Dear X: A Letter to the Girl after Me
Dear X:
I’m writing to you because you deserve to know.
Because someone has to know what happened on an unremarkable day in Pittsburgh.
Because the burden of a secret so terrible and consuming is too heavy for one heart and mine has splintered irrevocably.
Because this is your story too, even if you don’t know it yet.
Maybe you’ll hate me for this monumental burden I pass onto you. But please understand that the truth is an arduous pain to carry alone.
His name was [REDACTED] and he first killed me in November—my last day as a sixteen-year-old. The last day I remember what it felt like to be whole with lungs that inhaled feathered air. There was a time when I was soft before I came back.
Again
and Again
and Again.
I didn’t want to return after the first time. I wanted to fade into that Pittsburgh autumn of overcast skies and burnt leaves that tasted like bonfire ash and secrets made behind cupped hands, but he resurrected me to his altar of unwashed sheets and cinderblock bed.
Again, I learned, is a terrible word. It’s an ache that aloe can’t soothe. It gnaws inside a shrunken gut.
It’s always November for me.
X, I hope you can forgive me. My ghost calls to you.
#
His name was [REDACTED] and his eyes were the color of furrowed bark on the pines enclosing Peters Lake Park. For a short time, he became what those woods were for me. A shelter for when I had nowhere—no one else—to turn to. There, we’d dip our toes in lake water and watch ripples pulse out into the greater body. There we could unwind ourselves bare.
But he was not a gentle breeze across water. He smelled like rich, dark brown earth— the origin of life itself. He was the soil—a home for decomposition underneath a surface that exuded life. Unfortunately, I learned this too late.
Something as beautiful and vibrant as pomegranate blood can hide decay.
#
We were alone when light first left his eyes. My moth-wing lungs fluttered, struggling in the sudden darkness. I should have run. And I should have run the first time he choked me, with flat and unseeing eyes. And I should have run when he pulled a knife, when he hit me, when he tied me up, when he shoved my face into the mattress, when he, when he, when he—
But I didn’t.
#
I can’t describe the first time it happened. As time moves on and trauma turns into jigsaw scar tissue, I forget how to rearrange my first life. This first death feels like a memory I borrowed from someone else, stored in peripheral whispers and crackling static.
I forget much except the sensation of falling through the canyon where two twin beds were pressed against each other, balancing on cinderblocks. That’s where he buried my spine. My converse, my jeans, my black shirt, and new peacoat to fight off the November chill were carelessly discarded on the floor.
I only remember he smelled like the deep forest, where no one can hear you scream.
#
Please don’t blame me for not fighting back. I did and I suffered for it. Some deaths, I’d learned, are worse than others.
He sneered and said nobody wanted to love someone like me. When I wouldn’t kiss him after this verbal abuse, he decided I needed to give more.
The price had suddenly tripled.
He and his friend—an accomplice in this crime—grabbed me by my ankles and wrists, and then hauled me upstairs to that stained makeshift bed. I thrashed so hard in their arms that his friend dropped me and the back of my head split open against tile.
My soul briefly left my limbs once my head cracked ground and I was lost to a field of multi-pointed stars shooting across my eyes. I floated in lifetimes I’d never get to see, visions of my future that never materialized by morning. I wilted as they carried me upstairs.
I returned to myself, to [REDACTED] straddling my stomach. My ankles were tied with rope; his friend was cutting into my skin with each loop. [REDACTED] wrapped my wrists with the navy tie he wore to our homecoming. When I looked him in his eyes, the light was gone, atmosphere returning only black holes.
I fought back, kicking his accomplice in the face. When he tumbled over, I twisted around and elbowed [REDACTED] off me, squirming the tie off as I crawled on my stomach across the floor. I grasped the doorknob, but a pair of hands grabbed my ankles. I held tight, but together they yanked me back. I was pinned, retied, and forced to endure his kiss.
Only a warmup for what would come.
My head lolled to the side and I stared out his bedroom window, wishing it was open, just a crack. I didn’t want my spirit trapped in this room with him. When someone dies, you’re supposed to open the window or else their soul will never be free.
I fought until he killed me again. My splintered bone was cradled back into the chasm no one could reach. Even as my spirit lifted away from my body and the hurt, I never stopped looking out that pane of glass, at the idyllic suburban view outside.
And so it goes.
I passed beyond into the shelter of nothing where I was nothing and no one. I came back to myself, hours maybe days later, hurt in new ways and recovering from the suffocation of a room with a locked window that showed possibilities I’d never reach.
Later, I thought about you amid my regrets. I always wondered, always hoped, someone opened the window for you.
#
Disassociation.
