Bob* and I were helping out at a clothing drive. Everything was going fine and when we were ready to leave he gave me a long, warm hug. I was shocked at this unexpected gesture, yet I felt safe. It’s pretty ironic how much comfort I could find in the arms of my attacker. I fell back asleep and started to ask why, why he took advantage of me like that, why he ripped my clothes off… why he didn’t hear me scream "no."

He looked at me straight in the eye and said that he was sorry for what he had done, and that it wasn’t my fault. I stared right back with apathetic eyes, telling how he shattered my trust. "What were your intentions? We’ve been hanging out all summer, and I never saw it coming," I said. He calmly replied, "my intentions were to do this from the start, and to tell you the truth, you weren’t the first." Grabbing my have Bob apologized once more and slowly walked away. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t angry.

I had this dream a few weeks after school had started.

The guy who did this to me was a friend from high school. After graduation we lost touch and two years later we found each other again. We spent a lot of time together over the summer months, at one point he even asked me to be his girlfriend, but I couldn’t even consider it. The hardest part about being sexually assaulted is knowing that any one of my friends could have been Bob.

Since all this happened a week or so before school, there wasn’t much I could do. Pressing Charges would have made things more hectic. Between telling my parents and starting a new school, I’d go mad. The only thing I could do was to keep it inside as long as possible. If I told anyone, it came out as a big joke, like it was funny or something. But deep inside of me I felt broken. I lost my good judgement of people, especially guys.

Questions started to form in my head. Was it my fault? If I tell someone, will they think less of me? Would they think that I was overreacting? Maybe if I had done something different, this would not have happened. These thoughts haunted me.

The most important thing for me to do was to talk about it. When I told someone what happened in detail, feelings of complete helplessness flooded my body. Never in my life have I felt so weak and ashamed. I felt guilty by sharing my secret: it seemed more like a burden. I can never thank that person (along with a few others) enough for taking the time to listen to me. I am presently trying to be "normal" again. So far it is working. As far as guys go, well, I can’t stop trusting but I can be more cautious.

This article wasn’t written to gain pity, nor was it some sort of announcement. To tell the truth, I don’t know why I wrote this. Maybe I felt as though someone would gain something from my experience (besides myself). It’s been awhile since the incident, and I am still trying to figure out why it happened. Was it to get me back for something done in the past? Or is this part of the ever-so-wonderful growing up process? Who knows? However, I do know that there are many girls and guys who have been raped – most of which have probably been done by people they are or were close with. Hopefully these people realize, just as I did, that you can’t change what has happened, you can only move on and hope that some good will come out of it. Someone once told me that I live with my past. He was right; I should probably follow my own advice and move on.

Thanks for reading.