I am reluctant to write about you raping me. It is the type of thing that puts people so very on edge, edge of their seats, clinging to the edge, need a drink to take the edge off kind of edge.

Before you raped me, I was vibrant in the worst kind of way. I moved like I was a dancer and danced like I was terrible in bed. But I was not a walking contradiction because to say that would be cliche and I was no cliche.

It's true that most of the time I was being watched, like I was this little vibrant spec in the middle of a sea of black umbrellas and suits. A vibrant spec that was undeniably watched. If you were watching something special, something that rose to the top in a bubble, then you might have been watching me. I wonder now if you chose me for this reason.

Those days, I had a smell so very few ever forgot although they never even really knew it. I would try and leave my scent wherever I went, my bakery-sweet sweat to linger in white cotton curtains that blew in gusts, or silk tablecloths spoiled with red wine, or sheets - dirty with sex juice. It was a scent that reminded people of the worst kind of girl, one who lies and cheats and has found the perfect rhythm and swing of her gait because she's figured out the power of her own hips. My scent would collect people like a flies to sticky paper. I would leave them in my wake. That is how it was with me, then.

In time they would all get over it, like a death or a birth or all those things that happen in between, but every so often a gust of wind would pass, or a fork would drop to the floor, and it would somehow stir up a memory of me that they thought was settled. An atom of me, a fraction of a drop of my sweet sweat would soar in suddenly and cling to one hair right inside of their nose. And it would be enough to make them blow up, it would be enough to make them throw up, it would be enough to make them get up and leave. It would be enough to make them stay and keep sniffing around for more.

That was all I was then. A vibrant spec with no purpose. People were consumed by thoughts of me for no reason that I could ever understand. Maybe it was the way my eyes always burned brighter than others because I had just been crying, or the way my lips swelled up because I had been biting them earlier in a fit of my usual nerves. I would like to say that people did not know these things about me, but I think they did, and I think thats why they were drawn to me. They wanted to swoop down to me like a real life angel and heal the pretty and delicate girl that I was. They wanted to change me, to reset me, like an out of place bone that only needs the most expert hands to jostle it back into it's socket.

I so wish this is where we could leave me, just a vibrant sweetly-scented and sad spec, but things just got so much worse. I was in my twenties where things got messy because I was drunk all of the time. I believed in nothing and to some degree felt slighted or wronged, for no reason that I could even nail down. And when the panic attacks hit, I would get so low and depressed. I would scream at my father and blame his genes, because I know he had two sisters who killed themselves as teens and an uncle who was terrified of leaving his house. And I would scream at my mother, too, because on her side there was liver failure and drunken tears.

When the attacks for really bad, I was afraid to leave my house. I wouldn't shower for days and I didn't have the strength to brush my teeth because I was drunk and having these attacks all of the time. I was so lonely but was always too weak to pick up the phone mostly and much too sick to remove myself from the apartment ever. The accessories to being sick were totally embarrassing, too. The debris, the fallout, the moods and the desires. Daily, I would get such bouts of panic that I would puke into a waste paper basket that was permanently stationed below to my bed, next to balled up tissues I collected from crying . I chain-smoked and usually had a death rattle cough that was enough to drive anyone away. Never mind the smell of my greasy hair or the take out food containers that were strewn everywhere, my bed stacked of wing-eared books, and magazines, and my laptop at the edge, humming with guilt. I was usually lying in fetal position under my dirt and whiskey-stained down comforter, tearing up because I was always just that near the edge. I wasn't even a vibrant spec anymore. I was a particle of dust. Somehow a story was spun, and my life was undone. This is what I need you to understand, that you were not responsible for fucking up my life. It was

I remember exactly what I did after it happened. I stood up out of bed, and taking on the voice of a man reciting figures in a business meeting for some important accounting firm, calmly asked you to leave. I wasn't afraid, because in my head I was mentally fingering the off-side of a blade in my kitchen, or the scored button of the can of mace I had stashed under my bed. And it was odd to me, the way you spoke so coolly. You asked me if you could stay until your 'homies' got there, and I told you no, that you could not stay, and that was that. I played the game with you, and I was good. Of course, you had no idea then that you would spend the rest of your life in jail, or how short the rest of your life would be.

While you gathered up all of your street-stained shit and headed for my door, I stayed in bed frozen, except for my lips which were smacking and sticking together nervously like Marzipan. The heat was violent, and a pool of sweat had formed inside of my bellybutton.

Sitting in that damp heat that flooded my crappy studio-apartment, I focused not on what you had just done to me but on the mess that was my life. You were still making your way out - you walked so slowly, stepping over bodies, which were everywhere. Drunk, pathetic bodies passed out on my floor. Bodies that would not wake, even while you were raping me, and you must have been grunting. 'Pale Blue Eyes'' was on repeat, and TV light and murky ice cream spoons polluted the room.

When I finally heard the rickety slam of you closing my front door behind you, I calmly pulled my hair into a knot and stood up out of bed. My first thought was to locate my dogs, and I remember finding them huddled together in the closet, eyes squeezed shut as if something had happened to their mother that they didn't want to see. But they were there, and they were real and they were safe, so I was thankful.

Next, I walked into to the bathroom, where I peed and flicked the sleep out of my eyes. My ex-boyfriends boxers were still pulled down, exposing my underwear just a bit, and I left them that way. The lights were dim in there, and I closed the curtain carefully and checked my body for bruising or abrasions, using the glow of my cell phone to guide me.

