Un-Welcomed




Why did I let him in? Why did I not fight harder? Why did I just lay there, crying like that?

I keep thinking I'll find some way to describe it. I hunt through a mental repository of images, analogies, and metaphors, searching for a suitable vehicle for faithfully telling it. I arrive at nothing. For how does one say, plainly, all that it is to be raped?

Defiled. Polluted. Castoff. Exposed. Abhorred. And, most dreadful of all: defenseless.

The most difficult part was not the rape, that act of unspeakable violation. It was, and always has been, the horror of living in a body that has been raped. However much I believed in my mind that I was responsible for what had happened, my body knew better.



~ Halee Gray Scott, How I Beat Back the Darkness after Rape





Un-Welcomed