An open letter to my abuser

It's just a phase, I say, lying to myself, taking another drag of the cigarette I've been holding. The nicotine buzz hits me, and I realize I'm no longer the same person. Would Dipta, a few years ago, even think of this as the right thing to do? Perhaps time really changes people; it changed me for the good and the bad. As time faded, the obligations on my shoulders have gotten heavier, and so has this unfulfilling void that always makes me feel empty. I dumped the ashes in an ashtray and sipped on my coffee.  

The longer I stared into the smoke that passed out the window, the more I got in-depth with my emotions. Have I always felt this way? Have I always been an empty shell of a skeleton with nothing but the emotions that people around me fill up? Who am I, to begin with? Why am I here, and when will this stop? 

 Perhaps answering all these questions requires me to strip naked in front of the mirror and point out things that I see as flaws in me since August 8. It's been difficult moving on from what happened that day; the constant reminders, the panic attacks, and the shivers don't really go away. My words wouldn't be enough to describe how incredibly hard these months have been for me, someday I wake up feeling the best, and some days I don't wake up from my bed at all. The agony of this monotony of life eats me up sometimes; despite the fact that I've come to terms with him being my perpetrator, it does not give me enough justice to move on from the fact that he assaulted me. Every time I try to feel something new or touch someone, reminders of him forcing himself on me creep inside me, and I lay still crying; the patterns have been repetitive enough for me to realize I am entirely unable to give or receive love from people around me. I've been avoiding people for more than a month now, and I'm unsure how my friends, cousins, or acquaintances are doing. Social interactions at this point seem like a bizarrely overwhelming thing for me to involve in.

After all the guilt and bargaining, the depression finally hit me; even though I had accepted what had happened to me long ago, it went unnoticed how the anger inside me never seemed to stop. Being constantly triggered by a room full of men, dark alleys, or even cafes in Putalisadak, I've been avoiding everything. How does one even move on from something like this when the thought of just going to classes and doing mundane tasks feels heavy? The number of visits I've had with my psychiatrist just seems to prove that no amount of medication is going to help me through it but nonetheless, I keep on taking them with the hope of getting better. I constantly think of how I could have avoided the situation or how I could have fought back against him. Still, the conclusion always draws out that in front of a man, I'm nothing more than a pair of tits, and he'll do everything in his power to be the dominant one, even if it means he'll be assaulting the other person.

I'm not sure if he knows the impact he's had on me since he forcefully stripped me off of the clothes I loved. Is he even aware of how painful it was for me to accept what he had been doing to my body cause I wasn't strong enough to fight him? I have not been able to forgive myself for putting up in that situation; fully aware of the fact that none of it was my fault, I still cannot help but blame it all on myself.

He's destroyed me, and sometimes I think I'm beyond repair cause all that I've been doing is running away from it instead of facing it through, but how would I even run away when I'm stuck in the same coffee shop with the same cigarette in my hand?