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Last year on my birthday, I allowed myself to cum. I say it like that because I created a story in my mind where I had a boyfriend, I was comfortable, and I felt safe. I had security, so I let myself feel that freedom.  I ignored the part where he had gotten competitive with me over a game of foosball I wanted to play with a co-worker. He took my joy and spirit away and then clobbered me on purpose. I just stood there feeling like an idiot for even trying to have fun. I gave up after he offered, heavily, to play me instead. I ignored the part that when my cousin showed up, then my supposed best friend suddenly wanted to be around me. With her entourage of men she had brought along. I ignored the fact that the guy I had come with was suddenly buzzing with energy and started playing pool. I walked away because I couldn't handle to see it. The intensity of those people. The energy around them. It was turmoil. A toxic cloud of storms brewing. I didn't want it. I wondered how long it would take for any of them to notice I had walked away. I wondered why I was playing games right along with them. I wondered if it made a difference. Did it matter that I needed to get away from all the drama and that I wanted special attention for my birthday, that another woman was getting? It mattered to me at the time. It didn't matter how it made me look to walk away. I felt like walking away was taking back my own power. I control the situation when I leave. 

That power. The inner strength that let me reach the bounds of vulnerability. I allowed myself to let someone see that side of me. After years of trauma. After feeling like I was broken. A shell. That I had been used in the past for mechanical motions of sexual desire for someone else. Not for me. It would start out that I wanted it. Needed it. But, it was never for me. It was never about me. The next morning, I woke up to being unfriended by that supposed "boyfriend." The one who had told me the night before, "yes, okay, we are dating!" before I let go of my inhibitions and let him into my heart for a few moments. Less than a day later, he had ghosted me. I was so excited and told my bosses that he admitted, finally, we were dating! Then the realization that he had unfriended me and deleted his account. That he wasn't answering my texts. That anxiety that pooled in my heart, deep down, sunken and heavy. That I finally heard from him while I was on my lunch break and I told him, you know it was private? No one could see who I put I was in a relationship with... I ended up feeling so heartbroken, I cried to my friend. I asked her if she would be my online girlfriend so men would stop sending me dick pictures. To possibly create chaos or an illusion in anyone's mind who wanted to hurt me. A defense when I felt defenseless. She said she would and it just caused questions on everyone's minds. We were friends. I never did anything romantic or sexual with her. It was all a ruse to get back at her lover and mine. 

It still hurts. My heart is still pained by that. I believed him. I let him treat me this way and I believed him that he liked me. That he wanted me. Not just for sex. He was so gentle and kind with me. When it was just him and I, he would ask me about my day and then hold me in silence while the words hung in the air, until they all faded away. He would allow me to stretch out on his couch, pull my feet and legs onto his lap. He would hold his hand around my calf gently before feeding me bites of a shared desert. He was quiet, gentle, romantic and kind. Only when we were alone. When out in public, he acted like we were strangers. Like we were just friends. That it didn't mean anything more. That I was just really into him but he didn't feel that way. So I just backed away. I would act like I didn't know him, too. It hurt my feelings and I pushed them down deep so no one could see me being weak by him. That if he wanted to prove I was nothing to him, I would do the same. In my heart, I did not feel this way. I wanted him to hold my hand. I wanted him to grab me around the waist and pull me in. I wanted him to love me back. Even if it was just a couple times a week, on his terms.

