Dear Zac,
I will never regret anything in my life more than meeting you.
And I keep asking myself if it was just an unlucky coincidence, if things would have turned out differently for me if I had chosen a different hostel, if in that case another girl would be writing this letter.
This is not a thank you. This is a declarance of war.
A war between women who have been raped and men who rape women. I will never hate anyone in my life more than I hate you.
You did not only take my consciousness on that evening and my right to say Yes or No, my dignity and my second virginity (that I NEVER intended to lose), you also gave me an STD that I will have for the rest of my life.
I tried to forget what happened (tried to forget something that I can't remember anyway), but then I had genital and anal herpes, and for a week I couldn't walk or go to the toilet. And forever, I realized, would I be reminded of you dirty prick every couple of months, everytime I travel for longer, everytime I have a new boyfriend, and when I'll have kids, there's the possibility that I pass it on to them. In that case, Zac, I will kill you, and I am not even joking.
You didn't ruin my life. I am way too strong for you to do that. But you awakened a new kind of anger in me, an anger not only towards you but also towards the world we live in - a world in that you get told to better not inform the police, as it wouldn't change a thing, because you have too little evidence and no country feels responsible to punish a crime that happenend outside its own borders.
Date rape drugs can only be found in your blood 24 hours after you took them. I spent these 24 hours on planes or at airports, travelling from one end of the world to the opposite in a state of agony and utter confusion, still trying to figure out what happened to me and who did it. Later I asked another guy who was there that night if he saw anything and he lied straight into my face that I had been the one who started things with you and went to your room first, which made me stop searching further because I was afraid of what I might find at the end. So: there's no evidence, no trustworthy witnesses. There is just me and a memory that was never really there and yet changed a whole lot of things in my life.
You took my vague could-be and probably-not fears that probably every woman has and turned them into something very concrete: into the knowledge that I already have been raped once and that it could happen anytime again. At the same time you took the knowledge of how it is to be raped by knocking me out. You left me with the urgent need to write and talk about something of which I don't know how it feels or tastes or sounds. How it FEELS. The image of how it must have looked drives me completely crazy. I can't get over it the least bit as long as I don't even know what actually happened.
It seems so unreal that you are back on Hawaii now, probably in a brilliant mood, surfing or sailing and pretending to be totally gay. And the girls around you have no idea and I can't warn them.
I just want you to know, Zac, that there's nothing worse to do to a person than rape them. Nothing.
You abuse their most intimate privacy zone, you literally get into them without their permission, and by that you take every feeling of the own body as a safe place, of being safe at all. And there's so many like you. I am so weak, so weak, facing this ENORMOUS, this BREATHTAKING injustice. Because of you I was researching on how to get a weapon license. And where to find a professional killer. In twenty years you, by law, won't be a criminal anymore, but I, in fact, will still be a raped woman. I can't believe that they track down EVERY SHITTY LITTLE CRACK DEALER and even Alice Schwarzer lying about her TAXES, and on the same planet, at the same time there's hundreds of thousands of men who DID THIS TO SOMEBODY and they run around living a normal life. I can't believe that there are places where rape is not even considered a crime. I can't believe that the country I live in was one of them until just 40 years ago. I want to shove your head up your arse and shoot you into thin air, into nothingness. You deserve nothing but disgust.
This letter can probably not be finished ever, as little as I will ever be finished with this. So I'll stop right here. By telling you that, if I ever finally know what to do to you and people like you, I will find you. I hate you.
Summer
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen