The Stories I Don’t Tell
I’ve written eleven novels and dozens of essays. But my therapist encouraged me to write about the stories I don’t tell. After a year of her gentle nudging, I decided to leap. I approached this project as a writer and artist. I sought the right words, edited objectively, formatted with a creative eye, and posed for photos. I even planned a small release party at the encouragement of friends. I did all of this as a professional writer, and when I was finished, I was satisfied.
Until I wasn’t.
Until the writer in me retreated and the woman behind the writer realized what she’d done. I felt anger then. I feel it now. I’m furious that I wrote about my past because those memories belong to me. I’m territorial of them. They make me who I am, as yours do you. I don’t want anyone else to gauge the weight of them, to decide which are worthy of reflection. Of pain. I sit here now, writing this foreword to help myself understand my conflicting emotions — the pride of writing something of substance, with the overwhelming desire to delete every last word.
I want to say something profound about why I’m choosing to publish this despite those conflicting emotions. I want to tell you that it’s to connect with and perhaps offer solace and understanding to others. But the truth is, the only reason I’m clicking Publish is because I know I can later click Delete. I’m not brave. It’s just sometimes less scary to jump than it is to stand with your toes on the ledge.
To everyone with stories to tell.
These are mine. I hope one day you share your own.
BEFORE
If I’m being honest, darkness was my closest lover long before those two men let themselves into my bedroom and closed the door behind them.
My earliest memory of darkness was at age eight. My mom had ordered me never to touch the true crime book she was reading. At the first opportune moment, high with adolescent rebellion, I snuck that book into my lap and flipped through the text, ravenous for the passages that rattled my mother enough to issue a warning.
I found it.
Inside the pages, and under the cover of darkness, a man feigned a car breakdown on a quiet stretch of highway. When a woman tried to drive past him, he blocked her path with his body. The man raped the woman and then killed her. It’s a story told on repeat around the world, for as long as men have drawn breath. But the part that stuck with me was when he revisited her body, grunting between her legs, hours after her death.
I remember the nausea that swept through me. And also, the question: what was wrong with my mom that she would read something so heinous? I returned the book to her side table, careful to position it just as I’d found it, and backed away as if it were combustible. I lay awake that night, heart racing, hands clutching my worn pink bunny to my chest.
Four years later, a controversial movie was released. The title–Fear. It starred Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon, and every red-blooded American over the age of sixteen watched with horror, and horniness, as Wahlberg first seduced, and then stalked Witherspoon.
At school, the older kids spoke in whispers about the film, eyes wide with excitement. I asked my mom if I could see it one morning over breakfast. “Not a chance,” she said. “You’re too young.”
“I’m almost thirteen,” I countered.
“Exactly.”
My sister — flaunting the four years she had over me, along with the fact that she’d seen the movie — straightened over her cereal bowl. “Yeah, you can’t watch it. Listen to Mom.”
My mom pointed to my sister as if that settled things. But all my sister did was cement with certainty that I would watch that movie, one way or another. Three months later, when my sister and her friends rented it, I got my chance. I watched, mouth agape, as Wahlberg slipped his fingers between Witherspoon’s thighs on a rollercoaster. As he beat the shit out of her male friend in a jealous rage. As he carved her name into his chest with a blade. I swallowed hard and double-checked that no one was home when the twosome had sex — him, a confident, dominant man settling his weight over her trembling form, uncertainty written all over her face.
Without even realizing it, my brain etched the movie, and the messaging, to memory.
This is how love is supposed to look — obsessive, possessive, and toxic.
If you asked my psychologist, my darkness began not with a true crime novel, nor with Wahlberg pinning Witherspoon against a bathroom stall wall. Instead, she’d tell you it began with my father. But that’s what therapists do, yes? They go back to the beginning. They point out how your own father never seemed to like you. How, in fact, he seemed to resent you even though you mirrored everything he did — from your college, to your major, to your career.
“And why do you think you followed in his footsteps so closely?”
I look at my psychologist with a blank stare, knowing what she’s fishing for. “Because I was seeking his approval,” I reply like a good patient.
