Me Too: an "almost" story

I can't see his face. I can't hear his voice. But I can still feel his full weight against me. I can feel the terror as I realized he had my shorts down to my knees.

If you asked me to pick him out of a lineup, I’d fail.

If you had me cross-examined by a room full of old white men who are predisposed to not believing women – to not caring about the damage a wayward sense of entitlement to someone else’s body can do- I wouldn’t be able to produce the details they deem most pertinent. However, I still remember what his living room looked like. His bedroom. How I told him that Sign o’ the Times is my favorite Prince album.

The lack of other details wouldn’t make it any less true that my freshman year in college a guy I was dating tried to rape me.

“You should have told me you were a virgin,” he castigated me when I somehow – miraculously – got his solid frame off of me.  He sat sheepishly on a stool in the corner while I hugged by legs to my chest on the bed. “I wouldn’t have tried if you had told me you were a virgin.”

As if only virgins are permitted to say no.

“I don’t plan on having sex so if that is a problem just let me know.” We’d literally had that conversation the day before, sitting in front of his couch listening to Prince. “No problem,” he’d responded, “I like you.”

Even so, that next day as I prepared to get in his car, something felt off. I had a surge of not exactly panic but noticeable unease that I chalked up to paranoia and silliness.

I thought about that feeling during the long minutes of him moving seamlessly from the two of us watching television to his weight pressing down on me, my arms pinned under the mass of his body, his hands sliding my shorts down.

We weren’t even making out.

That wouldn’t excuse anything but it added to my bewilderment. I had commented on something on the screen and then I was saying “no, No, NO!”

Miracles happen.

Somehow I got him off of my 125 pound body. If I hadn’t…well… I was at his house far from campus with no car of my own, years before cellphones littered everyone’s pockets and in a sleepy neighborhood that probably wouldn’t have heard my screams.

It is that thought that chills me.

Months later, walking on campus, I ran into my almost rapist. He attended a neighboring university so I was surprised to see him. He waved and smiled and walked directly towards me, as if excited to see me.

“You tried to rape me,” I said to him as casual as his hello.

His smile faltered and his hand fell and then he walked on.

Love and Graduation

“Is he your son?”

L and I locked eyes for a moment and then we both shrugged slightly and replied, “yeah, sure.”

We don’t really look alike. He has reddish undertones and mine are decidedly yellow. He is slim and I am decidedly fuller figured. I suppose if you just looked at the shock of wild hair or our toothy grins you could assume we have blood ties; I don't mind the assumptions. Our similarities require more than a passing glance. To see them you need time around a dinner table as we talk food, time around a map as we daydream countries we’d like to visit, time around us lounging and discussing the world and history and our place in both. 

L graduated from university this weekend. It was the second graduation of his I was privy to. And as I sat in the drizzling rain, waiting anxiously for his name and face to cross the big screen (the stage version too far away and tiny to make him out clearly) I held my breath and felt my chest tighten with pride - who knew that is what love feels like.

At lunch, surrounded by his family (a brother, cousin, and another mentor) we all talked and laughed and ate. L facilitated our conversation- we were strangers and he was the nexus point we all converged on so he requested we all share three interesting things about ourselves. We answered…talked about ASL and bread making and children.  And L looked content. Sipping his drink, forking fettuccine alfredo into his mouth.

When I talk about L I always proclaim, “I love that boy.” And for the last six years that has been correct. That terminology fit. But now, graduation behind him and a future with a million different possibilities flowing before him like river tributaries, he is no longer a boy. He is a man. 

The love is still there. I love that young man.

I am proud of him. Proud of this man he is becoming. Proud of the challenges he has already faced, is facing with compassion and fortitude.  And I am curious about his future…hell, his present. Over graduation lunch he proclaimed he was not thinking about the future because he wants to enjoy the moment. And so I pause now. I pause in my projections of what his tomorrows will hold and focus instead on the him that is in this moment. The him that is still celebrating his massive accomplishment. The him that sits in the liminal space between school and future. The him that hugged me tight and didn’t shrink away when I told him I love him, that he is a piece of my heart.   

The glories of his tomorrows will come and I will bask in them when they arrive. But for now…for now I am thankful for the man  I met as a boy who lets me dote, and nag, and love on him because, as he once told me, “I know you do it because you care.” And I do.