I don’t know how long it takes me to fall asleep, at least an hour. I don’t once reply to her whispering. I know she kept on whispering long after I fell asleep.

I read that some women have the revenge fantasy where the role of the victim and the perpetrator are reversed. Those stories make good movies and books, like The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. I really, really, wish I was one of them. Other women have the fantasy of forgiveness where the survivor imagines that she can transcend her rage and erase the impact of the trauma through a willed, defiant act of love. Those are usually the Christian women who wish to transcend their experiences, “but it is not possible to exorcise the trauma through either hatred or love,” Judith says.

I feel like a lazy trauma survivor. I never have the desire for either revenge or forgiveness. I mostly forget that he exists. Even after I have the nightmare it was relatively easy for me to reduce him to nothing in my mind. What happened with André was much more personal. I wanted to hurt him in cruel and unusual ways, for years. I wanted to tell his family and every girl he would ever date who he truly is and what he is capable of. I was in the process of writing him a very long and evil letter which I was going to send to him on Facebook when I was raped. Stranger raped.

I was against the death penalty before I was raped. I still believe that we don’t have the power to decide whether someone else should live or die. I wonder, if my rapist ever came up to me and confessed, would I want to kill him? If he was remorseful, would I forgive him?

I imagine myself, sitting in a park, reading. He walks up to me. Same leather jacket. Same sneakers, with mismatched shoelaces.

“I raped you.”

I look at him.

“I know.” Because he is part of me.

What do I see? Remorse?

No.

I see arrogance.

I see pride.

He smiles. Then he turns around and walks away. Because he is free. He is free to live his life.

And I sit there. And I am rape.

I now know that I am capable of killing someone in the heat of the moment. I would do it to survive. But, as for what comes after it, whether any of me would be left over, I’m not sure about that anymore.

Malini started a blog around the same time that I did. One of her first posts was on the commencement speech that JK Rowling had given at Harvard. It rang very true for me. In it Rowling said that “failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was…”

That’s how I feel about the rape. Not that it’s a failure, but that it’s removed all the parts of me that were unnecessary, all those parts that were there for show, all those parts that I used to put on display in order to make other people happy. I cut people out of my life who aren’t good for me, something that is hard for me to do and that has to be done without bitterness. I stop caring what other people think of me, not just saying that I don’t care but actually not caring. I stop needing to please other people. Rape uncovers my bare, essential self. She is deeper, darker, and a little bit twisted. And, for the first time in my life, I am fine with her. She is also clumsy, sarcastic, very, very weird and loves to laugh. She cries when she reads something beautiful and gets more excited about Christmas than most children. She will also love you with all of her heart, dream impossible dreams, tease you with a smile, dance all night to one song on repeat and lie next to you just to hear you breathe. She is rape. But she is not just rape.

JK Rowling also says, “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.”