“Mmm.” She nods.
She asks about his personality. About what emotion I’d assign him.
“Anger,” I supply quickly. “And disappointment. He belittled my mother constantly. He disliked being bothered by his children’s needs. He was the life of the party when friends were over, but a dark cloud the moment they vanished.”
She pauses for a long moment before connecting the dots for me. “You learned that this is how men are supposed to behave. They are supposed to be angry.”
I flinch when she says this and turn my face away. She says anger, and now I feel that emotion like a dagger between the ribs, because she’s peeling me like an orange, my insides out in the open. My breathing grows shallow and my nails dig into my thighs beneath the table.
Anger is what draws me to a man. Anger and protectiveness — contradictory traits — and yet, in my mind it makes sense. How can a man protect me if he doesn’t have the capacity to lose his shit? This train of thought ultimately made the line between attraction and genuine fear razor-thin.
My penchant for dark-minded, volatile men is likely what drew me to my first serious boyfriend at the age of fourteen. A boy who, when I broke up with him eighteen months later, explained in great detail to anyone who would listen how he planned to kill me. Then, each night — in penance, or perhaps to scare me — he would leave flowers on my windowsill as I slept.
That same man still texts me to this day.
In the months following our breakup, I contracted Mononucleosis — the kissing disease — a mostly benign illness that inflicts patients with bone-deep fatigue for weeks on end. My mom took me to the doctor. I remember thinking about my ex-boyfriend as the nurse drew my blood. I was fifteen years old, and though I’d never had a problem with blood draws in the past, this time the room began to spin.
“She needs to lie down,” the nurse said, sounding somewhat frantic. She led me to a patient room and turned off the light before she left. I clenched my eyes shut as dizziness overtook me. When the door reopened, I assumed it was my mother.
I felt hands moving against my neck before I saw him. My eyes flashed open and fixed on the male doctor standing over me.
“Sit up,” he ordered, and I did, groaning. I tried to explain that I felt faint, but the words weren’t coming out right. A cold sweat broke out across my skin and the room spun even worse than before.
He continued feeling around my neck and collarbone. “Stand up.”
“I don’t know if I — ”
“Up,” he demanded.
And so I climbed to my feet, keeping a firm grip on the table because I felt like I was going to hit the floor.
“Pull your shorts down,” he said.
My eyes snapped to his face and my pulse quickened. My eyes searched the room, looking for a nurse. For my mom.
“Come on.” He rolled his wrist to indicate he didn’t have time to entertain hesitation.
I pulled my shorts down two inches as he sank onto a rolling chair in front of me, his head even with my chest.
“Farther,” he barked, and the thing I will always remember most about this moment was his frustration. As if it were me doing the wrong thing.
My heart shot-gunned in my chest as I pulled my shorts down even more. He motioned to keep going, and I did until my shorts were at my knees. He leaned forward and I looked anywhere but at him, wishing desperately that the nurse had left the lights on. In the dim glow of the cabinet lights, the doctor put both hands on my groin and began touching me, rubbing slow circles around my panty line, moving lower and lower down my groin.
I winced, and then, as his hands continued rubbing, I said in a near-whisper, “I think my mom was looking for me.”
He rubbed for a moment longer and then stood up. “All done,” he announced, his voice laced with annoyance. “Get dressed and come out.”
After that, I was moved into another patient room — one that held both my mom and proper lighting. A brief, traditional exam was done, one where the doctor smiled, reassured my mother, and then showed us to the front.
On the way home, I told my mom what happened during the initial exam.
Her response: “Don’t tell your father.”
It was another fifteen years before I sought reassurance from a doctor-friend that my “examination” was both unwarranted and indefensible.
After my breakup and doctor visit, and amidst the emotional rejection from my father, something in me shifted. I began relationships with boys — and later, men — with the sole agenda of hurting them. I did it purposely and without remorse. I would tell them whatever they wanted to hear to win their affection, and the moment I held their heart in my hand, I would swiftly close my fingers around it and squeeze. I’d watch the pain flicker across their faces with detached curiosity. Their anguish filled me up. Allowed me to breathe again. Reminded me who held the power.
