How to kill your rapist

The four years I was at the University of Colorado Boulder (2019-2023) cannot be described as anything short of hellish. This is a full recount of what I remember from my rape. This is the first and probably only time I will ever write this down, it is the details I have never had the courage to share. Proceed with all of this in mind and do not continue reading if it will be too overwhelming. I understand that hearing other people’s accounts can be helpful or harmful depending on the person and stage of their recovery. 

My experience is common. If you or someone you know was raped on a college campus, this story is already familiar. This is the type of story that is swept under the rug and denied. The type of assault men tell you you asked for, the type that others will say ‘doesn’t count’. This story is one shared by millions of women, men, and children across the world who all equally deserve justice, but will never get it. At times, we must make justice for ourselves, rage together and change the dialogue so someday, rape is not an expected and accepted part of society. For now, sharing is the best I can do.

This is how I kill my rapist.

*** 

Two months into my freshman year I am raped by a boy who waits for me to become so intoxicated, I can’t stand on my own. He grips my right arm to keep me from falling, has conversations with multiple people I know with me swaying in his grasp, ignores my slurring and stumbling and decides - this is a perfect time to instigate sex. 

I know for a fact if I ever said his name, he would say I wanted it; which is an insane claim to make considering my state of incapacitation. I don’t remember very much of the night, but I do remember needing to pee before he ubered us back to his off campus dorm room. The bathroom was so tiny, even me and my girlfriends who took the combination of partying and bathrooms as means to crowd in and gossip would never try to cram into the space two at a time. I wanted him to wait outside. He wouldn’t let me go alone - he didn’t want to ‘lose me’. I was too drunk to form any kind of real thought, but in that moment I knew something very wrong was happening.

I remember struggling to balance myself on the toilet with my knees shoved between his legs as he stood over me, needing to straddle my lap in order to shut the door behind him all the way. I wondered if anyone saw what was happening. After this, I don’t remember anything else about the party. Thank God I remember the bathroom. It is truly the only moment in my spotted memory that allowed me to believe I was, in fact, taken advantage of - that he knew what he was doing to me. 

All I remember from the Uber was his hand around my arm. We both sat by the windows with the middle seat empty. Across this void of contact he kept his grip tight around my bicep. The world was spinning. He didn’t hold me and I am certain he didn’t talk to me. I had lost my virginity only two weeks prior to a boy who lied to me and ghosted me after. I didn’t have any baseline for how these things should go. The women around me were not being treated any better than I was. No one - not the Uber driver, the hundreds of people at the party, my friends, or any of the RA’s at his dorm stepped in to help me escape what horrors I was barreling towards. I didn’t even know to be scared. 

I have flashes of the button board of the elevator. One of the most disturbing parts of the whole night was how unaffectionate he was. Whenever there was space to cuddle up to me, talk to me, smile at me, tell me I was beautiful - he did nothing. He stood beside me as you would a total stranger. He never spoke the whole way home. I don’t remember what his voice sounds like. 

When we got to his room, I remember being shoved down to the floor by my shoulders and being told something crass I will not be explicit about here. The lights stayed off. I don’t remember getting on the bed. Dorm beds are lifted quite high off the ground, he must have had a stool or something for me to stand on because there was no way for me in that state to hoist myself up there. I remember very little of the rape itself. I suspect half because of the alcohol and half because my brain does not want me to remember. It was so dark. He pushed so hard on my chest I had a painful bruise around my collarbone for two weeks. Though I don’t remember the sources, the next time I had sex consensually, I couldn’t stand being touched in certain ways. 

At some point it ended. At some point I got dressed. He stayed in his room while I got lost in the hallways trying to find a bathroom. It took me so long to find one I ended up getting a terrible UTI. The admittance of that would be how my mom discovered I was sexually active. 