On a particular moment in time when he frustrated me, I didn't want to catch him running up the stairs behind my co-worker (his best friend's girlfriend) and look up her short outfit. It made me angry. I had just found my son with his hands around my daughter's neck earlier that day. I hadn't had time to sort through the feelings yet. I had to do a work function and put on a happy face and pretend I didn't feel the way I did. I wanted to put on a dress I had bought that was a checkered retro style dress that I joked I would wear on a date to the shooting range. I decided against it because then it would seem more like we were on a date. It killed me to stop myself from being me. To wear something different because I didn't want him to think I liked him more than I did. Truth was, I was nuts about him. He came over and I just wanted to forget about it all. He showed up wearing a checkered shirt and I felt very confused on whether I was supposed to change into that dress that I had originally thought of wearing- or should I be stubborn and not let him control me like that? I stayed in the work shirt and skirt. He teased me on purpose. He made me want him and then he stopped me and said we would have sex later. After I met up with all my co-workers at a work function. I felt used and confused. He would oddly sit next to me at times and I always felt like I wasn't sure if he was making a gesture to suggest to my friends, family, co-workers that we were dating as a means to make sure I wasn't with anyone else- or if it was to make himself look better in their eyes- or if he really did want to make the gesture. A constant mind fuck. Being left at arm's reach. Never knowing how he really felt. Because, he would say we were just friends. He said we should just be friends. Then he would come walk by me and grab my ass. Or pinch my nipples. Then tap on my shoulder and hide on the other side. He would yawn and put his arm around me. I would hide my smiles. He was a child and I couldn't help but like him for it. He teased me and I wanted more and more. Always at arm's reach. 

Certain types find broken people. It doesn't always mean they want to exploit an abused person. I have met good natured people who find me. We connect as kindred spirits. Finding the comfort in knowing "me too." We do our best to heal each other without projecting. It's not always as clean as it sounds. It often ends with a lot of hurt feelings and some sort of disengagement. Sometimes, it ends with me realizing that I'm better off without them. I wonder, reflecting back now, if he was just a broken person looking to heal and I helped him do that- or if he was a con man and I fell for him hook, line, and sinker. I wonder if he is just the type of person to make only small waves in small groups. He gets away with being that way, grabbing women, grabbing children, because no one talks about it to each other. I still cannot forget a time in a co-worker's pool when my cousin's daughter was making a very upset and angry face at him. I could tell something happened between them for a moment but it was so quick, no one saw. But, I felt the energy shift. I saw him looking guilty and wounded, saying sorry. Without a thought I said, Oh, she didn't like that. But, what was that? Did he just grab her like he did to me? Feeling a nipple or a buttcheek in the pool without anyone knowing... Passing it off as an accident and looking remorseful. She always seemed to reach out to me but I was never strong enough to follow through. Her father and I were growing more and more distant by the day and I didn't like how he tried to control her. Or me. Or his girlfriend. Or anyone else who saw him deep down for what he really is- a broken man who gets away with things because nice people cannot fathom that some people don't have the empathy and they feign it well. Better than most. But, the women left behind. The broken women. You can see it in their eyes. They have kind eyes. Watery, and broken. We are hurt and confused, and sad. You always see it in our eyes. Never sure of how to answer general questions. Never sure if we should say something. Never sure if I had seen the tail end of a 12 year old child getting sexually touched in a pool so quickly, I'm not sure anyone else had seen it.

I pondered that moment in the pool for a long time. I wasn't able to reach climax often with him. Maybe a handful of times. But after that? No. Not again. Even though I could have. Many times. I just felt like there was something very off about that incident in the pool that I had seen. That it was odd that he didn't have any friends or family around him ever. That he was moving constantly. It just seemed to me like he was just a nomad. Or afraid of something. I always equated that to his mom passing away. I attached a traumatic experience to him and assumed that was the case for his being distant. Maybe he just never had any real feelings at all. 

Everyone feels sad and confused on why a person who has no empathy cannot feel bad. I got stronger. I kept my kids at arms length. I kept that relationship separate from everything else as much as I could. Even though, everyone knew how I felt about him. Even though, they all said the same thing. That I clearly liked him more than he liked me. That he was just using me. That he just wanted one thing from me. It's not so easy to get tricked by someone and admit it. To tell yourself that those feelings are not real and they are unrequited. 

