She stares at the television with unblinking eyes. Its light bounces off the bleak walls and forms eerie shadows , the figures dancing around her mockingly. A lone tear trickles down her face slowly, carrying the weight of the sorrows she’s been through. She feels dirty, used, betrayed.
An unknown force pushes her towards the bathroom and she gently places her body into the porcelain tub. Water gradually fills it as she starts scrubbing herself lazily. Her skin is marred with blisters from all the times she scrubbed too hard, trying to rid her skin of the disgusting feeling that made her insides crawl. She scoured and rubbed until her skin turned a blushing pink from the blood that threatened to seep put. She'd found out long ago, that no matter how many times she washed herself, or how long she lay soaked in this tub; that feeling just refused to go away. She does it anyway, because it's the only constant in her dynamic life.
She sighs deeply and thinks back to the time this had all begun. It had started out as a small, innocent touch here and there, a mere hug wh en no one was around, but it soon progressed to become so much more. She had been a happy-go-lucky girl of ten, always smiling, oblivious to what went on in the world around her. She had seen nothing wrong in these moments of contact; in fact, she thought of them as completely normal.
What a stupid girl she had been.
Two years passed, and she came to understand what those touches really meant. An extroverted, chattering child became a closed off, sullen one. She was like a fraying piece of cloth; slowly coming undone, thread by thread.
The clink of coins in his pants, announcing his arrival, would send a shiver of fear running down her spine. Even as she lay, pretending to be asleep next to her unknowing friend, he would torture her with his sickening touch.
When she heard his incoming footsteps, she would lock herself in the bathroom, back against the door, knees against her chest, hoping, praying fervently that he would leave. His hands touched her anywhere and everywhere; in the pool, on vacation, next to his sleeping daughter. He was relentless.
And she let him.
She let him to take away her dignity, allowed him to pick at her sanity because she was afraid. Terrified, that if she told anyone, they would see an impure, broken soul in the shell of a human being she was.
But she couldn't hold it in anymore. Like coal under high pressure, forming small cracks that led to bigger ones, finally one day, she broke.
Sobs had wrecked her body as she tried to tell her parents of the agony she was going through. Her mother had pulled her into a tight hug, stroking her hair, and whispering sweet nothings into her ear. Her father, he was furious, his face painted with a thousand different emotions in a split second, but for the sake of his only daughter, he kept it all under wraps. They told her that it would be okay, assured her that it was not her fault, peppered her face with kisses until her heaving sobs had died down to occasional hiccups.
Fast forward a few years, and she does not resent what happened. Don't be mistaken - she has not forgiven or forgotten, but she has learned to accept that it is a part of her. From time to time she wonders what she would have been like if 'it' had not occurred. Would she have more confidence in herself? Would she be more comfortable in her own skin? She brushes those thoughts aside, because they do not matter. Her struggles do not define her, but they have shaped her into what she is today. The coal that was put under high pressure has now emerged to become a beautiful, shining diamond.