Original non-fiction - Wounds

If depiction of rape, drug abuse, abuse, and or self injury are triggers for you, don't read this. I didn't intend on putting this up here, I'd already posted it somewhere else and it made me feel way too exposed, but tonight as I listen to Blue Blanket I am compelled to share this mass of pain. If you feel you need to comment on it, please do so, but if your comments are negative...keep them to yourself. Thnx.


Wounds are a funny thing, really. They all start off the same way. There’s the initial invasion. Something, physical, mental…something…pushing its way into somewhere it doesn’t belong. A knife separating skin, muscle and blood vessels, concrete pulling skin from underlying tissue, a fist invading a mouth. A verbal assault invading a psyche. Negative thoughts separating reality from the irrational thoughts. Then comes the bleed. Hot, sticky blood gushing over the skin. A deluge of self depreciating thoughts battering the walls of the psyche. The combo shots, the ones that attack the physical and emotional all in one fell swoop.

I’ve been subjected to all these wounds in my life. At my own hands, at others’ hands, and by the words and thoughts of both myself and other people. Some wounds even I don’t know the full extent of.

The first time I actually remember someone hurting me I was six years old. My third cousins lived next door to us and their son and I were friends, despite the age difference. I was a tomboy and he was into sports so we played a lot together. We were playing video games in his room one day and the next thing I remember, we were both naked and he was touching me. At six, I wasn’t aware what was happening, only that the things he was doing to me didn’t feel bad. This continued, him touching me - having me touch him, for years. When I was old enough to know that what was going on wasn’t right, I was told that if I told anyone everyone would blame me. I was scared, afraid people would look at me like a monster, so I kept the information to myself and it continued. Fast forward to age 11. At this point I’ve started my foray into the world of drinking, drugs. It’s the night before the fourth of July and I’m over at my friend’s house. We went to see the fireworks, and then came back to her house where she, I, her twin brother and his friend drink and get high. We went back to the house and my friend went to bed, leaving me up with the guys. We all chilled and goofed off outside, then we all came in to go to our respective “beds”. I was laying on the living room floor trying to sleep when he came in. My friend’s brother’s older friend. It was 3:54 am on the fourth. I was about to lose what little innocence I had left. At first he was nice to me, talking to me about my interests, telling me he’d been watching me all night, that I was pretty, that I shouldn’t be so shy. He moved closer to me, eventually sitting behind me on the couch so that I was between his legs. From there the niceties ended. He began touching me, despite my pleas not to hurt me. He laughed at me when I cried. He hit me. He slid his finger into me and told me that I was wet for him, I wanted him. He slid himself into me and hit me again when I started to scream. He raped me on the floor of my friend’s living room. When he finished, he left me to find my clothes and tend to myself. I let myself quietly out the front door and walked through the black night to my grandparent’s back porch where I sat until morning. When asked why my face was bruised the next day, I told them that I’d gotten into a fight. I died inside that day.

Enter the start of self injury and self medication. I became a grade A pot head. My former aptitude for school went to hell in a hand basket. I was depressed constantly and to find numbness I cut myself. I needed that numbness to function on a semi normal level. In addition to getting high, I drank every chance I got. Any escape that I could find, I took. I transferred schools after the summer I was raped, so at the new school I paired up with friends who shared my new interests. I became a party kid. Every weekend was spent getting as fucked up as I could for as long as I could. I still told no one what had happened to me. Life went on, my grades slipped, and I got into trouble at home, which just made me self injure more. I started experimenting with acid on the weekends. Life went on this way for two years, as I continued on a path of ruin.

