I am 25 years old now. I have never dated a guy or for that matter even kissed anyone. I don’t know what it is to be loved by someone. Sometimes I feel extremely out of place when my friends talk to me about their past relationships. They often talk about their boyfriends.

I too wish for a perfect companion but my experiences make me doubt the entire community of men.

We had many financial issues in our family. So we had to move houses often. I never felt at home in any of the places that I lived in.

Somehow I never felt at ‘HOME’ with my family members too.

I remember the times when I was a kid. I would always want my father to ‘pat me to sleep.’

I never realized when this ‘patting his princess to sleep’ activity became a sexual activity for him.

Obviously, I did not realize this until much later. One day my mom was down with an infection and was bedridden for 2 weeks. I was 15 years old at that time. That was also the time when kids had begun exploring the world of internet and had started surfing online. It was also the time when we would see if our crushes were online on Yahoo messenger. We would also check our updates on Orkut.

My mother always insisted that we used the internet only when my dad was around. She wanted him to sit next to us while we were using the internet. We lived 25 km away from the city and had practically no social life. The internet was the only medium through which we could connect with our friends and crushes.

I would come back from school every day and ask for permission to use the messenger. But I was allowed to do so only when my dad returned from office. He would stare at the screen constantly and keep a watch on the tab to check what I was doing. We had practically no personal life that most teenagers enjoyed.

One day, when I was using my right hand to scroll down the bar, his hand swiftly slid down under my boob. He applied pressure to it and fondled it.

To be very frank, I did not understand why he was doing that. But I let it go thinking that it was an accident. From that day onward, he would wait for me to ask for permission to use the internet so that he could play with my body. I remember how this continued for around a week.

Every day he would slide his hands either between my thighs or put them behind my shoulders and unbuckle my strap or he would put it under my shirt to fondle my breasts.

After a week, I stopped using the internet. I stopped asking my father to ‘pat me to sleep.’ Instead of finding safety in sleep I was scared that someone might enter the room at night. We shifted two houses after this but I still don’t find peace at night. It has been 9 years since this happened. But I still don’t know why he behaved like that.

He is a very humble and sober human being. Sometimes, I feel I must have done something wrong for him to have such sexual feelings for me. I try and convince myself that maybe all that I had experienced was just some weird dream that I am unable to forget. 

I wonder if my brain is making up such stories. I then think that maybe all this never really happened. But I can’t forget it. I can’t trust my father. I hate my father’s touch. I hate it when any family member touches my head. I shiver when I think of having a family of my own. I find it extremely difficult to trust people. I have changed from a chirpy person to a person who hates human beings after this incident.

Every time I even think of having a family of my own, one question immediately pops up in my heart – “What if this happens to my daughter?”

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