I will tell you what I know of the way silence grows roots inside of a person, until all that is left is a brutal, crushing vacancy where a voice ought to be.

I was 17 when I was raped by a classmate. He was someone I knew, someone I trusted, but in the end, none of that mattered. I would not find out until eight months later that I was pregnant as a result of the assault. My daughter, Zoe, would grow inside of me with a fatal congenital birth defect that took away her ability to think, or emote, or connect to the world in all the fundamental ways that make a life worth living.

I was forced to give birth to the child of this rape, always connected in some way to the man who took so much from me. I lived in Alabama, which this week welcomed a draconian new abortion law , but the states politicians have never borne any ethical compunctions about controlling women and subverting their agency. To them, we are collateral in a game of politics, and the suffering they inflict matters very little if at all to them. They have no interest in perspective or stories like my own, but I must speak or else the woman behind me might not.

It starts with a man at a water park in Destin, Florida, and Im 9 years old. He grabs my inner tube as he passes by, reaches under and sticks his fingers high up between my thighs. His thumb strokes against me. I look over at him, shocked. I want to scream, but he smiles back at me. His eyes are everywhere I am. He says, reassuringly, Looked like you were drifting off, just thought Id help, and lets me go. I float like flotsam, jetsam down the Lazy River, and the space between my legs is burning, my heart is pounding, but I say nothing because he was just trying to help.

Second semester, freshman year of high school, I am outside waiting for my mother to pick me up. A boy Ive never met jumps out from behind the columns, runs up behind me and grabs my ass. I stumble forward, my head whipping around in time to see him sprinting toward the gym. It was a dare! he shouts back at me, as if this gives him reason and excuse to have me under his hands, to hook into me as if my flesh were meat hanging raw and waiting.

There is a boy whom I dance with at the military ball in my sophomore year. The following Monday at school he begins stalking me. He follows me to my classes even though I never tell him my schedule, asks people who know me where I live, corners me alone in the courtyard and tries to kiss me. He writes violent stories about me in class after I reject him. In these stories, he slits my throat for my deceit, for leading him on with smiles and kindness. Hes done that to half of us in this class, the other girls explain. The teachers wont do anything.

These men are not my rapist. Neither are the men who begin leering at me from their car windows, starting when I am 13, who shout the things they want to do to me whose whistles are piercing and lecherous, and always reminding me you are on display, before driving off. No, they are not my rapist, but each of them takes something from me starting with my agency, my dignity, my sense of safety. They plant little seeds of self-doubt that grow unchecked; the roots spread outward, the silence flows into me, and into my mouth. Slowly, excruciatingly, I am alienated from myself.

This is not the first occasion I have written about the night of my rape , but in times such as these, we must revisit the origins of trauma. I must continue to draw the poison from the wound if I want any sort of progress or if I wish to heal at all. I refuse to let the infection spread, can no longer allow it to sit and continue to fester on my tongue.

Here we are again, back at the Before: I am 17 years old, I am a junior in high school. The darkness within my kitchen is beaming at me like an open mouth. My body is bent against granite. The corner edge of the table is a constant stinging presence against my stomach. A hand, not my own, is around my throat all 10 fingers dug in like claws. They are hands that I trusted, the hands of a boy from my Algebra II class. I try to reconcile the hands pushing down my shorts, wrapping around my throat, holding me still, with the hands that occasionally brushed against mine when I reached for a pencil or a piece of gum.

My pulse is churning, my own blood is a hostage in my veins. I dont know how we got here, when two hours ago we were studying quadratic equations and watching a movie. When his fingertips crept down the inseam of my shorts, I knew that something bad was about to happen a gut instinct. They call it that because thats where you feel it first, a thickness rising up from your stomach, into the back of your throat, and it burns there.

I do not know what he was thinking, if I led him into this with my body or my initial reticence when I got up and moved away. I am so accustomed at this point to men who turn and run away once I turn my head that it never occurs to me that he will follow my path into the kitchen, and even as it is happening visceral, undeniable I still cant believe its happening. The throb of life is trapped inside me, and Im trapped inside me, and my body is heavier than it has ever been. My teeth grind together but my spine, it folds over so easily, a burnt matchstick crumpling under a thumb.

I feel every bit of flesh and bone feel my shadow where its pressed flat against the wall. And life is startling and horrible and inescapable in this moment, and my mind is still a part of my body but I dont want to be. His body is in mine, but I dont want it to be, and somewhere amid it all, I notice the old oil left on the stove that my mother was too tired to throw away.