The Weight of Silence

Content note: This piece describes my personal journey toward healing following sexual assault. The narrative contains references to assault but uses non-explicit language throughout.

Based on the prompt. “I don’t understand.”

The Weight of Silence

Forty-four years of silence.

Forty-four years of carrying a secret that calcified inside me, growing heavier with each passing season.

Who would have believed me anyway?

He commanded respect, wielded power, occupied a corner office with a view. I was just the girl at the front desk — a voice that answered phones, a smile that greeted visitors. Disposable. Replaceable.

I thought if I locked the words away, buried them so deep they'd never find air — if I never shaped my mouth around the truth of what he did — perhaps the reality would dissolve like salt in water. Perhaps it would become nothing more than a shadow I once mistook for a monster.

But reality doesn't bend to our wishes. Truth doesn't dissolve because we refuse to speak it.

And it wasn't just once. That might have been survivable. A single moment to compartmentalize, to lock away. I became prey. No matter how fast I ran, no matter how many doors I double-bolted, no matter how many circuitous routes I took home, he would find me. As though some primitive radar guided him to my fear. As though I wore a beacon only he could see.

His hands — those gnarled instruments of control — would clamp over my mouth, silencing even the smallest whimper while his hungry mouth took what wasn't offered.

"Please stop. Just let me go. Let me go. I won't tell anyone," I begged, words muffled against his palm.

But what chance does 117 pounds have against 230 pounds of entitled masculinity? What defense does prey have when the predator believes it's his right to hunt?

Why didn't I tell? The question echoes even now. Fear petrified my tongue. Nightmares ransacked my sleep, leaving me drenched in sweat, muffling screams into cotton pillowcases that collected tears but never whispered back comfort. Still, I didn't tell. The silence became my fortress and my prison — my own private hell.

I tried to outrun the memory by falling in love. And for a while, it worked. Donnie's gentle eyes and careful hands seemed to promise salvation. The engagement ring caught light and threw it back in fractured rainbows, a constant reminder that happiness might still be possible.

But we were never truly alone, Donnie and I. He was always there — an uninvited third presence in every embrace, every whispered promise. Sometimes I'd believe he'd finally vanished, that the ghost had been exorcised. Then a certain scent, a particular shadow, the weight of a hand on my shoulder would summon him back. I wanted, with a desperation that bordered on madness, to be a normal bride, radiant and untarnished.

The wedding stood ready, an expectant stage. The preacher's blessing echoed in the air, while friends' well-meant celebrations hung like garlands around us. My parents' home overflowed with the physical promises of a future—crock pots, trivets, and pristine Mikasa plates arranged like artifacts of a normal life I couldn't claim. As guests gathered, I retreated. My body betrayed what my voice couldn't say, burning with fever as I shrank into corners. I couldn't move forward. Couldn't take that deliberate walk down the aisle knowing what waited beyond—the intimacy that terrified me. Because he would be there. Not physically, but woven into my skin, my senses. I could feel him waiting. Could smell him in rooms he'd never entered. In the most sacred moment meant for two, he would be there—a third, unwelcome presence, mocking my attempt at normalcy, laughing at what he had stolen.

So I froze. I ran. I escaped literally halfway across the country.

I broke a good man’s heart like fine china — completely, irrevocably. The pieces too small to ever fit back together. I wanted to explain, to offer him the truth as meager compensation for the future I'd stolen from us both. But excavating those memories, giving them breath and voice and shape in the world outside my nightmares — I couldn't. Donnie would have shouldered the burden with me. His soul was capacious enough to hold my damage, his love sturdy enough to weather the revelation. But I had spent so long reinforcing the walls of my silence that breaking them down felt like it might break me too.

But after forty-four years, the weight became unbearable. The silence that once felt like protection now suffocated me. So I'm telling it now, breathing life into the monster that's lived inside me. Not to cause harm — I won't speak his name. He's old now, withered by time, surrounded by generations that bear his features but not his sins. His hands, once weapons, now likely tremble with age. His memory, once sharp as the edge of a knife against my throat, may have dulled to fog. Perhaps he's forgotten what he did to me.

But I remember. Memory is the faithful companion that never abandoned me, no matter how much I wished it would.

For forty-four years, he has been my shadow self, attached to me at every moment. The physical wounds healed, leaving only the faintest silver traces on skin that grew older, becoming a map of a life lived despite him. But beneath that skin, in the territories of my soul, the wounds remain raw. Some days I can almost forget they exist. Other days, they throb like phantom limbs, demanding acknowledgment.

He's been the unwelcome guest at every celebration, the specter hovering in the corner of every room I've inhabited. He's been the invisible barrier between me and true intimacy, the glass wall I could see through but never break. For forty-four years, he's been there, watching, taunting, reminding.

For forty-four years, every kiss has carried his aftertaste. Every touch has been measured against his violation. Every moment of potential joy has been filtered through the prism of his actions, breaking what should have been pure light into fractured rainbows of anxiety, shame, and grief.

So what remains to be done with this burden I've carried? Time, that supposed healer of all wounds, has offered only partial remedies. The pain dulls but never disappears entirely. The nightmares come less frequently but with no less intensity when they arrive.

I've turned to prayer, letting my pleas rise like smoke, reaching something - Someone greater than myself. I've learned to sit in silence — a different kind now, one I choose rather than one forced upon me — and find my center in meditation. And now, I'm doing what once seemed impossible: I'm speaking. The words no longer choke me as they leave my throat.

Should I confront him? Some would say yes. Some would call it closure, or justice, or necessary catharsis. But the thought of seeing his face again, of watching recognition dawn in his eyes — or worse, seeing no recognition at all, as if what shaped the contours of my entire life wasn't even significant enough to register in his memory — no. For some survivors, confrontation is the path forward. For me, it would be a road back into darkness.

So I'll try to forgive — not for his benefit, but for my own liberation. Whether I'll succeed remains a mystery even to me. The intention itself feels like a radical act.

What I know with certainty is this: speaking these words aloud to compassionate ears has already begun to loosen the grip of his memory. Being heard, being believed, being held in understanding rather than judgment — this is the balm I've denied myself for decades.

Strangely, I harbor no wish for his suffering. I don't fantasize about his damnation or punishment. I don't want his wife — companion of six decades — to have her memories poisoned. I don't want his children or grandchildren to look at him and see the monster I saw. I want him to remain beloved in their eyes. This unexpected mercy I feel toward him confounds me. Perhaps it's evidence that healing has already begun without my noticing.

So I continue forward on this uncharted path of recovery. I walk beneath open skies until my lungs remember how to fully expand. I kneel to receive the healing licks of puppies who love with uncomplicated joy. I transfer emotion to canvas through colors that speak when words fail me. I coax melodies from piano keys, transforming pain into something that might resemble beauty. I write what cannot be spoken, and I dance — oh, how I dance — letting my body reclaim its autonomy through movement, reminding myself with each step that I am no longer that trapped girl, that I am the sovereign of my own flesh now.

Epilogue

Six years disappeared between writing those words and reading them again. In that span, a newspaper obituary caught my attention — his name in black and white, bordered by the finality of death. He's gone now. The tally of years since that first violation has grown to fifty.

I search my heart for the appropriate emotion and find only confusion. Shouldn't there be relief? Closure? A sense of justice served by time if not by law? Shouldn't his death feel like liberation?

Instead, I'm left with an unspeakable sadness. Sadness for the girl I was. Sadness for the lives we both led afterward — mine shaped by his actions, his apparently untouched by them. Sadness that even in death, he holds power over my emotions.

I don't understand why his physical absence from the world hasn't severed his presence in my mind. I don't understand why half a century hasn't been enough time to find peace. I don't understand why forgiveness remains so elusive, hovering just beyond my grasp like a bird that watches me but will not land on my outstretched finger. I don't understand why his death feels less like an ending and more like another chapter in a story I never asked to be part of.

But perhaps understanding isn't the destination. Perhaps healing doesn't arrive in a single transformative moment but in countless small reclamations — in every word spoken aloud, in every memory faced without flinching, in every dance step that celebrates the body he tried to diminish.

Perhaps healing comes in recognizing that his power has diminished over time — not vanished completely, but reduced from a roaring fire to a flickering flame. Perhaps it comes in knowing that by breaking my silence, I've alchemized private pain into a testimony that might reach someone else trapped in their own forty-four years of silence.

And perhaps, someday, understanding will come too. But for now, I will continue this imperfect, nonlinear journey toward wholeness. One word, one memory, one truth, one dance at a time. Not despite him, but because I am finally, after fifty years, more than what he did to me.