I didn’t know that there was a word for the sensation of departing from my mind and body. I hung like fog in the air, hovering alongside dust particles that glinted in the light beam over my corpse. Nothing was real for a time. My mind had to shed control of my form until it became a stranger, suspending my existence as a mercy.
If I left my body when he hurt me, then it wasn’t me who was hurting. It was just a body. He could never touch the tendrils of my spirit.
It’s why the memories—while sharp and metallic on my tongue—are so hard to spit out. When he touched me, I slipped out of that room and into the shell of my purgatory, far away from his smell, his smile, his obsidian eyes. I returned to the in-between each time it happened, torn from my body unwilling and unalive.
If I could have returned to the afterlife to stop his future destruction of you, I would have in a heartbeat.
#
I found the strength to leave [REDACTED], but his conquest continued. He gave me a black book, a diary of ruin with violent fantasies and the truth about what he did to me. He crafted it as a lure for me to come back, an excuse for madness, a petition for understanding. I read the pages and saw the crude drawings. He wrote about wanting to kill me, how he lusted to cause me pain.
I gave it back. Dear God, I gave it back. Why didn’t I turn it in? I dream about that book and imagine how it would have sounded slapped against the principal’s desk.
His ramblings read like a murder sentence, and you must understand, I was just beginning to live again. Learning to smile, to dream, to breathe.
When I talked to our principal a week after he slipped me his black book, I’d already given up the evidence, cooled my hands from the hot coals inside. A police report was my only recourse. My hands were tied like that day inside his room. There were no windows in the school office. I had to stay inside my body and mind.
She was asking me to relive my deaths and I couldn’t do it.
Please understand, I had no other choice.
#
Six months after I left, handed back his abuse and walked away from it all, I lost my footing. His damage left pockmarks in my life but he was not the only one who untethered me.
I came home from work late at night to a sterilized postmortem prep room. My father’s voice commanded me to the kitchen. It was a school night. “Death of a Salesman” waited dog-eared in my messenger bag upstairs. Mom paced, haloed in the singular light shining over the kitchen table, a loose bulb in an interrogation room.
My father threw down a stack of papers, highlighter gleaming off the ink. I read the first line and my heart sank low in my chest, pushed out into my limbs until I felt each beat in the tips of my fingers. It all flooded back: the scent of forest earth, dark soil and cedar, blood and salt and tears and decay.
Bound and highlighted, punctuated under glaring disgust were years of chat logs. Highlighted in yellows and oranges so bright they stunned me were my emotional wounds on full display: lost virginity and sex, self-harm, abuse, the aftermath of my suicide attempt. My own heart dissected in front of me.
My parents read about my rape and punished me for it.
Heat dissipated from my core and light dimmed in my eyes as I drifted above them, away from their anger. I disassociated as my father threw a cup across the room and called me a disgrace. My body sat there and refused to talk, to offer any explanation or apology for being raped. It came from a mouth that, at that time, was not mine—
No.
How beautiful, how painful that word. How little they listened.
I was floating away into the collapse of dying night stars.
When I returned, I’d become a prisoner of their house and I knew no authority could save me from either monster I faced.
At that time, I didn’t realize someone could have saved you.
#
You were doe-eyed and soft-cheeked. Just a few years younger, but the age gap felt like an ocean between us. You were someone who was beginning to bloom, something I no longer comprehended. Instead of my future, I dreamed of yours and the stars that twinkled in your eyes each time you laughed.
I watched you carefully. You were always surrounded by friends, an army of protection, I thought. You had so much of what I lacked: a family who loved you, who knew of your relationship with him, and friends who would stand up for you at the slightest hint of disrespect. It would be enough.
I wanted to believe it could be.
Social media was my only clue. I followed your every move. There were no fights, no name calling. Instead, you posted smiling selfies and giggling couple shots. I tricked myself into thinking he’d changed. He saw me as cracked and let me break, but you were different.
You had to be.
But we both know that’s not how either of our stories ends. I’m writing to tell you that you aren’t alone. That his abuse was never and could never be your fault.
I’m sorry for writing to you, X, sorry that this letter has to exist at all.
In the right timeline, I would have stopped him.
In the right timeline, it wouldn’t have happened.
From the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I don’t expect forgiveness. I only hope you read this letter and understand the choices I had to make. Above all, dear X, know:
I will keep the window open for you.
Kate Koenig (She/Her) is a queer writer and photographer living in Houston, TX. She is an MFA graduate of Creative Writing from The New School. Her writing and photography have been published in several literary journals and magazines in the US, UK, and Australia. Kate’s goal in life is to write stories for all lost girls looking to find a home. Find her on Twitter here: twitter.com/KateK_Writing and Instagram here: instagram.com/KateK_writing