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Marianne Porter

Guest Posts, Sexual Assault/Rape

Five Things I Remember About Being Raped

March 6, 2016
rape

Trigger warning: This essay discusses rape.

By Marianne M. Porter

Memory #1: The Sound

At 1:15 in the morning, on a bitter cold February night, the sound of clunky boots pounding on the wooden steps that led to my door woke me from a peaceful sleep. Then I heard frantic knocking. Prior to the banging, I thought it may have been the guy I was dating, a casual relationship over the past month. I opened the door, but it was someone else, someone I had knows for about half a year, but I trusted him. He must have needed help.

I didn’t think about the possibility that soon I would need help. This guy and I hung out with mutual friends. He helped me find my studio apartment above his friend’s garage six months earlier. He was married, soon to be divorced. I could see he was drunk when he stepped into my room. He sat next to me on my makeshift couch, lowered his head and cried. He wanted to talk, said he felt lonely, said he missed his wife.

We talked for a few minutes about his impending divorce and as I consoled him with positive talk about his future, I wondered simultaneously how I would get him out of my place. My apartment was isolated from the house it was attached to, a lone room above a garage. In fact the downstairs homeowners were both alcoholics and one of them was on oxygen, a few months away from death. He was the kind of man who cheated on his wife with young girls while she was at work. I caught him once when I made a surprise visit to my place in the middle of the day. A girl with long blonde hair hurried out his front door to her car in the driveway, laughing and giggling at the man in the window. My landlord waved at me, oxygen prongs stuck in his nostrils, finger raised to his lips to indicate this was a secret between him and me. Continue Reading…