I wrote a lot about my experiences in the last few years. The love, the pain. The agony of knowing someone like him. All while going through a divorce. I had gone from a marriage that seemed like a dream from the outside looking in. Except, it was a nightmare. Constant bickering. Belittling. Verbal and mental abuse that I told myself I was handling by having a sharp tongue in return. There's a certain type of man who can get into a car ride with you for 15 min and systematically push all your buttons, one by one, until you cry and sob and say sorry even though you don't even know what you're apologizing for- to arrive at your in-law's house for a party, fixing your mascara, feeling like now you have to try to put on a party face. But. I couldn't ever do that. I would instead, sit in the corner and disengage my feelings so that I could get through the few hours and then cry it out later. His family thought I was rude. That I was weird. Quiet. I would occasionally speak up when the conversation would get into a fantasy land about novels or music tastes. It just made me seem opinionated. Now, I don't care what they think. Their opinion of me doesn't hold a candle to my own. 

There's a certain type of man who finds a broken woman and holds her. Heals her. Puts his warm hands around her and gently squeezes. Who starts to be rough during sex and stops himself. Feeling her vibe, feeling her pain. Realizing, she needs something gentler, and softly holds her hand instead. To come from that and realize, that he just got what he wanted from me. He did it gently. Softly. Quietly. He got away with it because I had cared about him and he knew it. He set me up to use me and ignore me when he didn't feel like it. He would engage with me just enough so that I would keep coming back. Wanting more. Hoping. That I settled for him constantly keeping me at a distance because I made excuses for him. He probably fell asleep. Life was too much for him today. He needs a lot of time and space alone. 

When it was all over, I still felt like he would come back. That he would just show up one day. I still don't think it's far fetched. It breaks my heart that he couldn't be a man and say he was done using me for sex and he is moving on now. Don't expect to hear from him. Because he's cut me out of his life entirely. 

I was used to feeling broken after relationships end because that is what I was taught. That is the normalcy. I couldn't get along with another broken person in the end because deep seeded trauma would pop up and remind me why I wasn't worth knowing. My self esteem was low my whole life. But, if that was my standard, then how was I to know it wasn't okay? I saw other people being happy and good to themselves and I just assumed you get that way because you grow up in a loving, nurturing environment. I was bitter to my parents for making my childhood traumatic. I still am. Even though, I know that they did what they could to survive. Or at least, I know my mom did. She made a lot of bad choices with men. She taught me a lot of bad habits. I wished I would have ended up like my other sister. The one who seems to deal with things better. The one that has a college degree. The stay at home mom who is charming and kind hearted. The one who gets tears in her eyes when she speaks to people deeply. The one who sucks it back in and smiles before walking away. Or maybe we are more alike than I realized. 

The same one that beat me when I didn't do my homework when she told me to. The one who called me a "dike" because I watched her get dressed. She was a teenager when I was in elementary school. Almost a decade spanned between us. I didn't have sexual feelings back then. Nor did I towards my sibling. I thought she was beautiful and I was wishing my body looked like hers. She was perfect to me with alabaster skin. She looked like a ballerina I had seen in one of her impressionist painting books. I was envious of her maturity, her beauty. I was called a dike many times by women when I got older. I wasn't allowed to find beauty in those around me. It made people uncomfortable for me to look at them and think they were beautiful. As an adult, I realize now that a lot of them were repressing feelings and it was, unfortunately, not returned romantic admiration from me. Just appreciating someone's beauty. I remember I got a short haircut once and a girl I worked with kept dropping her pen in front of me and bending over. It would stop me in my tracks and pop my thought bubble. It made me really uncomfortable. I didn't know what to say or do so I just waited for her to pick up her pen and look back at me. She did it a few times before I caught on, after hearing some giggles from the cooks behind the counter, she wanted to see if I was watching her ass. She said my haircut made me look like a lesbian. I was really hurt by that. It was just a haircut. I had a boyfriend at the time. One that I very much enjoyed sexually. So why did she think I was a lesbian? Because of my short hair? My $15 hair cut from a random chain? One that wasn't like the picture I provided, but was a sort of "Karen" version of it. I was 17 years old and getting bullied by another woman about my sexual orientation. I quit that job shortly thereafter. 

