are you there, dog? It's me, kerensa

When I was nineteen years old, only a year into adulthood, and only hesitantly an adult, a man sexually assaulted me. We had met in our apartment complex one night, at the community pool. He was good looking, a military man, cocky and confident, and I was going through the end of my first relationship away from my small hometown. I invited him into my home. I kissed him. I let him into my bedroom. That was where my permission ended. When I told him no, he proceeded to try to shove his genitalia up the leg of my shorts, and when I began to cry and told him to stop or I would scream, he told me I was a tease. And I felt guilt. I am going to say that again- I felt GUILT. As a girl, I had been preconditioned to believe that I could feel bad for getting a guy "worked up", and I didn't kick him out. I slept on the floor next to my bed, while he slept in my bed, and I woke to him trying to do the same thing, only to my face. That time, I was done. Typing these words out makes

I am going to preface this with the fact that this story may or may not contain anecdotes about poop. If you have never pooped, you may want to opt out. That's the last warning I will give. Like a prairie dog, it will pop its head out without notice. In June, I took a spectacularly large fall down some spectacularly hard stairs. The sound I made upon landing most certainly broke some sound barriers, and the fuckity fucking fucks that I howled reverberated through our neighborhood of old people. Luckily, they are mostly all old and can't hear that well anymore. The hematoma that decided to grow out of my ass, like an alien in a Sigourney Weaver movie, made my one side look Kardashian-esque. The other side stayed firmly in the middle age mom jean category. Needless to say, my workout routine, scant as it was, was put on the back burner. I gained a good fifteen pounds in two months. I am pretty sure the hematoma weighed at least ten. The other five was sympathy wine. Pinot Grig