There was a half Swedish boy from London named [Owen]. “Why were you in an ambulance?” he asked me while we sat on tall chairs at a bar called Mash Tun on Church St. He had drunk nine pints of Guinness and began to treat me like a stray kitten when I told him the reason why. He said he understood. He said he had “been there,” before. He said he cared about me.

Daniel said he cared about me, too. He was my boyfriend, after all. The bottles of vodka he bought me when I was 18, the cups of water he’d bring me from the kitchen, the times he’d chosen to walk next to me instead of in front of me. It was so fresh and confusing being cared about. 

He was from England, but found me in America during his study abroad year, and I’d see him in England during my own study abroad year three years later. I visited him in between with all the money I’d saved up during my part time job, and he’d show his appreciation by paying for some of our trips to McDonalds and holding my hand after I’d begged him to. I’m pretty sure I hated him, but I’m pretty sure I was scared. 

I called the domestic violence hotline one month before I moved to England and they told me that Daniel might kill me. He threw objects, he forced me into sex, he berated me and insulted me. And in one month, I would no longer be 4,000 miles away from him. Just 100. I only saw him a few times a year and the distance was keeping me safer than I could’ve known. In one month we would be in a race, who would kill me first? Daniel? Or myself?

Daniel wanted to push me in front of a train because I was sexually assaulted by someone who wasn’t him. How dare someone else play with his toy? I’d only been in England for less than three months and I’d been rendered a baby mollusk, just waiting for the octopus to tear my insides apart.

He stood behind me. Rarely did he stand next to me, so I thought nothing of it. I stared down at the thick yellow line that separated my Doc Martens from the gap between the train tracks and the platform that I was to mind. The tunnel lit up, the roaring of the approaching train filling the Underground station. Though they meant nothing then, those lights could’ve been the last thing I ever saw and my chest burns when the memory returns. Daniel pushed his hands against my back with a certain force that threw me off balance and I stopped breathing. This was what the domestic violence hotline warned me about. He was killing me. 

But then he wasn’t. He grabbed my shoulders as I began to wobble forward, pulling me back and against his monstrous body. My breath returned, speeding up as the train slowed down and came to a stop. Despite the rush of people leaving through the sliding doors, the station felt empty. My blood rushed through my ears as the primal fear left me disoriented, my feet trying to understand their place on the dirty tile below. 

He decided not to do it. And when I returned to him, terrified and confused, he brushed it off. But of course he did—there is nothing easy about telling someone you were about to end their life, I’m sure. 

I often think about what would have happened if Daniel had actually gone through with killing me in front of all those innocent Londoners, all ready to head home after their Christmas shopping. I now know that there was a massive strike, but the tube was already facing significant delays that night, and it seemed no one knew why. Among the horror, one of my first thoughts after smashing my small body into the crowded train, unscathed, was about the inconvenience my body would’ve caused on top of it all. How selfish would it have been to die and turn thirty minute delays into cancellations and closures. London would hate us both.

His hands on my shoulders sent me back into time: Dad lifting me up to put the star on the tree in 2003. My cousin and I performing our newly choreographed dance for Grandma in 2008. My dog pulling me around the cul-de-sac on my roller skates in 2010. Mom crying when she turned her back to me in the airport in 2021, leaving her dying daughter alone in England just months before. The funeral would be closed casket, the only thing to remember me by: pictures and stories. My mom would never be the same.

I was 8 years old in the bathroom. I wrote the words whore, slut, bitch, and fat, ugly, stupid all over my thighs in permanent marker. I stopped believing in God. 

“God is great. God is good. Thank you, God, for our food. Amen.”

I was 7 years old in my parents’ bedroom. I pointed a letter opener at my throat as I stared at myself in the mirror. God did not have the mercy or grace he promised—he was neither great, nor good. God did not protect me. 

From the start I was doomed. Puberty at age 5, body hair at 6, breasts at 7. “Sexy” legs at 8 that even my dad felt the need to comment on. They were “just like my mom’s.” There was always extra fat on me—fat that forced my skin to expand, adding to the square footage of touchable area, viewable area. I was a woman at 5. 

