
My dad first raped me on the 4th of July like a true American patriot.
I have darker punchlines if you wanna hear

I have darker punchlines if you wanna hear
2006: My dad has a girlfriend now. He fucks her instead of coming to my room at night. I use my electric toothbrush covered with Saran Wrap to fuck myself. I’m stupid and leave it in my bed when I go back to my mom’s. The next Friday, he picks me up from school. He drives too fast and won’t speak to me. Yanks open the glove compartment in front of me instead. My toothbrush is in there, still covered in plastic cloudy from my mess.
Parked near some sort of small reservoir he makes me unbuckle and suck him. Bleak midwinter sky. The smell of the car’s heater and my Bath & Body Works Cherry Blossom spray. His own musk. Suck it since I’m such a slut.
After he cums in my mouth he turns sweet like he does. Holds my face against his chest and strokes my cheek with his hand. Tells me he’s sorry things are different now. Something about it being better this way. That I shouldn’t have to be so grown up all the time. My heart feels like it’s breaking and I don’t understand why. I hate the taste coating my tongue. But crying while he holds me feels good and familiar and I want him to touch me there so bad but he doesn’t and I’m too ashamed to beg like I used to. I shouldn’t be so grown up but I am but I’m not so what does that make me?
A very good girl - that’s what he calls me. But I don’t see proof of it anywhere. I’m a liar and a sinner and a slut and now he won’t even touch me in the special way. I’m dead leaves sodden around a dirty Kentucky pond. I’m a chemtrail evaporating in the flat gray sky. A semi truck barrels down the nearby highway, the blare of its horn already left behind.
The title and photos are for men. It’s the truth, but the even more pathetic truth is that the other morning, sitting in my car before work, a proposal video on TikTok nearly made me cry.
I was never a girl who longed for a ring. There was one relationship where I fixated on the idea of getting married because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, and he was not my husband. But overall, I’ve understood that this particular life trajectory would look different for me, if it happened at all.
Whatever little girl fantasies I might have had were killed off by what the most important man in my life did to me when I was still a child. So nothing in me rose up in protest when my ex-husband proposed the way he did. What did I have to compare it to?
The other morning, though, I compared it to the video on my fyp. Not even an extravagant proposal - just thoughtful and planned and intentional. Loving.
“I guess I’m feeling like damn, kinda crazy that my experience of being proposed to was after abuse and degradation,” I texted a friend. “And like a dog I lapped it up.”
Woof.