2001 was a bad year for a lot of people.

September marked the beginning of my high school career and the end of my short-lived belief that catastrophes occurred everywhere except New York City. Bad things had been happening to me inside my home for a long time. But that year, in early September, I realized it was possible to be more scared than I felt when in my father’s or cousins’ presence, anticipated or otherwise.

A few weeks after that cruelly beautiful September day, in an unauthorized extension of my school’s Columbus Day long weekend, I made a detour towards a Jackson Heights apartment instead of my school in Riverdale. For four long weeks dilated by the novelty of the horror that had descended upon my city, I contemplated my own mortality and arrived at the conclusion that I needed to lose my virginity.

I’ll take a moment to clarify — when I say virginity, I am not referring to the particular state of conceptualized purity we confer upon a female and her body when she and it are still unfamiliar with the penetrating force of a penis. The virginity that I needed to lose was shrouded by the small scraps of dignity I preserved when silent, anoxic gasps escaped my mouth, leaving all my cries of resistance like rocks in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to lose the virginity I kept aside for myself all the times that I said it didn’t count when people did things to me that I did not ask for and did not want.

I didn’t want to lose it for love or so I could tell my friends embellished stories of what I did the day I cut school for the first time. I wanted to finally know what it felt like to give someone permission to do to me what three others had done without it. I couldn’t die without knowing what it felt like to say Yes, go ahead. I want you to touch me there. I want to touch you like this. You can put that thing inside of me.

And as soon as I knew, I wanted to die. Again.

The first time I wanted to die, I put in what seemed like a solid effort. There were pills involved; vodka that I had recently watered down to hide my drinking from my mother. But I was in middle school. What did I know about how to kill myself? Apparently not enough. I woke up the next day and went to school.

This time around, I was hesitant to develop a plan. I had grown a lot more attached to my little sister, who was blossoming into an extremely sharp-witted and cunning four-year-old. It irritated me that my love for her was the only thing I saw between me and my mission to be rid of my seemingly eternal suffering. Misery had begun seeping into my life when my worries should have only involved forgotten permission slips instead of having to change into clothes after school that hands could not slip into or under. Wearing the turquoise unitard my mom bought me for a part in a school play hidden under the same clothes I had worn to school was a brilliant move on my part. It’s a shame that Lycra tears so easily. Surviving that nightmare with my cousins only to endure a similar terror with my father left me convinced that suicide would be an elegant solution to a very vulgar problem. My only issue was that I hadn’t factored my sister into the equation I was trying to solve so urgently.

Depressed, despondent, detached. These are words that may have come to my therapist’s mind as she got to know yet another victim of childhood sexual abuse.

Would you like to tell me a bit about why you’re here? Well you could say it’s because some people molested me, but I was kind of hoping I could stay home from school if I told my mom why I was always sobbing when she came to wake me up. She called you and sent me to school anyway.