This next part I remember crystal clear. I am somehow fully dressed, I am standing, he is lying still in his underwear on his bed. He doesn’t smile at me. He sticks his thumb in my mouth. There are attempts to arouse him again. He still doesn’t smile. I am standing alone with my winter coat and boots on. I think I’m half waiting for him to get up and walk me out, but instead I'm swallowing dirt from his unwashed hands. He continues to not smile. He stares into my eyes with a blankness that could make me cry. Many women describe men's eyes going black before they do something terrible. His eyes were so blue. I hate men with his eyes. After a long awkward few moments, it becomes clear to me I am leaving on my own. I don’t remember walking out of the room, but I know he never stood up. 

The next thing I know I am standing under the fluorescent lights at the gas station across the street. It’s so late. Snow is starting to stick on the ground. The cold shocks me into sobriety and I am left to think about what just happened. I look at my texts. Earlier, my roommate had texted me asking if I was okay, my response was a jumble of misspelled words and ramblings. Apparently that was okay enough. In the following months, she will use screenshots of these texts to make fun of how drunk I was to my friends on more than one occasion. This will contribute hugely to me staying silent. 

I grew up in California near the water. The sky is dark. It has stars and it rains. The trees are tall and there’s animals everywhere. Colorado is full of mountains and golden fields, but it is also filled with concrete. It had snowed only once before that night. In front of me was a world simulated by strip malls and new apartment complexes. The trees had been stripped of their leaves, not a single car came or went. The boulevard beside the dorm I stood before was wide and obstructive to the landscape. The streetlights changed pointlessly for no one. The breath that left my lips and the few snowflakes falling directionless from the windless sky were all that moved. 

When it snows at night in Colorado, the sky is gray. You can make out the world around you much more than a regular night and the world was laid bare to me in total emptiness. I was completely alone. I can’t explain how it felt to have something so awful happen in a place so liminal, but I think in many ways, I didn’t leave that gas station until I left Colorado for good. 

I had to wait a long time for the Uber. I can’t remember if the driver was a man or a woman, but they asked me something about why I was out by myself so late. We had a jovial conversation the whole way home. I am very good at small talk. Already I felt myself pushing down the tears. I’d deal with myself alone.

When I walked back into my dorm building, it must have been three or four in the morning. I wanted to go to sleep so badly. When I rounded the corner of my hallway, I could hear people, and to my dismay it was in my own room. People were still over. When I opened the door, the boys and girls in my room clapped and cheered for me. I was so confused. They asked me ‘how it was’ and ‘if I wanted to hook up with him again’. I said it was bad. ‘Oh, was his dick small?’ 

I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t say yes. All of you let him take me. Why did you let him take me? Do you think I was asking for it? Would you testify against me in court? I can’t report this. I can’t say anything. Maybe this isn’t what rape is. Maybe I was asking for it. I shouldn’t have drank so much anyways… 

I answered questions with the regular cadence I’d use in any other conversation. I was panicking inside. I was rambling. No one questioned anything. The next day one of the girls got upset that I answered a boy when he asked if I thought life meant anything. It was a stupid thing to get upset about. I was spinning. I wanted them to get out of my room. I hated these people. I wanted to die. 

I’d like to say this is a story with a happy ending, but I would be lying. Instead of speaking up, I would gaslight myself into silence. For the next year, I would suffer alone. I would be bullied by someone I thought was a friend, abused by a boyfriend that wasn’t even mine, called a burden on more than one occasion, and become crippled by anxiety so strong I wouldn’t sleep for days in a row. 

It wouldn’t be until my first pap smear my sophomore year winter break that I’d tell my sister. Not until my first vaginal ultrasound in May of that same year did I tell my mom and dad. Not until my junior year fall did I start sharing art and writing about it with my small printmaking class. Not until I left Boulder, would I go out in public without fear of seeing my rapist and would spend the next four years indoors. I would come to know agony that pushed me so close to suicide, I am shocked I never tried.