During this same period, I put a blade to my skin for the first time. And later, two fingers down my throat. And so I was ripe for the taking — thin, with clean lines cut across my forearm when I met him. The man who would be my first.
I was eighteen, and he was a landscaper.
A landscaper and a drug dealer.
Justin was tall and rugged, with cerulean eyes set against sun-kissed skin. He was so attractive that my friends nicknamed him God. He did have a certain deity-like quality with his square shoulders, steadfast confidence, and complete disregard for both authority and fear. He was slow to speak but — just like my father — he craved confrontation. As if all day, in his quiet discontented scowl, he silently prayed for someone, anyone, to try him.
I’d provide him with that release soon enough.
Our relationship went the way all toxic relationships go — a slow ballad of infatuation and love, followed by a chaotic spiral into codependency. There are three moments I remember most with Justin.
The first — him on top of me, fully clothed, his hands in my hair.
“Justin,” I whispered, my heart pounding in my throat. He raised his head to search my face, a question hanging between that furrowed brow. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
I remember the weight of his head as it fell to my shoulder. The ragged breath he pulled in and then released, as if resisting the emotions coursing through his body. “I am in love with you, Tori,” he confessed against my neck.
The second moment was shortly after high school graduation, when I told him to find a quiet place we could go, my intentions clear. He pulled his old Ford truck into a desolate field and threw it in park. He was gentle as he undressed me, as he positioned himself between my legs and murmured again and again, “Are you sure?”
I nodded and pulled him to me, closed my eyes, and prepared for pain that never came.
At the end of summer, I moved to College Station to attend Texas A&M University. Justin followed me mere weeks later, our love stumbling, punch-drunk, into obsession. There, during my first footing into adulthood, with my parents two hundred miles away, his gentle kisses morphed into demands about where I’d been, who I’d been with. I responded in turn, stoking the flames of his jealousy, drinking it in — the sweetest nectar.
After all, this was what real love looked like.
A few months later, I met someone on campus. A guy who cared little about Justin’s temper, though I tried to warn him. He was relentless in a way that made him the perfect kindling to ignite my tumultuous relationship. And so, one night at a party, my roommate and I went out on the balcony. Within seconds, the undeterred guy followed after me into the chilly night air.
“You’re driving me crazy,” he muttered, rattling his Jack and Coke, his ravenous eyes raking up and down my body.
My roommate glanced back and forth between us. “Her boyfriend’s going to kill you,” she said, shaking her head.
He only smiled and shrugged.
Moments later, I walked inside and Justin was on me in an instant. “What did he say to you?” he seethed, omniscient in his territorialism. I held his stare but didn’t respond. He brought his face inches from mine, his upper lip curled in paper-thin restraint. “Give me one good reason not to go out there and beat the shit out of him.”
“Because I’m asking you not to,” I said evenly.
“Not good enough,” he spit out, and marched toward the balcony.
He gave no warning.
He never did.
He grabbed the guy and his fist flew, knuckles meeting cheekbone. He hit him repeatedly as I calmly grabbed my purse and headed toward the front door, my roommate at my side. I looked back and saw three guys hauling Justin off their friend.
“Why the hell are you attacking him?” one demanded.
“Because I’m a crazy motherfucker!” Justin roared.
That statement rang in my head six months later, long after we’d broken up.
The night I needed his rage.
I was at a house party with friends, and the decision was made to move to a bar in our college town. Deciding to change clothes before we left, I crossed the street and ascended the stairs to the duplex I shared with two other girls. Both roommates were elsewhere, so the place was quiet when I found my way to my bedroom and began sifting through my closet.
I heard the sound of my bedroom door opening, and I spun to see two guys I knew — Jason and Rhett — stride into my room. Jason walked past my bed and stood on the opposite side. Rhett slowly closed the bedroom door behind him and put his back against it.
“Hey,” I said, wearing a confused smile. “What are y’all doing?”
