Something I Survived

My first time wasn’t a first time. It was a thing that happened to me while I held my breath and waited for it to be over.

People ask you. At sleepovers. In magazines. In the breathless currency of teenage girlhood where your virginity is a story you’re supposed to tell with either pride or scandal. Like it’s yours. Like you had a say.

I didn’t have a say.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t fight. I didn’t run. I just went somewhere else inside my head. Found a room in there with no furniture and no sound and I stayed in it until it was done.

That’s what survival looks like when you’re too young to call it survival. It looks like compliance. It looks like silence. It looks like a girl who seems fine afterwards because she’s already learned that fine is the only option that doesn’t make things worse.

Nobody asked me about it. Not then. Not for years. By the time someone did ask, I’d built so many walls around it that even I couldn’t find the door.

I told a therapist once. In a room with a box of tissues and a clock on the wall and a woman who nodded in that particular way that means I hear you but I can’t fix this and we both know it.

She said it wasn’t my fault. Which I knew. Intellectually. The way you know the earth is round without ever seeing it from space. You accept the information but it doesn’t land in the place it needs to land.

The place it needs to land is the body. And my body decided a long time ago that it wasn’t safe and no amount of therapy has fully convinced it otherwise.

I survived it. That’s the whole sentence. I survived it. Not I overcame it. Not I healed from it. Not I turned it into strength.

I survived it. And I’m still here. And some days that’s enough and some days it isn’t and both of those things are true at the same time.