CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT
Every night I play a game with myself.
I cocoon myself with my comforter, so only my face peeks out. I tuck myself in like a frightened kid and pat down the covers behind me until it’s wedged under my side. My ears must be covered, whether with a sheet or my hair—as protective as cornsilk but better than nothing. This is a leftover childhood fear of something slithering into my brain at night. I’ve never been able to shake the idea of some creepy-crawly finding refuge in the warmth of my ear canal. What’s to stop a spider, a beetle, or a feathery cellar centipede from burying inside me? Nothing. So I cover every orifice, and then I can close my eyes.
As I fall asleep, I’m cold. Each time I move, my body shocks, needing to warm the new space that I occupy. But eventually, I settle into the fetal position and lose myself to sleep. When I wake in the middle of the night, the tight cocoon I’ve created is overheating, baking, so I’m sweating.
I think: I am a supernova. I am the sun.
When it becomes unbearable, I eventually stick a foot out, maybe a forearm, and the heat leaks out.
I do not check the time during this nightly ritual. The light, my therapist says, will wake me up even more. Rather I worry that I’ll have woken up at 3:00 a.m., the witching hour. Or even worse, 3:33 a.m. I could not take a bad omen like that, so I do not look. Instead, I lay and bake until I let a limb out, just a piece, nothing too grabbable, and let the heat escape like a sigh.
I have always had a fear of being breached.
*
You’re more likely to be raped by someone you know than someone you don’t. My therapist thinks I fixate on protecting myself from intruders because the former already happened. So now I triple-check my locks. I push entry tables in front of my apartment door when I’m alone. I balance empty aluminum cans on window sills, the pop tabs inside for extra rattle. And I roll myself into a facade of downy safety each night as I tuck myself into my cocoon.
I do not help my paranoia. An ex-boyfriend often asked me, “Why do you watch things that scare you?” And the truth is I don’t know.
I cannot watch horror movies. I do not like the gratuitous blood and guts. I do not like the sickly-sweet feeling of suspense that lodges in my chest. My nerves need no more fraying.
But I’ve seen every true crime documentary available. I listen to cold case podcasts while I grocery shop. I watch Law and Order: SVU as my comfort show when it should repulse me the most. But yet. I like how Olivia Benson will still fight for justice on your behalf even if you shaved your vagina. Even if you got back in bed with him. Even if you didn’t have the strength, or the wherewithal, or the breath to say no. It’s a fantasy I gladly tune in to.
But when I open my eyes at night staring at the window, I expect to see the Golden State Killer. When I open my apartment door, I expect someone to shove in behind me. When I sit in my parked car, I expect someone in the back seat to put a gun to my head and tell me to drive.
Perhaps I am a masochist, and that’s why I watch assault as entertainment. Perhaps I am simply obsessive. Perhaps I am simply compulsive. I know this makes me seem neurotic. But I have no other answer.
*
For a period of time, I woke up every night on my back, un-cocooned. This is not inherently strange—people move in the night, I know—but I am a strict side sleeper. I have always felt too exposed on my back. But for weeks, I would wake up with my arms at my sides, palm up, and my feet crossed at the ankles, right on top of the left. The corpse bride awoken. A virgin sacrifice. As if I was offering myself as penance.
It unsettled me for weeks. And then, it stopped.
*
I’ve never slept well. When I was a kid, I would lie awake for hours, listening to what I called the man downstairs. Footsteps, methodical and even. Really it was the beating of my own heart reverberating in my eardrums, but I imagined a ghost pacing our kitchen while we slept.
When I would get restless, I would wander into my parents’ room and watch them sleep. I didn’t want to be alone in my insomnia, but I felt guilty waking them up, so I would stand there until one of them sensed a presence at the end of their bed, or I would finally fall asleep on their floor. I’d wake up curled on their discarded comforter with our dog.
Eventually, the man downstairs stopped walking around. Eventually, I discovered melatonin, and when I put up a tolerance for that, I found new pills. I still wake up every night. I just accept there will always be some sort of downstairs man, and I roll over. I think of the poet Erika Jo Brown, who once said, “In this life, I have trouble sleeping well.”
*
At twenty-three years old I still ask others to kill my bugs. I hate the feeling of the exoskeleton giving away. I hate the crunch, the squish of pus-colored goo that seeps out beneath a shoe or the folds of a napkin.
My rape-revenge fantasy comes to me in a dream, one that’s reoccurred at increasingly longer intervals since my assault. In them, I am invisible, lurking in a room with him and his friends. I torment him. I keep shoving him—off chairs, beds, tables—onto the floor. I’ll let him get comfortable before attacking again. He looks at his friends for help, and they look at him like he’s crazy. They tell him to knock it off. And when I get bored, when I am finished with him, I summon my supernatural powers to lift two large objects, and I crush him. It’s different every time: two refrigerators, two dining tables, two wooden closets that look suspiciously like the dorm-issued furniture in the room where it happened. It’s only then, when his execution is moments away, and the furniture is hovering in midair ready to strike, that I let him see that it’s me. I’m the one doing it. I am his tormentor. And then—I smash him. His exoskeleton breaks. His pus-colored goo seeps out.
I wake up from these dreams crying. I don’t know why.
Sydney Koeplin is an editor and writer from the Midwest. Her work has appeared in the Lovers Literary Journal, Qu Literary Magazine, Their Ghoulish Reputation: A Folk Horror Anthology, and elsewhere. She won the Elmira Nelson Jones Prize for Creative Writing from Colby College in 2021. In her free time, she enjoys swimming, reading, and trying to bake.
Hypertext Magazine and Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.
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