Somewhere in all this, I need a moment to write something. I've been to court too many times this month. I've remembered some things that I had kept... not so much hidden from myself, but I had worked actively to avoid encoding. I was raped by my abuser and this truth has only surfaced in the last two months, when another of his former partner's described incidents that very much resemble the night that I met him. The use of substances to cloud judgment, to dull the senses, to overwrite biological imperatives. Now I know why I couldn't sleep, why I stayed up crying by the window unable to grasp why. He would treat me terribly before sex, and the morning after. It just took him some years to treat me terribly during sex too, and then beyond that.

I wonder what I think about rape. It doesn't present the way I thought it would, but then again, our main thought seems to be that the worst violence is suffered at the hands of a stranger. It turns out it's not a competition, and the discomfort and denial that kept the truth at bay, that I never said those things out loud while W was around, not even to myself, because to find the words and to sit with the knowledge that it changes nothing and that he would hurt me and my children if I tried to leave, somehow that felt even more helpless. If I were more helpless, would that make me more fragile, and prone to punishment?