I figured someone sent them to tell me everyone was heading out. It didn’t register that, even in this hypothetical scenario, they shouldn’t have let themselves into my house. My bedroom.
My head snapped back and forth between them, my smile rooted in place.
And then it hit me.
And my smile faltered.
They hadn’t said a word since they entered. They only stared at me, and now that I saw the look in their eyes, I wasn’t sure how I missed it from the moment they walked in. My heart pounded in my chest, and a cold blast shot through my body. I swallowed hard and thought quickly.
I turned my back to them and faced my closet.
“I can’t decide what to wear. Y’all can help me!” I reached with a shaking hand and grabbed a blue jean jacket, pulled it out, and presented it. “Jacket or no?”
I looked back and forth between them.
They remained motionless, their faces cold, apathetic, as if they’d detached from any level of emotion before stepping foot inside my sanctuary.
Panic bloomed in my chest as I forced my smile to remain in place.
Could they see it quivering?
Could they see the way my bones turned to liquid inside me?
“Hey! Do y’all want a beer? I need a beer.” I forced my feet to move, forced my face to retain that smile. “Let me grab some from the kitchen, then y’all need to tell me what to wear, for real.”
Look how I’m smiling!
Can you see it?!
It’s bright and shiny and disarming!
No one is raped with a smile on their face, am I right?!
I stopped in front of Rhett, my entire body trembling, my vision blurring at the edges.
Rhett stared me down. I’d never seen anyone look at another person the way he looked at me in that moment. There was an emptiness in his eyes. His gaze dropped lazily to my body, and then back up again.
“Can. I. Get. A. Beer?” I drawled, releasing a nervous laugh that threatened to turn manic. I spoke as if they were acting crazy and wasn’t this all just fun and games?!
I stared at Rhett, and he stared back. And I held my breath, feeling like my heart was on the verge of imploding, as if my skin were ablaze. Feeling as if I would lose consciousness from sheer, unbridled fear.
Rhett held my gaze as I waited.
For his hands to reach out to grab me.
For the scream I knew would tear from my throat the moment he did.
But instead, after an agonizing, life-defining moment, he slid — with deliberate slowness — to his right and off my bedroom door. He looked at me with disgust and waved his arms theatrically toward the door, mimicking chivalry.
Go on then, his gesture said.
The second he moved off my door, I flew through it and ran for the front door, sailed down the stairs and into the night. I never told anyone what happened, and I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering why. But it goes something like — I have no proof, no one touched me, and it’s their word against mine.
That night, as I lay in bed, the doors securely locked, I considered calling Justin, my ex-boyfriend. The self-proclaimed “crazy motherfucker.” I held my phone in the dark, beneath the blankets, staring at his number. He would have asked no questions. Would have hesitated naught before delivering retribution without fear of consequences.
I clutched that phone to my chest all night like a comfort animal until the sun rose.
Then I put it away.
Recently, when I summoned the courage to tell my psychologist about the incident, her first question was, “Did they try it again?”
My head snapped up and my eyes widened. I nodded, stunned that she somehow knew. “At a Halloween party.” My voice was numb as I recounted the memory. “They tried to drag me into the nearby woods. My roommate saw it happening and intervened.”
“What do you think about now, when you recall these incidents?” she asked.
I hesitated, and then answered. “I think about the what-ifs. I’ve thought about it a lot.” I paused, fidgeting in my chair. “Like, if he’d grabbed me instead of letting me go, what exactly would have happened?” I glanced away from her, winced. “Does one rape me first, then the other takes his turn? Is it both at the same time? Do I just have to give them blow jobs?” My voice shook for a beat, and then I swiftly cut myself off from the emotion. Spoke as if it were someone else saying the words. “Do they hurt me? Am I…beat up?” I shrugged. “Do they cum inside of me? Do I get pregnant? Do I go to the police afterward?”
My psychologist listened patiently as I described my hypotheticals, and then asked, “What does it feel like? Not having an answer to the what-ifs?”
“It feels like I’ve been raped a thousand times,” I snapped.
