content warning: sexual assault, rape, child grooming

I always dream of the same house.
I remember all 21 houses I’ve lived in, but I only dream of this one.
I dream that I’m standing on the porch, watching a tsunami crash in. I dream of ghosts invading, throwing open every door, curtain and window, and no matter how fast I run through the hall, trying to lock everything, the ghosts are faster. I dream that I visit the house, years later, as if we’d abandoned it and left everything in its place, our lives frozen in time.
It’s cold and silent. The air is still, like a tomb.
When I pull back my covers, my bed is crawling with insects.

*

I almost never talk about it.
I almost never even write about it, even in my own journals. It’s too ugly—far too ugly. I never even discuss it in therapy, because where do you even begin?
I was maybe 12 when a man in his 20’s slipped a note under my door that said:
“If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

*

It’s me who carries the shame—because I am the one to blame.
When I’m 14, and a boy in Year 11 asks me to shave, I comply. He gets me to sneak out at 4am to do things to him on that pile of dirt in the empty lot across from my house. He smells like booze and cigarettes, and I think it’s love.
When I’m 15, and I send photos to a boy I like, he shares them around the school. I showed my face, so everyone has seen me naked, and it’s all my own fault.
When I’m 17, and I’m assaulted at a party by two soccer players whose names I never learn, I must have wanted it.

*

I leave that hotel room by the stairs. They never seem to end.
I said no, but he did it anyway.
They both did.
I keep thinking the stairs will end soon—I keep getting off at different floors, trying different doors, running into different arms in a panic, hoping to be saved. I want to drift out into the sea where nobody knows me. I want to swallow the world whole and laugh. I want to smash my fist to the ground and shatter the earth around me—I want my pain to be felt.

*

By the time I’m 18, my reputation precedes me. It poisons my subconscious.
She has herpes, did you hear?
One in the pink and one in the stink—I’ve heard she likes that.
I keep thinking I’m making friends. But they’ve just heard things about me and want to see if they’re true. They shove me up against bars and car doors and push their tongue down my throat and wrestle me into acquiescence.
I’m the slut who fucks girls’ boyfriends, the tease who leads boys on.
He’s the nice guy, for insisting on an intimacy I’ve supposedly asked for.
The truth is that I think sex will bring me love. But instead, it eats me from the inside out, like I’m rotten from the core.

*

I carry this trauma with me. I put it on my back and haul it into every relationship I have. I walk with my shame and I think it makes me stink. All my past selves are inside me like babushka dolls, and it’s too often that triggers snap us open and apart. So many of us are wounded, grieving the safety we’ll never get, and we all howl together like wolves under full moons, barrelling through the streets.

*

I think of Nina Azarova in The OA, and the bus crash that split her consciousness like a smashed mirror, dashing her identities across alternate dimensions: integration was the key. But sometimes, all that my past selves and I can do is to gather together on my bed and sit in the immense sadness.
Sadness for my younger selves, for not knowing one simple word: no.
Sadness for my younger selves, for their victimhood.
But most of all, sadness for my most youngest self, who wasn’t protected in her own home. Who was alone. Who wasn’t safe.

*

Sometimes, maybe, soon, that sadness can turn into power.
Sometimes, maybe, soon, I can protect myself like a wild animal—I can bare my sharpened teeth, armed knife and nail, when I need to.
We can buy new sheets for my 14-year-old self because she still remembers the covers she had when he moved against her. We can lodge DMCA’s for stolen content for my 26-year-old self, and fight off panic. For my 17-year-old self, we can forgive women for internalising misogyny, because none of us knew then.
We can get tattoos over our scars. We can use words as our weapon and write about revolution. Sometimes, maybe, soon, I can hold us all, when we need to.
Sometimes, maybe, soon, I’ll do it for all my women, who are all of you.