The mirror always reminded me that my life was being forced to start. I was 21 then, never again would my age be in single digits, never again would I get to play with dolls and watch Hannah Montana, never again would I get to go down the slide and jump off of the swing. The way my hips curved like parentheses and the hair that grew all over me felt like the hands on my back, pushing me away from home. To starve was to stop time.

Being hungry meant I could return to the childhood that my body refused me. Knobby knees, stick-legs, bony wrists, and visible chest bones meant I could shed the woman from me and all of the male poison that had seeped into her. I could grab childhood and wear it. The less food I ate, the less woman lived under my skin. I didn’t want to eat. So I stopped. 

Let’s start the ABC diet! It’s easy as 1, 2, 3! 500 calories on day one, 300 calories on day three, 100 calories on day five… 20lbs down in one month. The second hand on the clock looked a lot slower. I wanted to be down another 20 before I left for my year abroad in England in a couple of months. I didn’t care that my hair was falling out, I didn’t care that I couldn’t stand up without nearly passing out, I didn’t fucking care if Daniel was telling me I wasn’t as sexy anymore. These were just signs of progress. The light my eyes filled with when I became dizzy was the end of the tunnel. I could be there—the clock on the wall completely frozen. I would be safe. The squeaking of a swingset, the smell of pool water and sunscreen, my oversized Minnie Mouse plushie on the bunk bed, my body untouched and pure. 

At no point was anyone coming to save me from anything. When I fainted from malnutrition, a sunken, dark bed of cold loneliness would swallow me back up. The bed had been made in 2000 and I was born into it. The octopus, who was born underneath my bed, strapped me down with its tentacles by my ankles and wrists, another one of its arms covering my mouth, suffocating extroverted air out of me. My growing thighs were whipped into submission, the tentacles’ suckers leaving red cupping therapy marks on my souring skin. I would never stop wriggling no matter how much my wrists and ankles bled and it was funny. There were laughs from girls and boys as they watched the spectacle of a pathetic woman grow into her sunken, dark bed. Maybe the power of the jet engines would be enough to rip the tentacles off of me, the octopus left behind as I flew away. England would be the place I could flourish! 

There were so many new people to meet! So many new things to experience with them! So many new inside jokes to build and so many laughs to share! This was it!

“Are you crying?” my new temporary friend would ask me. If I had taken the coke line off the key I was offered earlier, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, I thought. In the crowd of ravers, I sobbed. He was going to kill me, wasn’t he? He was going to kill me. This moment of bliss—new friends, new music, at a festival drunk off of five Jaeger bombs—was fleeting. The face of my impending death smeared itself onto the heads of everyone in the crowd, the sound of my closing casket overtaking the EDM. I realized I would die in my sunken, dark bed. Even though my Doc Marten boots were on the soil of Brighton, England, my body would be buried and rotting in the soil of Chicago, Illinois, limbs contorted, bones broken, blood spurting. And stomach empty.

I went back to my room. All alone in my flat. “Are you sure you don’t want to come out with us?” the temporary friend would ask. I wasn’t built for it all. I was a PetSmart goldfish thrown into the Thames. All the carp and cod around me returned side-eyes as they watched my golden gills struggle to absorb the algae. Perhaps I was born to stay in my bed, I thought. Perhaps the octopus would enjoy a snack that would try to smile back.

I missed my mommy. I sent her pictures that assured her everything was alright, we’d have lighthearted phone calls in between it all. But she could not swim fast enough across the Atlantic to rescue me from the monster that was under my bed, waiting to wrap me back up.

I was literally slipping through the cracks. Now that my body had become much smaller, I sank into the street grates with the rest of the sewage and waste. I was hungry, but maybe it was safer down here with the mice. Maybe I could hide from the hands of Daniel, from the hands of men. I never wanted Daniel to touch me again. I was miserable under him, but how could I forget? I knew I was born for this, remember? I was nothing but a sex toy, but that was nothing new. 

Maybe if I hung out with the mice long enough they would sew me a dress and send me off in a pumpkin to the playground in 2007 with half my body weight and the giggles of a curious child, ready for her mom’s hugs.

I looked up at the soles that tread over the grate, cutting off the light temporarily with every step. Shoes always came in pairs—not just twos, but fours. Sometimes groups of six, eight…I envied the sneakers alongside the combat boots, I envied the platform heels alongside the Mary Janes. They got to be together. Perhaps it was foolish of me to assume that I could take up space around other people when I had actively been trying to disappear. 