I worked in the one hour photo department with a guy who kept asking me for my number. I said no every time. My boyfriend had visited me and he had met him. He offered to buy my tickets to a concert by my favorite musician, Beck. He made me uncomfortable. He spent the entire shift trying to convince me to go out with him. No. No. No. No. He was fired after a few weeks. I ended up quitting shortly after. When my manager found out, he asked me if the guy had said anything weird to me. I admitted he was insistent on asking me out and being a creep every shift. He said I should have said something sooner. That he would have been fired immediately. Instead, they just assumed he was a creep but had no proof. He said he could have done something. Convinced me to stay. I had slammed my finger in a drawer by accident one day and passed out at work. I woke up after a strange series of dreams, like I was someplace far away. Not on the cold, dirty floor of a Walmart 1-hr photo with a stranger looking into my face and a paramedic on the other side. They made me sit in the break room in a wheel chair for an hour before they allowed me to leave, only after I was forced to call my mom to pick me up. I was embarrassed. I felt really stupid there. I was sick of flipping through pictures that came in from online orders that had young women with dicks in their mouth and holding money. It happened a lot. I flagged them and only included the pictures their pick up order that had no nudity, as per the policy. No one did anything about it. Some random person would pick up the photos and pay for the 3 pictures out of 100 that were allowed. I didn't say anything to anyone who could do anything about it. I wasn't sure how to say something. I was just a kid in high school.

I had already at that point, being 17, been verbally, physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually abused by men. "Men." When I was 15 and losing my virginity with my first boyfriend, I had already had non-consensual sexual experiences. I had already been looked at up and down by older men. Cat called. Touched. When I found out that my best friend at the time had admitted to kissing my boyfriend, I feel like I cracked. There are no rules. There are no boundaries for some people. I felt safe and comfortable with the love of my life and we had sex. I let him cum inside me. He left for his mom's house in Detroit within a few days. When he came back, we tried again and again. I was full of emotions. New ones. Love and lust. I wanted only him. All the time. It felt good to be able to find control and power that way. Sexually. So it all crashed down when I found out he cheated on me. But, to him, it was just whatever. It was just some girl he kissed when he was stoned and had a couple beers at a party. One in the same teepee we had lost our virginity together only months before. To say I wanted to get him back for how I felt was an understatement. I pushed it all down and forgave him. I forgave her. I continued to be in it with him. To be his girlfriend. Despite what had happened. It ate me alive. From the inside out. 

Wednesdays was open mic night at Zoetropolis. It was an old cinema house on Lemon Street. Now, a bigger venue and moved locations. Back in the early 2000s it was the place for the art kids at several local high schools. My ex husband was there. His best friend. Another guy I dated later was there. Countless intertwining of the Lancaster art crowd in my generation. I met a lot of people there. There was a guy that showed up. He seemed to chat me up with charm while I worked the door for my boyfriend's shows. He was a little older. He hobbled and had a crutch because of a broken leg. He was kind of cute and I felt bad for his pain. He gave me his number. Asked me to call him. I did. I met up with him. He walked me to Long's Park at night. I had a bad feeling about it and told him we shouldn't be there after dark. He assured me it was fine. I was 15. I knew he had graduated high school based on what other kids had said about him. We chatted and he got intense. I was uncomfortable and averted his eyes. I didn't like him. I wanted revenge and the attention. I wanted the power of knowing I could cheat if I wanted to. I didn't want to actually do it. He asked me if he could kiss me and I said no. He forced me down in the grass and kissed me. He tasted like coffee and cigarettes. He smelled like old piss. I didn't want to kiss him. I didn't like how he did it. He was forceful. Like a need rather than desire. He drove me home and I was quiet. I didn't know what to say. We had hung out a few more times. I didn't know how old he was really, until I looked at his driver's license. He was 22. He picked me up at night and took me back to his dad's house in Millersville. He kissed me and forced his hands down the front of my skirt. I let him because I felt like this is how adult relationships are- he would know. He's the adult. I touched his penis but I wasn't sure what I wanted out of it. I wasn't sexually attracted to him like he was to me. He wanted me badly and I didn't want to have sex with him. It was already being pushed too far. I just wanted to kiss someone else and hurt my boyfriend like he had hurt me. But this was hurting me, too. I didn't want to hurt him suddenly. Or me. This 22 year old man tried to push my head down onto his penis and I resisted. He sort of shut down, said some annoyed words, and then fell asleep shortly after. I went to use the bathroom. To clean up. Get the smell of him off me. He didn't have soap. Or toilet paper. I wanted to go home. He took me home eventually. After I laid in his bed staring at his Dinosaur Jr. shirt and wondering what made me think this was a good idea. 

