Four and a half months after, I tried to touch myself.
I hadn't been able to since the last time I had stuff to do with him. The few times I'd even thought about it, my body went rigid. The association between pleasure and pain was too strong.
But I was tired of him having control over every aspect of my sexuality. Tired of my body feeling like enemy territory.
So one night, alone in my room with my roommate gone for the weekend, I decided to try.
I started slowly.
Lay on my bed. Closed my eyes. Tried to relax.
My hands moved to my breasts, gentle, exploratory. Like I was rediscovering my own body. Learning it again for the first time.
It felt... okay. Not scary. Just neutral.
I let my hands drift lower. Over my stomach. My thighs. Taking my time. No rush.
When I finally touched myself—really touched myself, the way I used to before everything—I felt a flutter of something good. Something that felt like it belonged to me.
My breathing quickened. I let myself sink into the sensation.
And then I closed my eyes.
His face appeared immediately.
Not because I wanted it to. But because my brain had wired pleasure and him together so completely that I couldn't separate them.
I saw his smile. Heard his voice. Felt phantom hands that weren't mine.
Without thinking, I murmured his name.
Just a whisper. Barely audible. But it was there.
And the pleasure intensified for a moment—my body responding to the memory even as my mind recoiled.
Then another memory surfaced.
The force. The blood. The pain.
Remember what happened last time you let yourself feel this?
My body tensed. The pleasure died instantly, replaced by that familiar tightness in my chest.
I yanked my hand away like I'd been burned.
Sat up. Heart racing. Breath coming in short gasps.
I looked down at my hands—the same hands that had touched me gently, that had tried to give me pleasure—and felt betrayed by them.
Is this how I'm going to live? I thought. Scared to even touch myself? Scared of my own body?
The tears came then. Hot and frustrated and exhausted.
I wasn't crying about not being able to finish. I was crying because even this—even the most private, personal act of self-love—had been tainted by what he did to me.
He'd taken my virginity. My sense of safety. My ability to trust.
And now, apparently, he'd taken my ability to experience pleasure without fear.
I didn't try again that night.
Just curled up in bed and let myself feel the grief of it. The unfairness.
He's probably out there having sex with other girls, feeling good, experiencing pleasure like it's nothing. And I can't even touch myself without having a panic attack.
The next morning, my roommate came back.
"How was your weekend alone?" she asked.
"Fine," I lied. "Just studied."
She didn't need to know about my failed attempt at reclaiming my body. About how thoroughly broken I still was.
But later that week, I brought it up differently.
We were talking about some random topic when I said, casually: "Do you think people can ever fully heal from trauma? Like, actually get back to who they were before?"
She looked at me carefully. "I don't think you go back to who you were before. I think you become someone new. Someone who carries what happened but isn't defined by it."
"What if the trauma changed everything? What if you can't do normal things without it interfering?"
"Then you work through it. Slowly. Until those things become normal again. Or you find new normals."
New normals.
Maybe I didn't need to get back to the girl I was before. Maybe I just needed to become someone who could exist in this new reality without it destroying me.