After completing what was, to me, a satisfactory exam, I stumbled into the kitchen to find some paper and pen. I say stumbled not because I was terrified of you, but because my shit was everywhere, just the way I liked it. And when I finally found the back of some stupid crumbled-up receipt, I took a dog-chewed sharpie from the nearest drawer and made a list, like this:

1. Right upper quadrant of the torso: two dime-sized bruises forming, possibly fingerprints. New. 2. Left lateral scraping on the posterior of the right thigh. Possibly new. 3. Prominent bruising on the proximodistal axis of the right knee. Old - please disregard

See? You barely even left a mark. I still tell people, "If you've got to get raped, get it the way it happened to me". Not once did you threaten me with a well-used knife to the neck, nor did you inflict much pain onto my body at all. When it was over, you acted as if it was the end of a date: "I'll see you around", you told me. I was hardly conscious, anyway. My mind must've been protecting me by not allowing me to wake up, by putting me in a sort of "Sleep Paralysis". And I am so thankful for this. I constantly wonder how things would have been if I had been awake. Surely I would have tried to fight you off while you were inside of me, while you were so worked up. I could have been badly injured, or worse - dead.

Though the list largely ignored the most obvious areas of impact, I was weary of touching my insides. Your 'evidence' was in there, and I didn't want to screw with it. I was a prudent person, who was going to do all of the things any prudent person would do after something like this. I was going to collect evidence, to make lists like these and to gather my sheets into a securely fastened garbage bag. My clothing, I would keep on. I was told I was supposed to. See, at this point you probably thought I would be like the rest of your victims and keep quiet. You didn't know it yet, but I would soon ruin your life, and after that, it would be my fault that you were killed.

I remember being irritated that it was only 4:30 AM. Most people were sleeping soundly, or waking up to run off to their work at some factory. Lovers still in their "honeymoon phase" and were rousing each other for sex. I cursed you then for leaving me with all of this shit to deal with. I wanted to stay in bed lazily and throw my dogs bones. I wanted to stay in that apartment forever and never leave until I was carried out on a stretcher.

What happened next is probably not important to you. I'm sure you know the drill - you've done this before. I followed all of the procedures and guidelines that anyone in my situation is supposed to follow. You didn't expect that then, did you? The cops that picked me up were young and Italian and good looking, and when I made jokes about my rape, they politely laughed. I tell you this because I want you to know that you did not leave me completely broken like you wanted me to be. I told them that you must've been small down there, because it hardly even hurt. I enjoyed speaking of you this way. We stopped at Starbucks, and they paid for my Mocha.

It was interesting to see the anatomy of my insides blown up on a large screen. Because of you, I found out that my cervix was perfect, delicately curved in all of the right places and colored pink like a baby rosebud. My uterus was slightly longer than normal, which would make pregnancy easier on me in the future, and would reduce the risks of stretch-marks. The doctors that performed my exam also told me that if they could chose any victim's insides to showcase in a remake of any classical human anatomy book, mine would be it. I found out all of these things because of you, and I brag about them to this day. To think of what happened next still makes me angry and a bit sick to my stomach. The way that you involved my mother makes me want to bury you alive. This is the part of our story that is the most dark; rough around the edges and so very lonely and cold. It is the part of our story that I want to keep as far away from as possible.

It must've taken forty rings for my mom to answer, when I called her. She was six hours away in San Francisco, and it was still so early. When she finally picked up the phone, I assumed the voice of someone who was newly broken, because I thought that's what would be excepted of me. When I told her that you raped me, I could hear her face turn 'rice-paper' white, and any trace of sleep immediately slipped away from her. She said she would drive up right away, and she spoke of renting us a beautiful hotel room to stay in until all of this was "sorted out". You killed a part of my mother that day, and for this, I will never forgive you.

And my biggest fear then was what I was going to say to her and all of these good-intentioned people when they got there. I knew that they would want there to be tears, for me to well up right in front of them and beg for help. I dreaded the dead air and soothing of non-wrinkled pants on laps that. I dreaded the moment when I would finally clear my throat to speak. That moment would be the only invitation they all needed, and they would all whip their heads in my direction, simultaneously, as if this one sound just might be the start of a quivering retelling, the next sentence; a bomb dropping, my story; some shivery invitation to be rescued.

I had no idea how to be the girl I was last night, the girl I was before you raped me. A part of me died that morning, yeah. But it wasn't in the way that most people who are raped die.You did not kill some shiny and glad part of me and turn me into a victim. What you did to me was so detestable and horrible that it brought my life to the lowest level of low, and I finally had the ending to the most pathetic chapter of my life. You ended that book. You revitalized me. You saved me. You resurrected the vibrant spec that I used to be, and for that, I thank you.

Later I found out that you had gotten yourself killed. You were there on the street by my apartment for almost a full day before you were found, your brains spilling out of you and settling underneath your head like some sick sort of pillow.

Thinking back, you weren't even a mistake. If you were a mistake, I would obsess and would want to know more. I would want to know if there was pain when you were shot, and how it felt to be alone on the dirty streets of Hollywood with your insides pooled around you. I would want to know how it felt to be dying and alone, with all of your friends miles away, terrified of being sent back to where you all came from. If you were a mistake, if you raping me was a mistake, I might have stayed until someone came to take you away on a stretcher. I would've cared, would've wanted you to live, to stick around so I could find out why.

When I saw you there on the street, the police surrounding your body in the same numbers that maggots were beginning to, I didn't gawk. I didn't even register that it was really you until i looked away. And when I looked away and into the street full of crowded, moldy people, I didn't think to look back, to make sure it was really you. The thought of you drains me. Your death wasn't a bad accident, or a mistake. You were a hit and run. No milling around, no rubber-necking. You couldn't have been saved. I've closed the door and washed my hands of you. I've left you there, a bad accident and a mess, like you always were.

I thank you. I thank you for putting your disgusting penis inside of me. I thank you for giving me that extra push I needed to hit rock bottom. Without you, I would've never been able to climb back out of where I was at.