Somewhere down the road
It's been 10 months since it happened, and it's still a daily recurrence, maybe I'll get a week of not thinking about it if I'm lucky or sufficiently distracted.
Fair warning that this will be a recounting of my experience with sexual assault. It took me a while to call it what it was, "Sexual Assault." I spent a lot of time calling it a misunderstanding, overstepping, misreading. I don't feel more comfortable calling it sexual assault, that that's what it seems to be.
Someone I considered a friend, someone who I had been open to sexual sort of things online. We decided to meet up at a convention we were going to.
I was really excited, like I had planned attendance for the convention months in advance. I decided I was going to cancel my flight which would have dropped me in on day 2 of the convention. I wanted to be at the whole thing, I cancelled the flight and settled on driving up.
After a full shift at work, I drove 11 hours to the city the convention was in. I was pretty wiped, but running on fumes to hang out with friends. Well I met up with the one specific friend.
I was tired and wanted to get some sleep, I was barely keeping my eyes open. He said he was also pretty tired and wanted to find somewhere to sleep too, and he floated the idea of joining me. I said sure.
On the drive to the hotel, he asked if this was "Just sleep, or other stuff too?" I told him 'Just sleep.'
We got to the hotel, and went to the room, cuddled, I feel asleep.
I woke up to him kissing my neck and groping me.
I reciprocated, not thinking much of it in the moment. Well, the room we were sleeping in was a friend's room, my AirBnB wasn't ready for check-in yet. He came back, with a few of our other mutual friends, and was reasonably, faultlessly upset that there was no "Just sleep" in his bed.
It hit me what was happening by then. I cried and put my clothes on in front of everyone before leaving the room.
I spent the remainder of my time at the convention trying to make up for the breach of trust to the room owner.
On my drive home, over the course of 11 hours, I had time to fully process the situation. I got back late at night, I went to my roommate's room, she was getting ready for bed. I just asked her if I could talk about something.
I spent maybe twenty full minutes thinking, leaving her in silence, trying to figure out what to say. When I found the words I could only sob them into her chest. "I didn't want it."
Our mutual friend group, a week or so after the event, had been discussing it still as a framing of "They planned to do stuff in the room without permission." as if I had made that choice with them.
I talked about it, there were reassurances and sympathies, understandings and support, though they never made it feel any better. The friend who made advances on me in my sleep, against my wishes, was effectively exiled from our mutual spaces.
It's been 10 months since then, and it's all fresh in my mind, the way I was laying in the bed of the hotel room, the wall of the hotel room, the layout of it, the way my shirt laid on the armrest.
It sits in the recesses of my mind, coming out when something tangential is happening, something as simple as seeing my friends months later, the ones who were there to watch me getting dressed with tears running down my face.
In its company are doubts, worries that I was over-reacting, re-framing it to make myself the one to blame. "I should have just stuck with my flight, I shouldn't have drove up." or "Why do I keep thinking about it, talking about it, reliving it. Am I seeking attention? If I am why does it hurt so much."
I'm still trying to figure out how life looks after something like this.