Content warning: Mentions of sexual harassment and rape.
No one warned me about boys. In Grade 6, I was ill-prepared when a group of them took my backpack and tossed it in the boy’s bathroom. My textbooks and notebooks were wet from whatever was leaking under the urinals. They locked me in as soon as I ran to retrieve my stuff. Closed the lights and shut the door. I was afraid of the dark, panic kicked in as I spun around and struggled to find the light switch. Growing up, they said I would be safe when the sun is shining in the middle of the sky.
When you’re a kid, you worry about monsters that creep in the middle of the night. The aswang1 your lola said that will be scratching on your window, or the dwende2 who will clip off your tiny toes. Those were the terrifying beasts that should haunt my dreams. Bloodsuckers and winged creatures loved the dark. So, they tuck me in at night, thinking they’d protect me from the sigbin3 hiding in the shadows of my bed.
Thanks to the bathroom incident, a dwende cutting off my toe wasn’t a scary thought.
I was five when a boy hit me for the first time. The blow behind my head was hard, but I didn’t think it was intentional. The second time he hit me was during recess. I was sliding down a slide, and he came running towards me with a boxer’s stance as soon as I hit the ground. I felt the heavy weight of his fist on my shoulder. He was laughing at the bruise that started to take shape.
My cries were in sync with his laugh. The teacher rushed over and asked what was wrong. I said, “He hurt me” stretching out my arm to show her the bruise.
She patted my arm and said, “Don’t cry, he only did this because he has a crush on you and doesn’t know how to say it. Boys are like that.”
Boys are like that. Don’t worry. So, I let him hit me and blushed at the thought of maybe we’ll one day get married. For the longest time, the bluish-purple marks and scratches were my signs of love and affection. Until another girl caught his fist’s attention.
When I was 10, my mother told me to put extra underwear in my backpack. I didn’t want to because it felt like an embarrassing thing to have. She noticed my flushed cheeks and frustration, she held my hands and said, “It’s just underwear, everyone wears it. I wear it, you wear it. This one is in case of emergencies, like if you accidentally wet your pants.” My mother was already an adult, so her underwear was just underwear, she already grew out of shame. I was too young to know the word, yet my body already knew the feeling.
What my mother didn’t account for was how cruel young boys were at that age. During recess, two boys decided to raid my bag and found my extra pair of underwear. They tossed it around, playing catch, and using it as a slingshot. My face started burning red, I could barely look up from my biscuits and tried my best to tune out the laughter. They threw my underwear back at me and called me gross. What was I supposed to do if they threw my underwear at my face?
This was a question I thought I had the answers to when I was 19 and had to pick up my discarded clothes off the floor. The guy I met on Tinder tossed my underwear at my face when he caught me trying to sneak out. I rushed out with my head held high. Where was the shame I felt nine years before? It was just underwear.
I was 13 when a boy shoved his penis at my face. Everything else that happened beforehand didn’t matter. I was happily reading Twilight on my desk. All I wanted to do that day was finish the last few pages and imagine a life where I was saved by a 100-year-old vampire interested in teenage girls. Stephenie Meyer’s words were starting to make me thirsty, all I wanted was to buy a drink. None of that mattered.
He backed me into a corner with all the boys in the room, swinging it at my face—I closed my eyes tightly and prayed to some God’s divine intervention. My forehead felt the tip and instinct told me to punch it—I did. I opened my eyes and saw him curled to the ground crying.
Moments later, he and another group of boys talked about which girl in the class would enjoy getting raped. He stormed towards my desk. Afraid he’d say my name in their disgusting discussion, he looked at me and said another girl’s name—describing what he would do in frightening detail. I never went to the bathroom alone again.
They say my fear of men is irrational. Not all men. I can’t even look back at my childhood fondly. Nostalgia was scarier than the filthy, gorilla-like kapre4 the manggagaway5 caught watching my window. It’s the uncle who called my 13-year-old body sexy, I’m more afraid of. I was supposed to be terrified of myths, creatures, and demons. I should go home early because I’m afraid of the manananggal6 flying above my head at night, not the man who will follow a 12-year-old girl home.
They tell me that I become used to what I endured. As if to say, my childhood pain-proofed me to survive. Numb to cat calls and ass grabs. That’s a lie. I lived through it, I hated it, and I still don’t know what to do with it more than move on. Sure, they were only boys—kids who didn’t know better. Boys will be boys, they say. By now they learned their lesson and God I wish that was true. One of them has a kid now—a daughter.
1An umbrella term for various shape-shifting monsters in Philippine mythology that never visited my window.
2A goblin-like creature, who lives in old houses and loves to steal shiny things, and protects my locked doors.
3A blood-sucking creature that looks like a goat with a curved back, who guards the space underneath my bed.
4A mythical creature that’s only described as a tree giant, watching me sleep, making sure that I was safe alone.
5A witch who can hex those who wronged me, all I needed was to give their names, and she’ll take care of it.
6A winged monster that is able to separate its upper torso from the lower part of its body, guiding my way home at night.
Louie Anne is a queer writer, poet, and an avid reader with a book-buying compulsion. Their work has appeared in the Southeast Asian journal Anak Sastra, Moot Point Magazine, and Ukiyoto Publishing’s anthology of love poems and stories, Magkasintahan.
VAGABOND CITY 