Yes, yes. I know I owe you more about the dream. But perhaps I don’t. Perhaps the dream was just a precursor to what happened last night, the reason I didn’t post anything yesterday.

I smoked medical grade weed from Cali last night, a gift from a friend. I take one hit, and I’m high. But this is a different high than ever before. It’s smooth. I don’t even feel high, except there’s something different to the world now, an ethereal haze from which I never want to get out.

Sang and my boyfriend are talking. Sam–Brw wants to be called Sam from now on–says something that pisses Sang off. Sam’s being offensive, Sang as being defensive, and I’m being asked to side. An argument I had with Sam earlier in the day–something about me always siding with Sang–led me to realize I was afraid to disagree with Sang. I’m afraid because he’s a man. This man I love in a different but equal way as my boyfriend: I’m afraid of him. The realization was still with me when they asked me to pick sides. I side with my boyfriend; I disagreed with Sang. The fear killed me. As I said the words that declared my position, I fell away. Or rather, the world fell away from me. I was somewhere else, staring at a small floor fan whirring its cold air at me. I watched the blades turn and turn and turn. Its whirring silenced everything else. And I was gone.

What emerged, I’m told, was over two hours of raw, ugly confession. I remember some of it. What I remember is painful. I begged Andy from the dorms to stop. I begged him for months, and for months he said I had made him that way. Then, right before Christmas break, after three months of brutal violation, he promises things will be different when I come back from visiting my family. I come back at the end of January. We had talked about this, in the interim, everyday over the phone. He was going to stop. I was so happy, so hopeful. We have sex at my return, and he isn’t forceful or cruel. I’m actually involved in it for the first time in a long time.

That lasts ten days. At the very beginning of February, he rapes me. I cry and beg him why.

“Sometimes I have to. It’s in me now. You put this is in me, and now I need it.”

I agreed he could continue to rape me on the very rare occasions. [I didn’t remember that before last night. I agreed to let him rape me as long as it wasn’t too often. I remember bargaining with him about how often was rare! I’m horrified I thought so little of myself. I’m horrified in a way that grips my heart and my throat and won’t let go. I can’t believe I ever thought this man, to whom I wasn’t even attracted, toward whom I felt revulsion, was the best I could do. I was settling, and he knew it. He said he knew it, that I could do better. But that seemed to fire the rage he felt toward me. That seemed to make the raping more sadistic. So I stifled a similar perception of my possible worth. I felt guilty about it. And so when “rare” became every day, multiple times a day, I only weakly protested. My thoughts about what he was doing to me were irrelevant.

Until I collapsed during intermission of a play I was acting in. I had been thinking about new and potentially more effective ways to try to break up with him when I fainted. I was waiting for the play to run its course, as he was in the play with me. I didn’t want to make a hard situation even harder by having to face him during rehearsals. Nothing good, I knew, could come from him seeing me every day after I reject him. But screaming backstage at the top of my lungs, “get this off me,” as I desperately snatch at my costume—hoop skirt and a corset—forced me to notice how near the precipice I actually was.

I made sure, the last time he raped me, to fight him as hard as I possibly could—to say “no” clearly—to tell him, with unmistakeable clarity of phrasing and tone, “this is not what I want, nor has it ever been,” to which I was told “fuck you.” I did this to make certain it was indeed rape. I did it because I still doubted my perception.

I WAS RAPED! For the love of god, I was raped. I was raped. I was raped. How does a person get over that? How do I begin to heal when last night was the first time in four years I admitted out loud–to men, no less–that I had agreed to let him rape me. I had thought that little of myself.

And then I yelled at my boyfriend, screamed at the top of my lungs, that I hated him, that I hate it that he can’t hold it together sometimes, that he can’t be there for me sometimes, that he can’t deal with his depression and pain as silently as I do.

None of what I was yelling at him was true. I do get irked when he’s too depressed to help me do something, even if it’s as simple as the laundry, but I don’t hate. I never hate him. I was just angry. And because any expression of anger, in my family, always resulted in getting struck several times by a belt or a flip-flop or a hand across the legs and butt, I don’t express anger. Ever. Especially to men. I’m uncomfortable with it. So anger feels vile, like hatred would.

That self-disgust and perceived hatred triggered my panic attack. Hearing Sam and Sang bickering, the two men in this world, other than my father and brother, for whom I care the most, set me off. What’s worse is they were asking me to side. I was already angry at them for fighting, and now they forcing me to stand up to a man, whomever I choose.

