A Young Man’s Insult
I was raped a month before my 21st birthday. I was a virgin. It was not violent.
My youth was sheltered, and I was a naïve, sensitive, church going young man. I was neither innocent nor prude, but I was clear I was saving myself for marriage. The woman, briefed on my beliefs, pushed boundaries that I didn’t possess the strength to stand firmly within. Unmoved by my lack of, she boasted about besting me.
I can recall the ricocheting shrapnel of shame for my body’s obvious physical responses. The sheets of my salvation were tearing apart while I was desperately holding the bed together, failing to hush the squeaks of satisfaction.
Why did my soul so weakly object to that which my body was not?
Twenty years of self-control vanished, vanquished by a few flashes of physiology. The terms of endearment she used for me were equally yoked with confusion. She spoke “fuck you” and “damn you” onto the epitaph of Love, and the vulgarity vexed me like an IV of nerve gas, sublimating into the previously, carefully protected chambers of my heart.
Subconsciously, I began building boxes in which to banish the before. Shame shunned my intimacy history into deep storage, hidden, unmarked, unfiled. I built the same boxes with my partner’s name on them.
Knowledge foiled my fantasy.
It was fantasy. My confidence required enough dissociation from our pasts to make them feel like differing lifetimes. I corralled my imagination to the confines of current conditions.
I carried the burdens of betrayal with me, applying them to future loves. Portending their purity, as well as mine, was an effective emotional barricade, protecting me from the prowess of my past.
I was in perilous pursuit of purity regained, founded on the illusion, delusion, that virginity could be resurrected. Even now, two years single, I feel threatened by news of an ex rejoining the race of romance.
Logic betrays me, clouding the waters of my focus.
My confidence slept solely in the bedroom. My worth, weighed in intimacy. I had not balanced my own book of checks, so I regrettably cashed several from accounts that weren’t mine. My baseline had buckled, and I romanticized women without thought for my care. Over time, my identity dwindled to a dirt pile, easily disbursed by the desire to please. In an effort to be irreplaceable, I took on too many titles but wore none of them for very long. I was so preoccupied with pursuit that I lacked the loins to laminate myself from the love of a lady long enough to lament my own accosted abstinence.
In my efforts to love like I’d never loved before, I emotionally elevated each relationship above the one before, romanticizing the stories with an “As you wish” attitude (Princess Bride). Ultimately, the stories came to a close with me, the masked dichotomy of villainous hero, tumbling downhill with the words ‘as you wish’ rolling alongside.
The traumatic trance I taught myself created a cantered correlation between the physical and spiritual worlds of sex, intimacy, and love. I became emotionally subservient to women, tempering my truth to theirs. My tales were tainted, tilted. ‘Little white lies’ were easy to digest at first, devolving into disgusting rascality. My morals were a mosaic mural of mistruths and misinformation, while I wore my Sunday shoes every day to conceal my dirty socks.
I needed every new relationship to look and feel as if it was my first. I painted descriptively deceptive worlds that we both would take our first steps into, together, and when that painting’s colors muddied, I drenched the canvas in turpentine, picked a new palette, and placed myself in front of the easel of evasion.
I want a restart. I call ‘foul’ because I didn’t have control of the starter pistol.
Unfortunately, my painting cannot be doused in detergent. Art appreciation is a process of processing. Emotions evolve as my canvas widens. My color-wheel is becoming a color-globe. Though paints cannot be unmixed, separated into ‘savory’ and ‘not’, all colors have beauty and deserve dignity on life’s canvas.
