By Lylia Saurel

COVID Diaries: Third Place Winner

His teeth bit my mouth, and I could feel the blood rushing in my lower lip. He held my body firmly enough that I couldn’t defend myself, but loosely enough that he could take advantage of it. The giant screen threw an incessant light on us, the sound of the movie covered up my pain. I sought to move back in my red velvet seat, but his fingers had already invited themselves under my clothes and the agony had already set in me. I tried to push him away, but each of my attempts caused him to finger me deeper and stronger, so I stopped trying. I let him finish.

When he was done, he pulled up his pants and waited for the end of the movie to leave. After twenty minutes he stood up and looked towards the back of the room, as if to reassure himself no one saw him and that we were indeed the only two people in this dark space. He walked out in front of me, and as I followed him silently, an employee entered to clean up.

“Hope you enjoyed your movie, have a good night,” he told me as he swept yellowish popcorn into his short black dustpan. We exited the theater, the cold night air caressed my bare neck, and I clung to it. 

New York City went into lockdown the next morning. My attacker was the last person I saw before isolation, my last moment of “freedom” was my rape.

And for four months, I forgot. 

Days passed and quarantine became a comfortable cocoon that allowed me to work on myself. I exercised to see my body change, meditated to calm my mind, and flirted online to feel my heart soften. As the virus spread and plunged the world into a silent chaos, alone in my apartment, I felt at peace.

But on July 4th reality caught up with me and my own world collapsed.

As I sat curled up between two friends on the sofa in our tiny Airbnb, one of them spilled his drink on my pale blue jeans and it wasn’t until he wiped the alcohol off my thigh that my whole body remembered, a shiver down my spine and my mind swirling.

Amid open packets of chips and cigarette butts, my friends clanged glasses and their laughter echoed a message of happiness to be reunited again. In the midst of the hubbub, I realized that that night no liquor could lighten my spirit.

Slowly after, the city came back to life and so did my memories.

Ever since, life has been much harder. This third online semester is much harder. Trapped between the plain white walls of my apartment, I spend most of my time looking out the only window there is as an escape from these flashbacks. 

The wind moves the branches of a tree still bare of leaves, on which a squirrel has built his home. Some days I spend hours observing him, running up and down the dry trunk with little wood chips in his mouth. Other days it is the neighbor’s white cat with red spots that comes to stand at the window who has all my attention.

On days when none of them are around, I just sit on the only end of my bed that the light reaches and let the sun warm my cheeks until it feels too hot to stay. All of these pastimes have become captivating enough for me to abandon my laptop filled with due assignments and ringing with incoming Zoom calls. The little bit of concentration I had left in me is finally evaporating.

The pandemic may finally be dozing off, but if sidewalks paved with flowery restaurants and happier crowds have replaced the empty streets of the last year, I am left deteriorated.

A year ago, I failed to understand how a virus could disrupt everything in its way, but today with hindsight I understand better because my breath too has run short. Because me too I live in a damaged body, and because me too I feel the side effects from an impostor who turned my life upside down.