Then the rain would come and flood the sewer. I would float up to the top, my face pushed against the grate, forced to see smiling, laughing faces through inhalation and blur of cigarette butted water. There they are. Perhaps it was foolish of me to assume that I could have a smiling and laughing face of my own when I was depriving my brain of the energy it would need to contort my cheeks into happiness. 

I got sent to A&E a month before I was almost murdered because I was suicidal. How could I not be suicidal? The sound of car horns made me suicidal. Seeing a dog with its tail tucked behind its legs made me suicidal. The smell of Crayola crayons made me suicidal. Realizing that the only way home was to starve made me suicidal. The idea that my own boyfriend wanted to kill me made me suicidal. I smoked at least three cigarettes a day, and I had at least three shots of vodka a day. The red on the Marlboro pack and the red on the Smirnoff cap were best friends and I could at least hang out with them while I waited my turn in purgatory. 

The irony of being afraid to die while also lusting over it. It was okay with me if I died of malnutrition, alcohol poisoning, anything self-inflicted, really. But the hands of a man as my cause of death was worse than actual death itself. It would have been better to die on my way home than while being pulled away from it.

No matter how much I knew I needed to run, I was shackled. He was too scared to do it that time. But how exciting it must’ve been for him to practice his role as an unbound deity. How nice must the adrenaline have felt coursing through his fingertips as he pressed them against my corduroy coat, a slight moment of freedom brewing as quickly as it cooled. I could only imagine his resentment against me gained a growth spurt once he pulled me back, the two of us depriving him of that release. If I tried to leave him, how much worse would it get? If I stayed still, promised to only be his, maybe he would try to love me and in turn spare me, at least long enough until I could return home to Chicago in half a year. 

Outside of Mash Tun I watched a Brighton Police car ram into a crowd of people crossing the street while the bastard inside laid his hand on the horn. A woman went flying across the tarmac as he hit her. What a sick venture. The police—the group of people whose job it is to protect the citizens—shattered the bones of one in front of the others. They are supposed to keep us safe, we are supposed to trust them. The woman couldn’t get up.

In the bar I was that woman. Owen, after spending hours hugging and comforting me despite my stiffness and mortification, suggested that we go home before the rest of our group. Admittedly I was tired, as it was nearly 2am by this point and I had spent all of my money on vodka cranberries and the malnutrition was making my hands shake and my body convulse. He told me he would buy me a kebab. A kebab was too many calories over my self-imposed limit, but he insisted. I got one without meat to decrease the calorie count. “Just salad? That’s all?” the kebab shop man asked.

On the bus I was that woman. Owen would not let go of me on the bus. He wrapped his arms around me like an octopus and forced my head onto his shoulder as we sat on the top floor, the driver speeding up Coldean Lane in complete forest darkness. He told me how important I was, how precious my life is, how he understood me, how I now understood him. He cried a little bit and I took reluctant bites of my lettuce and mayo pita wrap. There was no way Daniel would find out about this unless I told him, but I could feel my stomach turning as my body prepared for stinging words and dull pains. I wished the driver had crashed. Then Owen would have had to let go of me and Daniel would have to let go of himself. There would’ve been no one to confide in that night, there would’ve been no one to push in front of a tube train weeks later.

Outside of our flat I was that woman. Oh, I had to make myself throw up. Not from the vodka cranberries. I had enough practice keeping vodka down. The kebab. I had betrayed my vow to starvation and I had no choice but to excavate the horrors out through my mouth. My fingers were shovels as I gouged out the fossilizing pita wrap into the bushes behind the bus stop, Owen standing next to me and cheering me on. “Yes! Keep going! Great job!” He was the first person to encourage my purging. The terror that laid within the idea that this man enjoyed my decrepit act of running and hiding from calories burned a fear in my stomach that would petrify me every time I knelt over the toilet after that. Even the most sacred and revolting form of self-torture that I engaged in was viewed as attractive by a man and once again I remembered that I will always be a woman, and I had been since 5.

In my bed I was that woman. Owen would let himself into my bedroom and insist on talking. He told me how much he cared. There was no care in the way he hit me in the face. There was no care in the way he pinned me down to my mattress. There was no care in the way he forced his lips against mine. In my bed I was that woman. 

