By Sofía Jay
It was taken away from me without a second thought. Maybe I started it, I felt guilty because my mind was screaming at me that it was my fault. It wasn’t. It never was. I don’t remember how it started or who started it. But I do remember my age. I look back and hurt and cry for that little girl that never got to be, it was taken away from her. That fragile little flower was broken and lost its color. But she never knew that until half a decade later. She never understood herself, never had a voice for herself, and never knew when to say no because she was never taught how to.
The first and last time, she said no, she felt guilty because she was on the receiving end of a disappointed look, but it kept doing it so she thought that she wasn’t meant to be heard. She grew up with unsought prints on her, feeling like she wasn’t enough because if they didn’t like her body she had nothing to offer. So she went on the internet, having an environment with older people around, learning from the grown-ups things she shouldn’t know at her age. She started seeking that attention on the internet because a part of her brain was craving it. So she started talking to strangers on the internet, putting herself on a silver platter thinking it would be better. It wasn’t. It never was going to be, it was a pattern she, at the time, didn’t understand. It kept going after everything stopped, after half a decade or more. It was familiar to her, so she kept on doing it. She still does it, when days are bad because she never learned to cope in the right way and she hasn’t told anyone. This is her little secret, something she thinks that if she holds it close, then she’ll have the control she never got to have .
The handprint never left. It takes three months for the body to forget someone’s touch. That touch never left, not even after it all had finally stopped. It’s been years, however sometimes she still feels it. I pity people that have the heart to take away innocence, but then I remember that someone like that has never had a heart. I can’t escape. It follows me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. People don’t openly express how this can damage someone. No one talks about the days that sometimes you wish it happened one more time because it felt good. The part where you have to remind your body that it didn’t feel good, that you were just having a Pavlovian response. When you wake up and crave to crawl out of your skin because you feel disgusting for so many reasons, but at the same time, if you don’t show your body, you’re not worth anything. The way it makes you hate your body so much that it feels impossible to love, but if you don’t love your body you can’t love people. Love is something that grows from the inside to the outside. I thought that it was love at some point, fell in love-– or what I thought was love at the time-– because I thought that was the way to show that you love someone.
The feeling of guilt eats you alive because you never worry about them, when you should, because society says so. Because that is what we’re taught when growing up. But that person made me grow up. I never got the opportunity of innocence and never got to grow up accordingly. So I shouldn’t care for them, I actually don’t care for them. I have to fake it though, when we’re in the same room. For others, it looks like a playful dynamic, just being silly. In reality, it’s a way to protect myself. “I don’t care”, yet I have to act like I do because they’ve always been there. Yes, they’ve always been there because they wanted something in exchange, they wanted to take something away without permission.
No one knows about it though, never had the heart to say what happened because I was scared of the many outcomes. They probably wouldn’t believe me. They would say that I started it, which maybe I did. But it was consensual, an act full of genuine innocence. But then it changed to touches I never wanted. There are triggers that make me spiral and panic, especially when I see them or I’m alone with them. I can’t miss something I never had though, so I just mourn what could’ve been and daydream about how differently I’d be if they gave me back my girlhood.
