The Day After

I feel like I can breathe. It’s all sort of quieted, which I knew would happen, but has allowed me to revel in this feeling of it being done. It’s out there, it’s finished. It’s funny — there’s a really disjunction right now. To everyone else, it is immediate — it was yesterday. I am someone who was broken, or traumatised, or needs healing. To me — it was a year ago. I’ve processed so much. I’ve done it! It’s almost a day of celebration — I was successful, I sorted it, and I’m beyond proud. Talking to Emma helped — because it was a year for her too so she got that something that has been crappy in the background was gone.

Now, I feel a bit like I’m sick. The enormity of what I have done has hit me like a ton of bricks. I keep thinking about tiny inaccuracies — March not April it turns out. I remember there was only blood on the sheets, not vomit — I said that there was vomit to his mum, and when I later told the story because I felt scared it was period blood. But then I didn’t know, was there vomit?

I’ve done something enormous with something so scary and fallible as my memories. What if there are things in those big black spaces I have no memory of that make it seem as if I could consent? Did I brush my teeth? I don’t know and I cannot remember. And that’s scary. Anything could have filled those gaps, anything could have been said to fill those gaps, and that terrifies me in my bones.

I keep clinging on to the concrete things. That I came back and cried. That I called Emma, I told her immediately after the fact that I thought I’d been assaulted. That Felix says (and said before I posted) that Robbie was eager to take me home that night, that I was not in a state to do anything. That I was covered in my own sick, I still had vomit in my hair. That I identified and talked about the ambiguities aggressively. That I have that clear, clear image of lying on a sofa, and my head rolling back and him saying suck it. That this cannot be okay, that I need to remember if anyone else told me this, what I would say to them. That yes memory is fallible. But I addressed this fallibility openly and honestly. I said what I don’t remember. And I only reported the facts. And yes, if you talk about something that happened over a year ago, there may well be inaccuracies of the March-April, vomit-blood variety. But that doesn’t change the substance. It doesn’t change the call I made to Emma immediately after it happened. It doesn’t change the veracity of my memories, the event that occurred, and the suffering I went through. It doesn’t change it.