He drowned me in the sewage and the mice couldn’t save me. Owen would kick them away, telling them how insane and sick I truly was now that he knew. Stay away from her, he told them. Taking away any chance I had at help, at friends, at any salvation. He had my blood on his hands but the sewage water washed them clean and no one would believe me. The mice followed him as he walked away, my lungs full of feces and dishwater, my open wounds inviting maggots to their fleshy party, and my body ravaged once again. The octopus had suffocated me. 

3 cigarettes turned into a whole pack, 3 shots turned into half a bottle. I would lie there alone on my floor next to my bed hoping that I would melt into the carpet. I was too scared to get back into my own bed after what Owen had done to me despite washing the sheets multiple times. 

I made the drunken mistake of telling Daniel. 

“Okay,” was all he said. 

He never told me loved me again after that. He never bought me gifts again after that. He never complimented me in a non-sexual way after that, though that had already been few and far between. I would cry, and cry, and cry, begging him to tell me why he hated me now, what I had done wrong, though deep down, I knew. Someone else had played with his toy and now it wasn’t worth anything. What would it matter if his toy got destroyed? 

When he decided that he was too scared to throw his toy away, he settled for reluctant cheap dates and forced maintenance sex despite it crying and lamenting constantly. His toy may have been defective but it still had a hole, still was a foot shorter, and still 150lbs less than him. It had nowhere to go for months, so it didn’t matter if he neglected it and let it cry itself to sleep. The mice didn’t want anything to do with it anymore and anyone who valued it at all was on another continent, oblivious to how matted its hair had become, how its clothes were missing, and how there was permanent marker smudged on its face and body.

I would have rather just been in the closed casket. I thought about the woman who had been betrayed by the police. How many bones did she break? How intense was the pain? Did the officer apologize? Did anyone care? Maybe I could be buried next to her.

Owen’s and my shared flatmates didn’t care. To be ripped from my already dying body was poisonous enough. To be told by the people who lived on every side of me that my experience meant nothing as they laughed and joked with Owen at the dinner table I was afraid to sit at, that was lethal. I was already reduced to a wraith after everything, now my spirit was being taunted through a Ouija board. They went out with him, cooked meals with him, smoked rolled cigarettes and drank beers with him one hallway away from my bedroom, the muffled laughter almost drowning out the ringing in my ears.

No one has ever apologized to me for anything. The men who viewed and used me like a woman when I was a child never apologized. Daniel never apologized. Owen never apologized. My flatmates never apologized. University of Sussex never apologized when they told me they couldn’t do anything about what Owen had done other than try to expel me for causing distress to him. The United Kingdom never apologized for raising a country full of rapists with a ranking of number 1 in rapes in the developed world. I never apologized to myself, either, though maybe one day I will.

When I wasn’t visiting Daniel north of London, I was in my room alone, shaking and convulsing from hunger, forcing energy into my body with sugar free Red Bulls and doing online Zumba classes and Korean ab workouts, chugging sink water. No one checked in on me. My body was decomposing in the sewage, floating alongside discarded National Rail tickets and toilet tissue, and no one could make out the smell of death through it all. 

I was under the water, I was under a man, I was under the train. All I wanted now was to be under the ground, and my mom would never be the same. 

I think about my mom now. Had she known even just a single one of these things would happen to me while I was away she would have called every airline and cancelled every flight from O’hare to Heathrow. She would fall to her knees, her eyes growing red as tears bombarded them, upon knowing any of this, so I had to return to her. If there was nothing else for me in England, there was a loving mother on the other side of the earth who would never be the same if that man’s hands didn’t pull me back. So I kept going. Alone, I kept going. The second semester of my year abroad at the University of Sussex was the longest four and a half months of my life, each day filled with terror and humiliation. My body was not my own, it had been stolen, and at any moment, it could be killed. So I sat there, hoping that I could survive it all and make it back home to my mom’s arms. 

I turned to the bouquet of flowers my mom had sent me on my birthday. I unwrapped the birthday cake flavored Fibre One bar and steadied my trembling hands. I would go home in three months. I would return to my mom, damaged goods, clothes tattered and reeking of salt water, but I knew that if I hadn’t made it, she would never be the same, and that was a fate worse than letting the octopus kill me.