I would meet my now fiancé, Aiden, and come to know unconditional love and patience few people in this world will ever experience. I know for a fact that had I not met him, I would not have finished college - not just at Boulder, but anywhere. Much of the strength I needed to get through those times came entirely from him, not from myself.  

Even after I started speaking, people around me continued to go to bars where they knew he’d be. There was never a night where staying in on my behalf happened. I would spend two days cooking to make large dinners for all of my friends in order to see them. People complained about how much time I spent with Aiden. On more than one occasion I was called a bad friend. People were uncomfortable by my mental illness and anger and cowered at the sight of my pain. 

I met my best friends in Boulder. The ones I cherish speak to me about these things often and with complete honesty. They know how I feel about the whole experience and truly hear and see me, no matter how it looks or sounds. Of course, not everyone is so kind. Some of the people in my closest proximity who saw the most naked of my struggles were the most cruel. I do not speak to these people anymore. I doubt any of them are confused as to why. 

I was never allowed to be angry - not really. People were not angry for me, not truly. Had they been, they would not have spent every opportunity partying five feet away from him and reporting back to me how weird and disgusting he was. Had they truly been angry about what he did they wouldn’t have been able to stand being around him. This truth has made me very emotionally closed off. It is much harder for me to be vulnerable in any meaningful way. There has only been one other night in my life where I restated everything I’m writing here so candidly, alone with Aiden at my kitchen table after I’d had a couple drinks and was feeling chatty. 

It eats me how silent I’ve been. I’ve been talking about my assault for five years, and yet it’s only been half truth. I have kept hidden the aspects of my life that involved any other people for fear of hurting them. I know the people in my life I have kept close love me deeply and hate what I went through. There is only so long that I can make this work halfway in secret, because so much of the pain I have felt came from everything that happened afterwards, not from the event itself. 

Allowing rage for ourselves and even more importantly allowing rage for our peers, is instrumental in recovery. Asking women to cry instead of scream, to wish for peace instead of revenge, is wholly sexist and contributes to the success of the war against women indefinitely. We must be better for each other. Rape is ugly so it should come as no shock that the emotional impulses of its victims are ugly too. 

There are still days that I convince myself this has all been a lie, an elaborate act I’ve been playing out everyday for years in order to garner attention and self victimization. As if the six inch military grade blade I sleep with every night is just there for show. As if I wouldn’t castrate, kill, and carve my name into the skin of any man who tried to hurt me this way again. As if I will ever trust or respect men and women who think anger about injustice is not an instrumental part of justice itself. As if I will ever return to Boulder again and not be made sick by the overwhelming memories of my young adulthood. 

This summer was the first time I ever seriously thought about having children. In that process, I have asked myself: what if the world takes from my child the things that it took from me, could I handle that possibility and support them through it? I want that answer to be yes one day, but how can it be if I’m not being fully honest with the artwork I make to support other survivors now? I don’t want to live at that gas station anymore and I don’t want fear to control how I speak about things that were done to me. Things I never asked for. If I plan to make space for other people’s rage, I must make space for my own. This, I know without question. 

*** 

I am writing this on September 18, 2024 - halfway in a coffee shop and halfway in the bed of my apartment. As I wrap up my thoughts and have these words on digital paper still unread by any other eyes, I already feel a weight lifted that I’ve been carrying daily for years. I hope in the alternate reality where 18 year old me is still stuck frozen in the snow, she walks home and goes to sleep. I hope there’s no people in her room. That someone asks her if she’s okay and she says no and breaks down crying. I hope she gets a rape kit that actually gets tested and she wins a court case. I hope she says his name. I hope his mother hates him forever and his friends never speak to him again. I hope she goes back up into his dorm room and slits his throat and gets away with murder because, hey, he asked for it. I hope she can bend time and knows me already, reads this, and is happy peace is in sight. I hope she can see the end before the worst begins and it guides her with a helping hand. I hope I see her again soon doing something totally different, making art about her favorite dogs or something meaningless and stupid because now, it’s really over, and she can be whoever she wants to be.