TW: mention/description of sexual assault, incest
Imagine being born with wings but also having a fear of heights. Everytime the winds caress your feathers, you expand your wings to take a leap; but then the weight of your past pulls you down to the labyrinth of rumination.
This is exactly what my life feels like. My very identity, my very pride was tainted by someone before I even got to own it.
Back in summer of ’10, I had packed my bag with my hindi textbook, paper cutouts of my favourite cartoon drawings, and a self-designed board game to take to my grandma’s house. It was fun, my cousin and I, having the time of our lives at nani’s house in the absence of our mothers. We’d go to fields in the evenings, make tents with bedsheets under cots and go on walks to get milk and lassi. The electricity would only be there for an hour in the afternoon when we’d watch some movie with my cousin who was 5 years older than me. And then we’d pretend to be the characters from the movie and finish the story ourselves when electricity would go off mid-show.
It would have been a perfect summer until it wasn’t. There was a chapter in my hindi textbook about a parrot’s birthday and how all the animals in the jungle brought different gifts for him. Rabbits were making pudding; birds decorated the venue. As I lay by the window, my serotonin got infected by my cousin’s testosterone. He had been telling me how life works for weeks, it didn’t shock me and before I knew it, it was over; it kept happening for a year until the next summer when I told my mother. “Why didn’t you tell us before?” Those were her exact words.
And I still don’t know why. I can think of the song ‘cannibal’ by Marcus Mumford where he explained it as “I can still taste you, and it kills me//that there’s still some sick part of it that thrills me//that my own body keeps betraying me.” I couldn’t stop blaming myself. Not even in 2020, when I did realize and had the courage to accept that yes, I was sexually assaulted!
I used to think I’m too self-aware for my own good. Acceptance calms the relentless anxiety that has been following me since that unfortunate year, but it can’t bring me happiness; it can’t make me not hate myself every time somebody tries to touch me the way he did. A year ago, I’d flirt with people online on reddit and twitter and let them make me the subject of their humiliating fantasies on text; thinking I deserved it because my introduction to sex happened to be through an assault and until now that’s the only experience I had had.
Today when I think of it, after meeting that cousin at a birthday party, seeing everybody pretend nothing ever happened; I had to ask myself why I didn’t do anything back then and the answer reveals itself. Because I didn’t know what it was, what it meant, let alone knowing it was wrong. I couldn’t let somebody else’s mistake ruin me, ruin who I am. No amount of sex-ed seminars at school, reading and writing about assaults taught me what seeing people going on with their lives as if nothing had happened did.
His abominable touch isn’t the same as the touch of a lover. You need to touch the spot of the wounds, gently, to apply ointment, after all. This is me reclaiming what was stolen from me. The opportunity to explore myself. But I’m far past the fears and find myself flying with the adrenaline rush through the skies with remnants of the past now only covered by ivies.
