I Was Cruel When I Left.. Written By: Laura Reavis Barnes | by Laura R Barnes | Aug, 2025

Written By: Laura Reavis Barnes

Sometimes, I forget how I was so cruel towards him. In the end, when I left him, I seemed just so mean..

Only, that was just after I told him to stop, using both my voice and hands, even after freezing up and being terrified to move, even the signs I gave him before I even left that room…

Those rooms.

Twice in counting, too much and too many times did it happen.

The marks that it left on me, the marks that I sobbed over, that destroyed everything I had left of me, I sobbed for hours, days, weeks, months, and over a year to presently, after trying so hard to scrub them off, when I couldn’t. Because that’s not something you can just “erase”.

So I was then left unclean, and filthy, making everything around me dirty. Left as someone vulnerable and ashamed over something I shouldn’t be ashamed of. Something that wasn’t my fault. Something that even when I knew it was real, I still doubted myself for him, because I just thought that it might have been my fault.

I was so scared for what seemed to be no reason, too embarrassed of what he had done, I couldn’t bear it to tell his parents what happened, going to stupid lengths to keep my uncleanliness a secret. A secret I couldn’t even bottle it up just by myself. Writing a stupid letter to him through the mail, that I had known what he did, and that if I found out that he ever did it to anyone else after me, I was going to tell his parents… the entire thing was created in a feeling of panic. I sounded more pleading than confident, more ashamed than wanting to get justice, I don’t know if he could tell either.

I then became someone, a person who gave him too much power over me, someone hurt and affected for the rest of my life. Even after the letter, He then shamed and judged me, when he was the one who dirtied me in the first place.

Since everything happened, I asked myself “why did it happen to me?”, because it didn’t change anything in me, other than create misery and even more desperation than I had before, to leave everyone and everything behind.

I think I just might infinitely be searching for an answer to that. I’ll just forever be looking for an unexplainable response to his actions. An inexplicable explanation for what he did to me.