[A note on content: This essay contains discussions of sexual assualt]
“i was wearing a pink and brown spotted bra from victoria’s secret. i was so happy that i could already spill out of victoria’s secret, something that felt so grown up. i kept that bra for a long time. i kept it because in my mind it was “the bra i was raped in”, and i needed reminders, because i was going to get lost in it.” – jailbait, ruralisolationshortie
The night I was sexually assaulted, I was wearing a pale blue dress. It was a satin wraparound slip, purchased three years prior from H&M. I had argued with my parents at the store until they agreed to buy it for me—it cost about 2,000 rupees. Rarely before had I wanted an item of clothing so badly. At seventeen, I thought slip dresses were the epitome of elegance; it helped that this particular one was also my favorite color.
For the next couple of years, it mostly remained carefully tucked away in a small cloth bag in my cupboard, decidedly more special than all my other clothes. I wore it outside only once–to a fancy dinner at a wildly expensive Mexican restaurant. In 2021, during the second wave of the pandemic, I took it out to play dress-up, then carefully put it back in storage, unsure of when I would see it next. Three months later, my best friend N invited me to her birthday party.
I originally planned to wear a different dress to the party, ordering something black and ruffled from a sketchy website. But they canceled my order two days before the celebration. Scrambling to find something at the last moment, I remembered my pale blue dress, stored away in my cupboard. As usual, I couldn’t figure out all the strings, so I asked my mother to tie it up for me. Leaving the house for the first time in over a year felt special, just like the dress.
***
The girl who sexually assaulted me was one of my closest friends. As she sat next to me in a room full of people, I felt her arm creep up, higher and higher, until she was groping my chest. Three years later, I’ve finally started to forget the details of it, something I resolved to do that very night. In bed after I returned home, still slightly tipsy, I stared hard at the ceiling and sternly told myself that I wasn’t allowed to even think about what had happened. If I reflected on it more consciously, I reasoned, it would become a whole thing, and honestly, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
For her, I had infinite excuses. She had been drunk. She had told me, only a month ago, that she had feelings for me. Maybe I’d led her on in some way. Maybe she’d just put her arm around me platonically and it slipped. Maybe when she’d grabbed my arm and forced it around herself, that had also been purely friendly? Surely–even if I hadn’t suddenly stood up and walked off–things wouldn’t have gone any further? My biggest fear was blowing things out of proportion. I was convinced she would never intentionally hurt me and relieved when, the next morning, she woke up with a hangover and no memory of her actions. She’d be devastated with guilt if she remembered, I was certain–and I just wanted to protect her. It took me months to even use the term ‘sexual assault’ for what had happened. When I finally did, it was still uttered softly, hesitantly, inciting more guilt in me than relief.
During all of this, the blue dress remained in my cupboard. This time, though, it wasn’t painstakingly folded and packed into a cloth bag. Instead, it was stuffed carelessly onto the top shelf, pushed to the very back. Before I had even begun to process that I’d been sexually assaulted by one of my closest friends, I knew I wanted it out of my sight. I kept insisting–to others and to myself–that I’d had so much fun at the party, yet I couldn’t bear to look at this reminder of the night.
Even as I tried determinedly to turn a blind eye to what had happened, I found myself spiraling out of control. At random moments during the day, I’d burst into tears. In my brain, there was a constant sound of distant screaming. I could never stop analyzing every detail of that night, and began to grow furious at all my friends who had been in the same room but somehow did not notice what was happening. Even worse was the paranoia that they had, in fact, noticed, and chosen to ignore it because it wasn’t that big a deal. A month later, I finally told my sexual assaulter (a term that felt reductive and deeply wrong to describe someone who had once been my closest companion) what she didn’t know. She apologized with the fervorous guilt I had expected, before telling our other friends–including my best friend N–that I had admitted to making the whole thing up for attention. I don’t know how many people believed her; I do know, however, that N thankfully did not, not for a moment.
***
In one of my favorite Netflix series Sex Education, high schooler Aimee Gibbs is sexually assaulted on a bus. In arguably the most poignant storyline from the show, she grapples with the trauma of this violation, struggling to reconnect with her body and sexuality. “I just want to be the old me again,” she earnestly tells her sex therapist.
Instead of a blue dress, Aimee has a pair of blue jeans. “Those hateful jeans she wore the day she was physically assaulted on the bus announced their presence casually, catching her off guard while she rummaged through her wardrobe,” writes Leigh for DigitalSpy, “Her visual unease over the jeans encapsulates so much: her vulnerability, her fear, her distress. Yet when those jeans (those hateful jeans) fell to the floor, I didn’t once question why she had kept something that was connected to so much of her pain.”
I, too, could not throw my blue dress away. I flinched every time I saw it while rearranging my wardrobe or searching for something to wear. I was affronted by the very sight of it, as if it had personally set out to do me harm. It was, as Leigh writes, “a physical reminder of [my] pain.” And yet, I found myself oddly intrigued by it. If I came across it on the right days, I’d sink with it to the floor, running my hands across the soft satin, observing it carefully, searching for God-knows-what. The dress marked the one night that divided my life into a before and after. Before, I had been trusting and open, refusing to even trim my waist-length hair after my grandmother’s death because she had liked it long. After, I was on medication for depression and anxiety, addicted to alcohol, and chopped my hair into a pixie cut on an impulse. Like Aimee, I just wanted to be my old self again. Like Aimee, I never would be.
