An Ode to the Man Who Brought Me Back to Life. And to Myself.
By: Marie Patlán
Tags: Metoo

“So kiss me now, this whiskey on my breath. Feel the lives that I have taken, what little soul that I have left. And oh, my God, I’ll take you to the grave. The only love I’ve ever known, the only soul I ever saved. And I went home, chasing twisters in the canyon. My cathedral is the badlands. Dust and devils on my conscience. Come back to me, darling.” — Delta Rae, “Chasing Twisters” “And when that next storm comes, I’ll do what I’ve always done. I get my hands dirty. I show up so early. They show me no mercy, so I just keep working. Maybe God could save me, or my boss might pay me. Am I so unworthy, or are their hands just dirty?” — Delta Rae, “Hands Dirty”

This is not a love story.

I was twenty-one the first time I got assaulted by a man I thought I trusted. We were fairly newly dating, attending different colleges. He invited himself to visit me on my ex-boyfriend’s birthday weekend — a mess in itself, but that’s an entirely different story. I was sad, and I was questioning getting into a new relationship so quickly after ending one. I didn’t really want to see him. I wanted space. But he came up anyway, and got a hotel room, and I opted to stay off-campus with him rather than in my on-campus apartment. I told him I didn’t want to have sex that weekend. I wanted to find answers to my questions, and I didn’t know if he had those answers. But he was insistent. He pinned me down. He humped his body against mine until he was finished. And then he went on with the night like nothing had happened.

That was the first time I felt dispensable. Used. Empty. Before that night, sex had been loving and intimate each time I participated. He may not have been a violent person, but he scarred me for many years to come.

After that, I stayed celibate for over two years. I didn’t trust anyone. I stopped letting people touch me unless they really knew me. I became known as the girl who hated hugs, as the one who didn’t want to be touched. I changed. I adapted to a world that hated women, that used them as objects rather than treated them as people.

Then I met my husband. But this is not a love story.

From the beginning, I felt like I was the only one of us interested in a physical relationship. Even when things were new, I had to convince him to have sex with me. He was rarely interested, and I can probably count on one hand the times he initiated in the six years we were together. This was a different feeling than my short-lived relationship with my first assaulter; it was a kind of pseudo power, a trip I constantly took where I thought I could make my husband want me.

But he didn’t. He never wanted me. And I wish, for his own sake, that he has found a way to reconcile this trait in himself with his own beliefs and self-worth.

After I asked for the divorce, I felt desired for the first time. I had a couple ill-fated flings, a friends-with-benefits or two. Nothing stuck because I had coated myself in rubber; everything bounced off. I wanted nothing to do with a relationship, because the one I had just gotten out of had ended so poorly. I thought I might be ready someday, that I might be able to find my own worth along the way, and then I’d have enough to give to another person.

But this is not a love story.

I was thirty the second time I got assaulted by a man I thought I trusted. We weren’t dating. We had known each other for less than a week. He worked for the same company I did, so I inherently trusted him. We met at a week long training for work.

He put something in my drink.

I didn’t fight him off.

So therefore, I am not to be believed. He gets the benefit of the doubt because he has a dick and some balls.

I kept this secret, holding it inside me for eighteen months before I felt ready to cope with it. Some trusted friends knew, people I told along the way as a way of understanding who I am as a person. Why I’m guarded. Why I’m angry. Why I would rather be seen as a bro than a sex object. But after eighteen months, after finding inner strength I never knew I had, I thought I was ready.

I was thirty-one when I was betrayed by a man I thought I trusted.

There are ways to handle the reporting of sexual assault. Telling our supervisor behind my back isn’t one of those ways, but that’s what he did. It was the first time I cried at my desk at work. It was the first time I talked about my sex life with candor in a closed-door meeting with my boss. It was the first time I had to relive that night in excruciating detail in eighteen months. Over. And over. And over. And I was told the same thing I had known from the beginning.

I had a drink. I didn’t fight him off. No one would believe me.

Darkness closed in.

My anger grew. It was anger like I’d never known before. Anger at a person. Anger at a system. Anger at a gender. And I sat with it. I brooded over it. I coped with it the only way I knew how.

I started talking. And now I’ll never shut up.

I had long ago stopped looking for a partner, because I didn’t believe one existed. Trust was hard, if not impossible, to come by. But there were some steadying forces in the midst of all the noise. I made some excellent friends along the way. My girlfriends will always be irreplaceable as they rage against a misogynistic machine alongside me. But men showed up too, men I hope will forever be in my corner. One in particular stands out. This is a story about me, but it’s about him too.

He doesn’t like sad stories. He told me that on one of the first occasions I had an actual conversation with him. He likes to bury his head in the sand. But I was talking at this point, and even though he didn’t want to, he listened.

He wasn’t there when I was assaulted. He wasn’t there when I was betrayed. But he was there when I confronted my betrayer. He was quiet, and steady, and he never tried to save me. He listened. He offered no advice, and he never tried to fix it. He believed me. He stood next to me. He never changed how he treated me, and he never believed I would break.

And then I asked him to help me in a way no one should be asked to help, and he never hesitated. “If it will help you,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

The darkness started to lift. The anger started to subside. The bars on the cage I had been stuck in for years began to break open.

This is not a love story. But maybe it is, a little bit. Because for the first time in my whole life, I am beginning to love myself.

He didn’t do that. I did that. But in his reliable, steady way, he showed me that I was worth knowing. That asking for what I wanted and needed was as easy as saying the words out loud. That you can love a person platonically, that you can want them in your life forever, without making something into a doomed love story.

That crying didn’t make a person weak.

That dreams could be as big as you wanted them to be.

That love was worth waiting for.

So maybe this is a little bit of a love story, but not in the way you might think. I love the strength I’ve found in myself. I love the career I have built. And I love the people I have chosen to keep around me, the ones I’ve let into the fold, the ones who don’t blink when I tell them how damaged I am and how I’m truly trying to fix it.

The ones I’d go to the end of the earth for.

Maybe this is a little bit of a love story. But in the end, I’m my own first love.