I was sad and distant. My friend and ride to Zoe asked me what was up. I told him about Dan. The guy who was 7 years older than me. When I was still a child. Not a virgin. But a child. He was angry. I started to cry. He said it wasn't my fault. He said he was going to take care of it. He said it would be okay. I felt like he was angry at me but he didn't say anything mean. He could have told me I was a terrible person. That I cheated on his friend. That he thought I was dirty or ugly. He didn't. He told me it was okay. That I would be okay. He confronted Dan and told him to back off or he would call the police on him. He told Dan I was underage. That he was disgusting. He spit at him. Dan said he didn't know. He said he was sorry. He left in a hurry. Or as fast as he could with a broken leg. 

I lashed out a lot that year. My ex husband's best friend was at Zoe. He would talk to me, too. I wasn't attracted to him. He was a redhead with a lot of freckles. He was nice to me though. I appreciated being seen as a person and not an object. I had met lots of people there and his interactions stuck with me. One particular night, I had gotten in a fight with a kid in the grade above me. I was feeling sassy and I made a comment about him being fake. He had just started showing up, a rich kid from my school, suddenly he was a hippy with a tie dye shirt because he smoked weed. I was quite cynical. Probably still am. He ripped his shirt in half and threw it at me in the parking lot. Me. Stone cold sober. Standing in a parking lot with a ripped tie dyed shirt in misty rain. My boyfriend at the time, the one who I had lost my virginity to. He yelled at me. Asked me why I had to be like this. Why did I have to be so mean? My words had cut like a knife and I didn't even remember what I had said exactly, because that's not how it works. I always have the means to cut anyone down. I choose not to. I have a unique insight into people and I just know the thing to say to hurt their feelings. I do not know how to conjure this up anymore. Maybe I just lost the ability from not using it. But, at that time, I sure did. I guess to him, not being a poser was very important. After I stood there feeling stunned. Feeling abandoned. I began to cry. I had let out. I had lashed out. Projected my hurt onto someone else. I didn't like that feeling. It was dirty and cruel. My ex husband's best friend walked up and gave me a hug. He kissed my neck and ran his tongue on me. I pushed him away. I was confused and left. I wrote about it in my diary. The whole thing. I have it on my shelf. He denies it happened. I took the shirt home and hand sewed it back together. I found the guy in the halls and gave it back to him. I apologized for what I said. 

There's two kinds of broken people. Those who use and abuse. Who continue the cycle. Who allow the abuse. Then there's the other broken people. Women like me. We are the ones who heal. Who make ourselves whole again. We move on. We build ourselves back up. We don't allow other people to be our moral compass anymore. We sew up the wounds, admit fault, and move forward. We take back our power without it being held over anyone else. 

I tried. I really did. I went on dates. I met up with men whom I had thought were kinder than they turned out to be. I slept with men and when I could have taken my power back, I chose not to be vulnerable. I chose to let myself hold it in. Just in case. I was right to think so, in retrospect. You don't get to watch my face in vulnerability. You don't get to see me when I release, let go, deep into ecstasy. You don't get to take that power from me. So I started over. I started from the beginning. I called up my first boyfriend. We met up and I let go. I came and then disengaged emotionally. I said "see ya." and locked the door behind him when he left minutes later. Have a good trip to Detroit. Tell your mom I said, hello.

I wonder what men see when they look into my eyes. They speak of depth and love at what they see. That I give off this wonderment for them. A universe inside my eyes that glistens with maternal warmth. One they seek so lustfully. They will say anything. Let's go for a hike there sometime. I doubt it, buddy. You just want to cum and go about your life. Go on then. I've learned to ignore it. It's not words to hang onto. Men want one thing and they get it. It's up to me if I want to give it to them. Not today.

I'll keep my power for me, thank you.