It is easy to document a blast of an IED. The aftermath and destruction is horrendous, visible and invisible. There are often witnesses.

Rape is done in secrecy, behind closed doors, where no one else sees or may not hear. That is the double horror of the crime. Compounding that is what a victim, like myself, must go through. The telling and retelling after years of saying nothing out loud but screaming, reliving the abuse over and over in our head, unable to go to the oblivion of sleep for if it does come, a moment or two of sleep, it is filled with nightmares.

Quite the decision ~ awake and replay, afraid to tell or doze off only to wake in a sweat with nightmares racing through my head.

This is from the notebook I started while inpatient in Topeka, KS, November 2011.

My intent is to continue to post what I have written a few paragraphs a day