trigger warnings, sexual assault.

it's 1 am.
i should really really be in bed.
sometimes i remember the days before remy, when i used to love staying up really late. back when i wasn't chasing a tornado all day and could afford to lose a few hours of sleep to the pleasure of night owlery.

oh but i can't shut off the brain tonight.

travis is working a night shift at tosh, and i usually am more wired and anxious the nights he's gone, so there's that.
then there's that my phone is lost somewhere in my parents' yard, so i feel like one of my appendages is missing.

and then there's the whole bit about someone who harassed and bullied me for years trying to add me as a friend on Facebook. and how for the first time in my life, i said the word, "fuck" to someone.
i said,

really?
no i don't want to be your Facebook friend.
but i will say something i've wanted to say for a long time.
fuck you.


and it felt good to say that to him.

then i didn't expect him to respond. but he did. and he said, haha yeah i get that.
and then he told me how he enjoyed reading my blog but he had a few questions about it.

i feel kind of floored that a person who was that cruel to me could just start asking me questions about my life.

but maybe i should start at the beginning.

without dragging the story out, this person was friends with the guy who assaulted me. he was in the next room several times it happened. he was always kind of a bully. he made comments about my appearance that stung for years.

a well liked girl in our neighborhood moved away in junior high.
one night when all of us were hanging out, this boy said he wished i'd moved instead of her, because she was "hot."

he said a lot of things that like that didn't help my low self esteem.
the low self esteem that didn't know how to handle a boy doing things to my body that i told him not to.

so then when i went in to the bishop and "confessed" everything that had happened with the boy who assaulted me, the bishop asked who else was involved, if his friends had been there. i said that the friends had sometimes been around, but that they weren't involved. i was terrified of all those boys being upset with me.

of course they found out. parents were called.

this boy, the one who recently tried to friend me on Facebook, he took it upon himself to punish me.
not long after, a neighbor caught him peeing on my house.
every time he saw me at school, he screamed at the top of his lungs at me in the hallways.
one time when i was at a concert, i took an empty seat. the person in the seat next to me turned around and i realized it was him. he started to scream and scream, until a good friend came over and took me to sit next to him instead.
everyone was staring.

whenever i saw him, i'd freeze. i was almost more afraid of him that of the guy who assaulted me. at least when i saw him, he would just make eye contact and then keep walking.

kids at school would ask me why he hated me so much. i didn't know how to answer.

whenever i am under extra stress, i have this reoccurring dream about getting in a fist fight with this guy. to say i've been afraid of him for the past decade is a huge understatement.


and then he just, requests to be my friend.


six years ago, the guy who assaulted me tried to add me on Facebook.
i will never forget that moment.
i was attending byu hawaii. i was working for the newspaper and had just logged onto Facebook in the lab.
there it was, a friend request from the boy who had taken my innocence away, taken parts of me i'd never find again.
like it was no big deal to him. like he had no idea the destruction he'd caused.


how can people who harmed me so deeply, to my very soul, not have a clue.

sometimes the weight of all of it buries me.

xo.