The Night I Don’t Remember

Poem

There’s this the night I don’t remember that changed my life.

What can I say? I don’t remember, but ever since then, I haven’t been right.

It unnerves me how I sometimes wonder if it’s crossed your mind at all.

Has your experience been anything like mine?

Or did you suppress those commonly decent thoughts of guilt and remorse
and easily tossed them aside like you did me and that condom wrapper you left on my floor?  For twelve years, I have hated you and I’ve hated myself even more.

That power you were not given, that permissible privilege that was not offered to you, you stole it.  Disconnected my soul from my body and left me to clean up a mess I did not make.  But I suppose none of this would have happened if I hadn’t blacked out in the soon to be discomfort of my own home, in my bed, and instead stayed awake.

So, this is what I would have said that night before you took it upon yourself to decide my fate. Not that I owe you an explanation, but here it is anyway.

It doesn’t matter how many have laid here before. It was then and has always been my choice. You have no rights to me.  What I say goes and only I control  when my legs open and when they close, not you. So, if it wasn’t clear the time before or the time before that,
NO MEANS NO.

You can only have me if and only if I choose to give myself away.
And to the few good men, who have tried to love me that I purposely sabotaged, they have you to thank.

I could have killed myself and ended that pain when the burden became too heavy, but what’s suicide to a person who has died inside a thousand times already?

I’ve been trying to reverse that feeling, making the load lighter to carry, reawakening my essence while decompressing my depression and reclaiming the unrelenting potency of my presence.

But you, may you never know peace for every day that you live because you take with no regard and have nothing to give.  He raped with no regard and took it without asking like it wasn’t mine, it was his.