I was angry and I was afraid, so afraid that they were angry at all. An angry man literally tortures me with the expression of his emotion, with the knowledge that there’s that build up inside of him. I will defile and hurt myself, do anything, to keep a man from becoming angry. That’s how afraid I am of an angry man. And here, for the first time in my life, I had two. My life, I felt, was falling apart. I hid in the world the fan spun for me.

A world, the other day’s dream told me, where my brother could be a rapist. Now seventeen, he could do that to a girl, make her feel insignificant and afraid with just a look, just a gesture. He has a penis. He has desires. He can rape someone now.

That frightens me more than I can stand. My brother is not a rapist, nor do I believe he’s intellectually or emotionally capable of doing that to a person. But men don’t know. Men don’t know how they make us feel when they desire us, when they lust so openly, as they so often do. Nor what they do with their words when they call us bitches and cunts. That anger and the knowledge of their lust for us combines in my mind into a rape, sending me into a frightening panic as I remember how dangerous that mix is.

I start to think, who does these terrible things to a human being? And why? Why? Who did these terrible things to me? Where is that dark place? There it is. There it is. In the fan. In its blades. Watch it turn, disappearing into itself. Running so fast, I can feel on my skin the force of its motion. I’ve run so fast I can feel the wind break against my skin. I’ve run so hard, so fast, for nothing. I hate them for making me do that.

I scream at Sam some more after I stop hyperventilating. My lungs hurt from the air. I can’t breathe through my nose, you asshole, I think as Sam suggests this idea. I can’t do anything. Every muscle in my body is tense. Every muscle is shaking. I can’t stop. I can’t stop it the memories, the thoughts from coming. I’m—I’m—I’m—

I calm down, but it only lasts a half of a minute, maybe less. I start to hyperventilate again. And I start talking, rocking back and forth and talking, loud enough for others to hear, but it doesn’t matter who is listening. I wish Sang and Sam weren’t so near. I wish I was in a dark, warm place.

I realize my mother trained me to be afraid of men by constantly telling my sisters and me that she would never leave us in a room alone with any man, not even our father. She tells us that we shouldn’t let him kiss us on the mouth, as is a custom in most Hispanic cultures. That it’s wrong. That it’s dirty. That he’s wrong. That he’s doing something dirty. He’s doing something inappropriate with us. My little girl mind understood enough to be scared of him.

I realize, I had been thanking my luck for years because no rape had impregnated me. Yet when I look back, I realize what Andy, the will-be lawyer, did to me when he threw me on my back and came inside me. Certainly, the knowledge of what that really is, that it’s rape, had been with me for some months. It was Sam who had presented the idea to me, and I had accepted it, but I had never considered it, and I had never dealt with that.

Until last night, high, for the first time, from medical grade marijuana. No one can ever again tell me weed is bad for me. Perhaps for some, those who use it as an escape, but this chemical took me deeper than I’ve ever been. It dropped my defenses, led me to self-hypnotize, and I remembered the things I’ve been telling you for months that I couldn’t. Today, I awoke, and I feel like shit, but goddamn do I feel lighter. The disgusting things, for four years, I’ve been crawling into my closet and under my bed to hide from: like poison, I had to vomit in order to start healing. I’ve been nauseous from that poison my entire life. Last night, I upheaved it all. My throat is sore and I’m exhausted, but I’ve had a breakthrough. I told my boyfriend and one of my best friends the darkest, ugliest things I’ve ever thought and experienced, and they stared, quietly, respectfully, lovingly, while I did it. Then they embraced me with words of comfort, gave me a Xanax, and settled their argument with honesty. I apologize profusely for the over two hour panic attack they just sat through.

“No. Don’t apologize,” they say. “That was more important than anything we were talking about.”

“Now we have to talk about something real,” they say.

They whisper to each other while I sleep a dead sleep on my couch. They tell me today I was and am beautiful to witness, that they love me, and that they will always listen and protect me.

Then they told me a few hard truths. But I’ve said so much already. I don’t want to overburden you. Later. Later. There’s time. I know that now. There was time to experience it. It’s going to take much more time to get over it. I was tortured. I’ve literally suffered torture my entire life. My parents are no exception: the people who were supposed to love and protect me tortured me instead. I’m 22, and I’ve just come to terms with the reality of what I’ve lived. Yes, indeed, there’s time.