N had her own blue dress, too. It was a reusable cloth mask she wore to the house of a man she went out with who assaulted her at his apartment. She remembers the clothes she was wearing as well: a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. “I don’t associate those with the incident, for whatever reason,” she tells me now, as we talk over Zoom, “Maybe it was the mask’s immediate proximity to my face or the fact that I remember wearing it all the way to his place and all the way coming back. I guess it just depends on what your brain latched onto in that moment, whether it was a phrase, a word, a feeling or a particular object.”
For N, too, the mask began to feel hostile before she’d even processed what had happened. She hid it away in her cupboard because it was uncomfortable to look at. “When people say that your body remembers the things that you try to block from your mind, that was very true,” she concedes, “For a time after it happened, I hadn’t really registered–or was trying not to register–that a part of it was not consensual. So, for a while, when I couldn’t use that mask anymore, I didn’t understand why. I just thought it smelled weird or felt like it was suffocating me a bit.” Because wearing masks was more a necessity than desire, she reasons, she didn’t really think about it much. Instead, she just began to use other masks. “It was only much later, when I talked to my friends about what happened and how it felt, that I saw the mask again and made the connection.”
When, some months after the incident, N returned a pink jacket she had borrowed from me, I found something lumpy in its pocket. Confused, I put my hand in, only to pull out the mask. She’d probably left it in accidentally. Your mask is here, I texted her, ready to return it the next time we met. Good, she replied, keep it. I didn’t mind at all. In a way, I felt like I was taking on some of her burden, relieving her of a small weight. To me, the mask was only a reminder of my best friend and all we would do for each other–so I let it stay in my pocket, where it still is.
Over the years, N says, she has come to believe even more that certain objects carry certain energies. It is the same energy that I’ve sensed in my blue dress. “It has this weight to it, almost,” I’ve often told people, “Like I’m holding it in my hands but I’m feeling it in my chest.” Yet, we hardly ever speak about the materiality of such significant memories: not just the traumatic ones, but also the good ones. Returning from a holiday with some of my closest friends, I couldn’t dissociate the black shirt I’d worn then from walks in mountainous marketplaces. Every time I look at my white ballet flats, I think: they’ve accompanied me to my favorite author’s birthday party. When my great-uncle passed away, I stole his favorite kurta, which I still wear on days when I need to feel safe. For months after first hooking up with a man I fell in love with, I would look at the torn beige underwear I was wearing then, reluctant to throw them away.
If objects carry certain energies, however, I also believe they lose the weight of them with time, and as we heal. A year after being sexually assaulted, I texted a friend asking if she wanted my blue dress. Just give me a bottle of Sula wine in return and we’ll call it even, I said. She agreed, thrilled because she’d always loved the dress. A few days later, I texted her again: Actually, I think I’ll keep the dress for now. On Christmas that year, I took it out of my cupboard again. It felt lighter–still not completely untainted, but more like a dress than a trigger. At the Christmas party that night, I would be surrounded by the very same friends who had helped me heal in the last year. They’d been next to me, unwavering, as I drank, screamed, broke down, hooked up with person after person to reclaim control of my body, and desperately tried to reach out to my sexual assaulter again because I missed her. They would be next to me, unwavering, when I was ultimately better. They were the reason I could wear the dress again.
In the final season of Sex Education, Aimee burns her blue jeans, euphoric and finally liberated from an experience that has long weighed her down. I’ve thought often about why I haven’t been able to similarly get rid of my dress. N got rid of her mask, after all, by giving it to me. “I think I’ve come far enough to not have that reaction to it anymore, but I still don’t think I would choose to wear it,” she admits, “Nobody wants a reminder of a bad memory.” I, on the other hand, have gone back to treating the dress with the same care, folding it gently into a cloth bag and saving it for special occasions.
I have theories, of course: while N was sexually assaulted by a man she hardly knew, I was sexually assaulted by one of my closest friends. When we met for the last time ever, I was in that dress; it was, thus, my last tether to a year-long friendship that once made me feel the safest I’d ever been. The passage of my friend’s home, where I’d last stood with my sexual assaulter, had a similar heavy energy to it. So heavy was it, in fact, that I was constantly on the verge of tears the next time I went there.
Another girl I’ve spoken to confessed to me that she’d been wearing her favorite jacket when she was sexually assaulted. “I’d had it for years before and I thought no, I’m not letting go of this because of this incident,” she says, with determination, “I tried to tell myself to not let the trauma attach onto a material thing. Sometimes, it still reminds me of the incident, but not always.” Maybe it was a similar resolve–to not let my sexual assaulter ruin a dress I loved alongside everything else she had destroyed–that led to me keeping the dress.
There is something to be said about the weightage that sexual experience is given, especially for women. In one of my favourite books jailbait, writer ruralisolationshortie writes about the bra she was wearing when she was sexually assaulted–and how she kept it for a long time, after, because it was “the bra i was raped in.” Many of my girlfriends have grown up being told—by parental figures and teachers, even—that sexual harassment is an ordinary and definite part of a woman’s life, something they just need to get used to. It is described as a rite of passage, almost: a transition from girlhood to womanhood.
My blue dress was the only witness to this transition. My sexual assaulter, drunk, had forgotten what had happened. The people around us hadn’t noticed. I remembered what had happened—as did my dress. For months after, I’d find myself thinking of the blue dress as the last vestige of my girlhood, which, in Indian culture, is latched onto the concept of purity. Maybe that was why I struggled—and still struggle—to part with it, why it still feels so intrinsically attached to my selfhood. Maybe, when I finally do, it will be with the conviction that what happened that night does not define me.