Life changed a bit between eighth and ninth grades. My mother bought a house back in my original school district and informed me I was moving. I refused to leave my school, choosing instead to move in with the father I had watched abuse my mother for the first 6 years of my life. Staying with him allowed me to stay with my friends, and allowed me access to pot any time I wanted it, all I had to do was sneak into his stash. His girlfriend hated me though, and made a point to make this known. Eventually she went to my school and informed them I was living out of district. I ran away from there, back to my mom’s. I enrolled in the high school at my old district and continued getting high constantly. Time went on, I started skipping a lot.
The one class I did go to was ceramics, where I met the first person to change my life for the better. She and I connected like I’d never connected with anyone before. We slowly fell in love with one another, but it was an innocent love. We held one another, she held me through the nightmares. She tended to my wounds when I cut myself, she cried, showed me it hurt her to see me hurt myself. We spent every day of our lives together for 2 years. I told my best friend about her, came out as bisexual. She said she knew. She’d seen us together. It was only obvious. She was mine, and I was hers. Until she wasn’t anymore, at least. I was out with my best friend at Barnes and Noble when I saw them. She was there with a tall, thin blonde girl, holding her hand. My heart shattered there in the middle of the music section. My best friend dropped me off at home, where I proceeded to call off work and slice myself with a butcher knife, crying hysterically and begging for the strength to press hard enough to end the pain that lived at my core.

More drugs. More drinking. Sleeping around with guys. Anything I could do to make myself feel “normal”. I allowed myself to be used for oral sex just to feel someone cared about me. I slept with a guy friend just to get to him before my best friend did. I smoked opium, I did acid, I smoked pot. I sliced my arms bloody. I attempted suicide time and time again. I dropped out of school and floated my way through life. Then I met him. He treated me like I was a decent person. We hung out a lot, eventually sleeping together. A lot. At the same time as this was happening though, I was going through some inner turmoil. As much as I wanted to be normal for my family, I knew it wasn’t possible. As sweet as he was, being with him did nothing for me. I had to admit to myself what I had honestly known since I met her. I liked girls. I came out to my stepsister, who then told her father, who told my mother. From there, I was out. I was still broken inside, but it felt so much better to at least not have to hide that part of me too.

I lived, I went back to school, I got high. I got kicked out, I drank, I got high. I got a job, I got high. I cut, I got high. I slept with my first girl. I got high. I got a computer, I got internet, I met her. And again, my life changed. She stole my heart much in the way the other one had, but this time there was nothing innocent about it. We were the epitome of passion, from day one until I moved to Chicago to be near her, right up until the last day nearly 2 years later when my issues became too much and she walked out of my life too. I started smoking again. I got high constantly. I cut. I tried to kill myself. I met and went through a handful of girls, but none of them gave me what I had had with her. I got a job, I worked and I made and lost friends.

Years pass. I got high. I drank. I partied. I made friends with something that would nearly be my undoing. It came in a plastic baggie and it was bitter and white. It was my new love. I worked. I got high. I got high at work. Life went on. I met another girl who would stay a bit longer this time. She eventually left too. Then I met her. She was just as broken as me. She was someone I’d known through the hardest times in life, and we somehow ended up together. I visited her, we had sex, we snorted cocaine, we partied. I came back, and started the process of moving down there. I moved, we lived, loved, partied and were addicts together. Then, it happened again. Her uncle came over to celebrate his birthday with her mom, bringing with him two ounces of pure Colombian cocaine. We partied, the friend he brought with him to sleep with him left and somehow I ended up locked in a bedroom with him. He forced me to blow him, he pushed me down on the bed and he fingered me as I cried. Yet another man taking just what they wanted from me and discarding me. I told my girlfriend about it and she blew it off. It was the beginning of the end. We eventually left the hellhole we were living in and moved back here. Life was ok, until she left again. A long drawn out painful time later and we are now split up and hate one another. Another 3 years plus of my life wasted. This time though, I took back the life I had been on a mission to destroy. I stopped the drugs, I stopped the cocaine. I realized that I had wasted so many years of my life on those things and I wanted a chance to see if I could make something without them. I grew up, I told a select few some of my secrets. I found out something in the process that nearly was my undoing though. The guy who raped me at age 11 went on to hurt other young girls. If I had just reported him… I feel their losses as if they were my own fault, which, in part, they were.

Over the years I’ve examined these wounds that have been inflicted on me and I’ve been unable to find a reason for most of them. I don’t even think I know the whole of them. I have flashes of memory from when I was small, of things that are just bizarre. I don’t know if they’re real memories, or if it’s just my fucked up psyche. Me, in the tub at 4 screaming for my mommy. Me, sitting on the toilet and asking my mother why there was dried blood on my inner thighs. Flashes that could be true, but I’ll probably never know.

All I really do know, in fact, is that some wounds never do really heal.