't know you don't want this. Secretly you do want it, don't you; you've always fantasized about being raped, haven't you? So shut up and enjoy it."

Rape.

It wasn't really rape. He didn't put his cock in me, just his fingers, just his tongue. And I hardly did anything to stop him, hardly anything at all, I kind of played possum, hoping he would get that something was wrong and stop. But he didn't. Instead he said "Kiss me, please kiss me." And I did because if I didn’t it would have been like telling him no and part of me had the other part of me hostage, and I couldn’t do anything too obvious. I was dizzy, dazed, the world slipped away from me and when he went down on me there was a moment when I lost track of where I was and who I was with and for a moment, as clear as day I saw Sunday's black haired head and broad back between my legs in place of Dizzy’s red. Sunday, who, as far as I can recall I wouldn't have started fantasizing about for another couple months. He felt so real, and for a moment it felt truly as if there was someone else there with me, as if someone cared about me in that awful moment and then it was all gone and I felt so alone.

Sometime after he had made me come and after I had made him come there was a knock on my door and I scrambled to put something on and answer it to find my friend Jack, small and inextricably hobbitlike standing outside my door. Dizzy was still in his boxers on my bed and he lounged their looking so smug like “Buddy, I bet you wish you were me right now.”

I didn’t want Jack to leave, I didn’t want to be alone with Dizzy’s and what had just happened again but he was already backing away, repelled by the intimacy Dizzy implied.

With Jack gone I tried to explain that what had just happened actually wasn’t something I had wanted to happen at all, that it hadn’t felt good or right or loving but I was still numb, the hurt part of me was still a bound hostage behind the calm smokescreen and he left under the impression that everything was fine and dandy, that what had happened hadn’t exactly been what I said I wanted but we’d both had fun anyway.

That was the last time I saw Dizzy. The impact of that night slowly grew inside me. I had always thought, naive as this may sound, that I was special, that there was something precious about me that anyone I dated couldn’t help but fall in love with, that I was too smart to date a man who wouldn’t, too smart to date someone who would abuse me, too smart to make the kinds of bad mistakes that other people made, too smart to be nearly raped by someone I cared about but then I was, and all of those assumptions came quietly tumbling down.

The worst part was that I had brought it on myself, I had raped myself as surely as Dizzy had. I had forgotten that I had gotten so caught up in believing that he would keep his word that I couldn’t stand up for myself and enforce my word myself.

But it was a soft catastrophe, a numb catastrophe that never made me feel acutely sad, only deeply yet dully anguished like I was hurt somewhere but I couldn’t tell where or how badly because I was too anesthetized to feel it. The friends I told said ‘well you look like you’re handling it well so you must be fine.’ I told my mom what had happened and my therapist and neither of them seemed to think it was a big deal either so I thought well, I suppose this is just life. Better suck it up and keep truckin’.

From time to time, Dizzy would find me online and try to talk to me. Our conversations always ended in fights, fights that never brought us any closer to accepting the other’s perspective.

And then, almost as a joke, I told new friends about what had happened with Dizzy and they gasped and worried if I was OK and stared at me, saucer eyed with concern. And I started to wonder whether I was OK, whether almost rape and losing faith in myself should just be accepted as another, no-big deal disappointment of life.

And one day Dizzy started talking to me over instant messenger and I realized I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, that it hurt to talk to him and no matter how much we fought it never got any better and I realized that I didn’t have to do that anymore. I also realized that I’d been holding back. I’d been saying that what had happened was mostly my fault, and it was, partially but he needed to take responsibility too so I told him I felt like he had, in a small and not so dramatic way, raped me. And he went off the wall. And he said he had loved me. And he said I hoped I didn’t seriously think he had raped me and how I was too immature to deal with a relationship ending in a reasonable way. And I said nothing. I removed him from my friends on facebook, I blocked him on instant messenger, I may have blocked him from sending me messages on facebook too. And I went on with my life. There was nothing left to say to him, nothing that could make it better for him or for me.

Once while diving deep into my facebook message history I found a message from him, I didn’t read it, I couldn’t but I couldn’t help but look at his picture, Dizzy and a girl, both smiling, I had nearly forgotten the sweetness of his smile. And he was wearing a shirt, a white shirt that said in big red letters “I Hate Rape.” And I wondered if that was him trying to say, in the only way he could think to say it- “I never meant to be that person to you, to anyone.”

I almost want to say I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Sometimes I feel like I deserve to be really raped, brutally, forcibly, violently raped for thinking about this one, stupid little thing so much, for being so affected by it. Sometimes I feel like I raped myself and I’m some kind of severely messed up girl who shouldn’t be trusted to take care of herself, sometimes I feel like I was so wrong to accuse him of rape, sometimes I just feel empty like the whole time with him was a mistake a delusion and I wonder how I could once have been so close to someone who is now a such a complete stranger, for whom I am nothing more than a bad memory. But there is nothing to do now but move on and nothing left that either of us can say that will make it any better.