This is what a rape looks like:

You talk on the phone with someone you met online. You talk dirty. It's fun, it's another way to check out of reality, which is difficult these days to sit with, more so than usual. You speak of the physical pain he will provide you with, the choking and the hitting; it's what you crave, and he says he can provide that, that he craves it too.

He says he is from Boston, but lost his apartment recently so he's heading down to New York, to live on the streets, to see what it is like to be homeless. It sounds exciting, dangerous. You say you wish you could offer him a place to stay, but of course you can't. Otherwise, you think everything sounds just great, just wonderful, and you say you can't wait to see him, to fuck him. It's fun, all of this, another way to check out of reality, which, really and truly, is too uncomfortable to live in right now.

You make other plans with other men meanwhile; so many men to make plans with. Sex on beds, on the beach, in bathrooms. So many men to have sex with, so many who can open a door for you to somewhere else for a little while. You always forget about this particular one until he calls or texts you, and then snap! You are back in sub space, a place you have learned to long for, a place that, depending on the man and his boundaries, allows you to tip toe up to death and to peer down its rabbit hole. Like all inviting holes it seems warm and soft, and it is ever so inviting.

(You have yet to use a safe word with any of these men. To be honest, you don't understand safe words. Rationally, yes, of course. But for what you desire? There is no safe word.)

You make a plan with him. He will come over one night, a few days after starting his new adventure on the streets of New York City. All of this continues to sound fine, acceptable, exciting. You schedule another meet up the night before that. Another guy you've met online. You meet for the first time on a street corner in Brooklyn and take several trains and buses to spend the night on an empty August beach, where you lay down blankets and talk the night away, with some halfhearted sex in between. He is a musician, sensitive, funny and interesting; you click like you would with another kid at college orientation, a new friend, a new buddy who "gets" you in the midst of an adventure. You sleep fitfully, wake in the morning, run into the water, screech at its chill and run out. Then you head to work.

You are tired, but also hyped up on all of this. So hyped up; so obviously an addict using her poison. You thought you had put everything down, all the alcohol and binging and compulsive eating and drugs, but there you are, one more thing to bite off, chew and swallow in one giant gulp. (Today at dinner your six-year-old watched you suck down your glass of water in awe and asked "Why do you drink everything and eat everything so fast Mama?")

You are stalling now as you write this. You are getting to the hard part, the secret shameful part you never told anyone, not even your therapist, not even your sponsor, not even your closest friends, the ones who don't blink an eye at what you tell them, but only listen and nod. The shame pulls your hands away from the keyboard; actually it slaps them away, like an irritable parent. It tells you to check Facebook instead. It tells you not to do this, that you cannot write this or say it or even think it. It tells you to stop. But you know you have to finish, that you are finally ready to do this, to put these words down on (virtual) paper. You don't know why now, perhaps because you have been playing with your food again, flirting with forces you can't control and that seek to destroy you, you know you don't have a choice. You know you have to write it all out and share it with the world. Or at least some of the world. The world that is ready to hear.

This is what a rape looks like:

You are hyped up at work, you can see that you are surely on a path to self-destruction, sex on the beach with a stranger the night before, and now sex with a stranger at your apartment tonight. A voice inside you tells you, at last, "too much."

You have reached your limit, your bottom, no need to dive down farther. Take a break. Cancel tonight.

But you think that you can't back down from this, that you can't disappoint this stranger and, truth be told, you are an extremely competitive person, especially with men; this wouldn't be the first time you risked your health and your life to show a man you are just as fearless, just as daring, just as deranged as he is. And of course there is that feeling that sometimes comes when in the midst of self-destruction, whether it be through using or through some other form of violent self-sabotage; the jitters and the aliveness and, most importantly, your separation from the world and its hurricane of pain. Meaning the real pain, the kind that physical pain can't hold a candle to, that kind that brings you to your knees whenever you are forced to be alone with it and to sit with it.

You will not sit with it today, and you will not sit with it tonight. Nor will you be able to sit with it for some time after what happens. Which is just as well since like every addict ever there is a deep streak of cowardice that runs through you. (Though, like some of those addicts, there is also a streak of courage that is deeper still, only by a hair, but enough, it will be enough. After all, here you are, writing this down at last. It took three years, but here you are.)

Enough stalling. You are home in your apartment, alone. Your child is with your ex-wife, in your ex-home; there is grief, so much grief, but no chance to feel it tonight. He buzzes, you let him in, and he instantly starts choking you; pushes you against the wall in your entranceway. "Okay," you think, "I guess this makes sense. This is what we talked about doing. I mean, this is what I signed up for, right?"

He hits you across your face and it hurts bad; usually the men start slowly, they let the arousal take over before they hurt you, before they hit you. That way the pain is incidental, it feels good but not too much. But not this one, he goes right for it. Hard.

Something you did not sign up for: He stinks. Like a homeless man. Because he is a fucking homeless man. Standing in your entranceway—kneeling now actually as he pushes you down to his crotch and shoves his cock into your mouth—kneeling in your entranceway you know all at once that you have made a terrible mistake.

You have made a terrible mistake but you must carry on as best you can and try and pretend as best you can to him and to yourself that you are having "a good time." That this is sexy and fun and exactly what you signed up for. That you aren't terrified of him and his smell, that you don't find him repulsive, that you aren't questioning everything about this moment; no, luckily you are a champ at compartmentalizing. It's amazing how good you are at it actually; of course you learned it as a child and applied as necessary and now you have done it so much over the years that, at 36, you are an expert in its application. (Some people call it "denial," otherwise known as "not just a river in Africa.")

This is what a rape looks like:

He talks so much, won't shut up. About his reasons for being homeless (he wants to be a social worker who treats homeless people, so this is a "para-professional experience" for him); about his conversation with his mother on the phone the other day; about what else I honestly don't remember (I am ready to switch to first person). He took me into the bedroom and started fucking me without a condom, and then stopped to explain why he didn't use one even though we had discussed earlier on the phone that he WOULD use one. I just nodded and agreed. He would do things to me and then stop and talk about himself, and I would just wish it was all over. Why did this have to take so long? Why couldn't he just fuck me and then leave? At one point my cat, the overly sensitive one who is forever having bitch fights with me, she jumped up onto the bed, and she pushed herself between the two of us. It is an image I can't let go of; even my fucking cat knew better than me that this was not a good person to have in my home, in my bed.

At one point he started choking me so hard I started to pass out; he was fucking me at the same time. Normally it's a scenario I am aroused by, but this time it felt wrong, everything felt so wrong, not least because of his stink. I realized he could very well kill me, and I stayed limp and wished that he would. I closed my eyes and let him choke me to his heart's content. He didn't kill me, however. (Today, three years later, most of me is glad that he did not. It took a lot to get this place, to be mostly glad I am alive. It took every last bit of that courage I mentioned possessing earlier.)

Then he started to try and shove his cock inside my ass and finally I said "no." I half-heartedly whispered it, and he half-heartedly stopped. And then started trying again. And I said "stop." I said I didn't like it, that it hurt. I was still half-hearted, I suppose, and he only half-heartedly listened, always drawn back to that part of me, a part I did not want him anywhere near, under any circumstance.

This is what a rape looks like:

Consensual at first. Reluctant but game. Quiet in the face of broken boundaries (no condom); silently wishing him away but saying nothing. Being agreeable. Being good. Not being a bitch, a disappointing bitch, a scaredy-cat, or rude. Slipping into sub space as a way to escape and deny. Hoping to die, the fail-safe option (because problems: sorted). Then finally whispering "stop" and being ignored, probably because it was whispered. Stop again, then again, then please stop.

He kept struggling to shove his stinking dick into me, sometimes getting it in a little and then stopped by my clenching fear and disgust. All six-foot-something of him laying on top of me and trying to shove it inside me, ignoring me now, just straight up ignoring me and finally ... I flipped. Those who know me well, closely, from childhood or otherwise, they know what this means. It is a moment in which I take hold of the table and I heave it over onto its side like a wild, monstrous woman escaped from her tiny, walled-in prison behind the tapestry. Because right there, alongside the addiction and the cowardice and the courage is the anger and the insanity and a kind of terrible strength. Often when this side of me is sparked it ends in destruction, of relationships, of objects, of myself, but this time was different. This time I flipped the table and it was a six-foot-something man trying to shove—I say "trying" like he hadn't succeeded but he did, he succeeded—his cock inside my ass against my wishes and in a second I was out from under him, locked inside the bathroom and screaming at him.

I stood there, looking at myself in the mirror, questioning what this was, all of this, when I heard silence and stuck my head out. There he was, putting his shoes on, tying them, and then he stopped and asked, actually asked me if he should leave. Timidly. I made it clear, very clear, that he should certainly get out. Get the FUCK out. So he did, taking with him the watermelon he had brought me as a hostess gift.

So that is what a rape looks like, except I didn't know I had been raped. I had to call a friend, and then my therapist, and then another friend, before I understood what had happened and what I needed to do. (I take a moment here to note that these three people were all men and constituted my support system at that time of my life; my world is rich with good, kind men, and I keep myself busy with raising one more to join their ranks one day, God willing.) The rest is less interesting to me, I have combed over much of it in therapy and otherwise: the hospital, the anti-HIV drug regimen that had me weak and tired and puking for a month; the depression and mood swings; the refusal to go to the police; the abandonment by certain work friends, the job loss. Defending my decision not to go to the police; hiding the full extent of my mistake to everyone who asked; and finally, the shame, the rotten, acidic shame eating away inside of me. The shame that reminds me I let a crazy homeless man into my home, sight unseen, and invited him into my bed. The shame that tells me this is unforgivable, I am unforgivable. The shame that even now is shaking its head at me and telling me to delete this, to hide it, to never show anyone this admission of my ugly culpability.

It doesn't help that a phantom nausea rises in the pit of my stomach and up my throat as I write and consider this. For a month I felt that nausea as everyday I swallowed the anti-HIV pills, which are nothing more than poison meant to kill everything in its path. Everyday I would work hard to forget why I was taking those pills, that it wasn't just because I had been date raped, but that I had been date raped by an insane homeless man who had been God knows where and done God knows what. Not attacked in an alley but forced in my bedroom, on my bed, at my invitation. It has a metallic taste, that nausea.

But I have no choice. Because like I said, most of me wants to be alive today, and I have a hair's breadth more of courage than of fear, enough to do what I must to make sure this keeps on happening, this living of mine. I have just enough courage to sit at last with the pain, the real kind, and to feel its arms wrap around me and squeeze until I can't breathe and then let go and drift away as harmless as a morning mist pushed to pieces by the afternoon sun. So here it is, my shame, at last. I have no other secrets now. May God help me to forgive myself one day.

xo