Welcome to my Shattered Dreams site. This is only one story of what happened to me. The other is one I have written out & told to certain people but don't want be read by others right now. Some times it doesn't feel as if it happened to me but it did. This is a shattered dream.

It was December 1995, the last month of fall term, my second year at a private women college. I'd made many friends during my year & half there as well as from the surrounding schools. A lot of the girls always brought their boyfriends over to visit. The guys I met & befriended were involved in theatre & musicals, as was I.

I'll call him ... Michael. He was the boyfriend of this girl who lived on my floor where I was a first year community advisor. She & I occassionally talked about this & that so I knew her somewhat. He was someone I'd met during a musical I was singing in. Charming, handsome, good manners, catching voice ... A southern gentleman who could make friends very easily, almost too easily. They came to my room one night a couple of weeks before finals to chat a bit. There was nothing to signal that what happened later was to come. She said that she was going back to her room for a while to make a call to someone. She asked that since I knew him a little if it was alright for him to stay in my room, since dorm policy was to have a male escorted at all times. I'd buried the rape that happened to me at an earlier point in my life, but was still very edgy & uneasy being alone with a guy. Yet I heard myself say that it was okay as long as she hurry back soon. As soon as the door closed behind her, I instantly jumped up to open it a little, wishing I'd told her to leave it open before she left. As I got to my feet, Michael got to his & asked if I was ok. I said yeah & that I was going to open the door a little so she didn't have to knock to come in. He put his hand on my arm & said that I didn't have to open it just yet, he wanted to talk to me without distraction. Nervous, I started stepping around him, saying that even with an open door I wouldn't be distracted. That was when we started dancing around each other, me wanting to get to the door & he not letting me past him. Finally a few minutes later he got very impatient & put both hands on my upper arms to hold me. At this point my brain stops remembering actual words but not the actions. So all I'll tell is what happened.

He grabbed me & started leading me to my lower bed under the loftbed I had. I tried fighting back, talking, pleading, anything to make him stop before he went any further. He took his belt & tied my hands above my head. I was so panicked, caught up in a past rape, that it never occurred to me to start screaming. It wouldn't have mattered since he grabbed my throat, squeezed really hard until my throat was bruised & hurting, then said that I better not even think about yelling 'caouse no one would hear me. He shoved my sweater up over my head to my arms, then did the same with my bra. I closed my eyes & hid my head in my arm as he started roughly touching my body, withdrawing as deep into myself as I could. He removed my pants & underwear, then started forcing his fingers inside of me. He took off his pants then raped me. I can still remember the feel of him forcing, pushing inside me harder & harder. When he was through, he fixed himself neatly then untied & redressed me, patted me on my head & walked down the hall to where his girlfriend's room was. The act took only 15 minutes. It felt like eternity.

I fell into the pattern of taking hot showers very often, dressing drably so not to be noticed by guys, feeling as if I was to blame, that it was my fault I was raped a second time in a place where I thought I was safe. I entered a self-destructive state, where nothing mattered anymore. I refused to let this affect my grades especially so close to finals, though it was very hard at times.... Went home for Christmas break & managed to make it through somehow. Then it was back to school, back to the small room where my life was forcibly changed again. I found out I was pregnant mid-February. I got pregnant the first time I was raped but miscarried before I knew I was pregnant. This second time I knew what had to be done. So I had an abortion quietly. Then I found out at a later check-up that I had scarring on my uterus from the miscarriage & the abortion. This, coupled with the fact that my body's hormones may never let me carry to full term, brought me to an all-time low.

It was at this point that I was approached to do volunteer work at a rape home. Thinking it was the perfect irony, I started helping out there. As I started interacting with different women, my own healing started so very quietly. I stoppped blaming myself for the rapes, stopped faulting myself for not being strong enough to stop it from happening, stopped self-destructing & thinking about suicide... I stopped burying the pain, anger, frustration, confusion, everything and started dealing with it. I'm still dealing with it & I know I'll almost always be dealing with it.

It's been so long since I buried my rapes, trying so hard to pretend they never happened. That was my way of dealing with them. Until January, 1998, when I started searching on the internet for others who maybe could understand what had happened to me & maybe give me reasons why it'd happened to me twice. In March I met my fiancée, Stephen O'Haver, online. We talked on ICQ day & night. He had many female friends who had been raped & sexually assulted as children & adults. At that time he was a safe person I could talk to through the computer. Some one who could understand a little of what I was going through & offered to be there when I needed to not be strong. Over time we met, went out a few times & became close. He knew of some of my triggers & that I was afraid of the violence behind them. He was the first man outside of my family that I started to trust to touch me, to hold me a little longer than I wanted to be held. He is a person who loves touching the ones he's close to but he had to learn to go slow when touching me, letting me know that he wanted to hold one of my sensitive areas such as a wrist. He was so afraid of hurting me that I know I drove him crazy at first. As time went on, we started caring a little more deeply than before, getting more familiar & comfortable with each other. Before we knew it, we found ourselves in love. We tried denying it, saying that we didn't want to ruin a good friendship by getting involved in a relationship. He was still dealing with a previous relationship gone totally bad. I thought that I had too many problems for him to want to me romantically interested in me. Love & Time proved us both wrong.

To make a long story short, we've gotten married recently. My triggers & nightmares are virtually nonexsistent around him & his love. He'll grab my wrists occassionally in play but knows when to let go. He also gives me body massages, something I never thought I'd enjoy. It pains & angers him when he asks me about my rapes & the emotions come back with the telling. Stephen is truly a blessing & a miracle sent to me when I didn't know I needed him.

~*~quietsoul~*~ © 12/26/98

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