There are a lot of words that get used so often in the wrong contexts that they lose their original and/or true meaning. Love is one that always springs to mind, gay is another one, and there’s hundreds more. The one I’d like to discuss is rape. Rape by definition is not a laughing matter, and the one in four women in the UK who have been victims of sexual assault probably agree with me. Yet rape is something we joke about down the pub, and has also developed a further meaning synonymous with “a bad thing has happened”, as in “I was totally raped by work today” or “I got gang-raped by some noobs on xbox”. I don’t have a problem with rape in the second and third examples, but to use the word rape to describe non-consensual sex really bothers me for some reason. The word rape in this context is not empowering nor comforting and most certainly not funny. This four letter word presumes too much of itself to try and describe the experience of non-consensual sex, it’s too specific, and almost not specific enough at the same time. Rape conjures up images of violence and pain and discomfort, but that’s not always quite correct. More than anything else it seems to me that rape is a word for victims to make them feel like victims. Nobody enjoys feeling like a victim and it certainly isn’t helpful when you’re trying to recover from the experience.

I’d love to share this collection of memories, piece it back together into the form of something that makes any sort of sense, but I’ve been trying to sweep all the pieces into the same place and it’s not working. It’s too shattered, too scattered to try and reorganise and retell in a continuous form. One second, it’s the first time, I’m fifteen, blind drunk and too exhausted to fight. The next I’m nineteen, it’s the last time, I’m stone cold sober and quiet, waiting for it to be over because I know it is the last time and if I do anything now it will compromise all my carefully laid plans. There’s pieces of everything else in between all mixed up together and I can’t work out where they all belong. It doesn’t hurt my head to try like it does with other memories, it just frustrates me endlessly.

I suppose the only really important piece of the puzzle, when it comes down to it, is why? Why did I let it happen? As bizarre as it sounds, I suppose despite everything I really don’t like resorting to violence. He was not an intimidating man, despite the age and height advantage he was skinny, weak and pathetic and under other circumstances I proved beyond doubt that I could physically overpower him, but I didn’t enjoy doing so. It’s a horrible contradiction in itself, no matter how much he hurt me I still didn’t really want to hurt him, at the start it was because I liked him, then as time went on he became contemptible and not really worth my time. Of course, I despise the man now and would gladly kill him with my bare hands given half a chance, but strangely not because of this. I’ve always been pretty emotionally disconnected from my physical form. Things that happen to my mind don’t generally happen to my body, and vice versa, and ultimately it is my mind that I care about. I hate him for what he did to my mind, and what he tried to do to it. As with everything, my body was just another casualty, collateral damage I suppose. It endures and it heals.

Every so often my mind and my body do work in synch with each other though, and on those rare occasions, well, it’s certainly something.