Editor’s note: Content warning: this Letter to the Editor submission discusses sexual assault.

The following letter was written by a sexual violence survivor to their assailant as part of their healing process.. By sharing this letter, the author hopes to show readers the complexities of sexual violence and its lasting effects.. This article is a submission to our Letters to the Editor section. For any questions or submissions please email Opinion@thedailyaztec.com.

I don’t remember finishing the bottle of vodka. I barely remember climbing into your bed. I don’t remember everything that happened that night, but I remember how it felt.

We were joking around and enjoying each other’s company. We walked back and forth from the door to the other end of your room, testing how drunk we were and trying to follow each other’s fingers with our eyes. You kept yelling curse words, which was so out of character for you that I took it as a clear sign you were extremely drunk. 

I have some vague, hazy memories of us lying on the floor, talking and laughing, but everything felt like a blur. I soon began to feel sleepy, so I climbed into your bed, feeling safe and thinking I could trust you. I remember hearing someone knocking on the door and watching you open it, but I don’t remember you closing it. That’s the last thing I remember before everything went dark. 

When I started to regain some consciousness, I felt you on top of me, shoving your tongue in my mouth. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, my first thought was, “This is an odd dream.” But then I felt your tongue pressing into the left side of my mouth, and I realized it wasn’t a dream. 

What bothers me isn’t the kissing itself. What bothers me is that you made out with me while I was unconscious. You were also pressing your entire body weight on me, which was both uncomfortable and painful. I told you to get off and to stop putting your weight on me—again and again—but you didn’t listen. I vaguely remember saying the words, “Please” and “I’m serious” at certain points. I tried pushing you away but you kept calling me a bitch and climbing back on top of me. This happened over and over, no matter how hard I tried to push you off. Each time you got back on me, the less strength I had to fight back. I don’t know what else you did to me while I was unconscious, and that will forever haunt me.

You also seemed to express some awareness of the situation, saying a couple of times that you should sleep on the floor so nothing further would happen between us. This makes me believe you knew what you were doing and understood the gravity of the situation, but you still chose to proceed. 

I woke up to the feeling of myself throwing up. The pressure of your weight was suffocating, causing me to throw up in your bed. I glanced over to my left and saw you sound asleep. I somehow managed to climb down the ladder and stumbled to the bathroom to throw up again. As I placed my phone on the toilet tank, my friend called me out of nowhere. It felt like a lifeline in that moment, even though I could barely hold on to a single thought. She helped me figure out what to do. She asked me what your intentions were, and I told her I didn’t know. She continued comforting me as I tore off pieces of toilet paper to clean up the vomit I dripped on the floor, stepping in it as I struggled to clean. I tried waking you up by calling out your name several times, but you didn’t respond.

The next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor after blacking out. I checked my phone and saw two missed calls from my friend. Later, she told me she had hung up because her phone was dying and I had become unresponsive toward the end of our call. The call log shows it lasted 1 hour and 8 minutes. 

I looked over at your desk and saw the vodka bottle was empty. I was shivering, my head was spinning, my clothes were soaked in vomit, and my hair was matted with it. The taste and smell were awful—vomit in my hair, on my clothes, all over my face and soaking into my socks. I zipped up my jacket to cover the vomit on my shirt and left your room. When I got to the elevator, I leaned against its walls and rested my head back. I waited for it to reach the first floor, but it stopped midway. A girl walked in, and I mumbled, “Sorry, I’m so drunk.” She replied, “It’s okay. I’m so high.” She stared at me for a moment before asking if I was okay. All I could do was quietly say I was fine.

When I got to the front desk, I asked the girls working there for my ID and if someone could help me get back to my dorm building. I was so humiliated, reeking of alcohol and vomit. I felt so ashamed that at one point, I could feel my eyes starting to water with tears, but I didn’t want to cry. The lights in the lobby were so blinding, I could barely keep my eyes open. I spoke to the girls with my eyes half-closed, constantly apologizing and repeating that I was 21. I told them I was afraid we’d get in trouble since I had supplied the alcohol and you were only 19. They reassured me that the amnesty policy protected us. 

I also asked if someone could check on you because I needed to make sure you were okay, even if I couldn’t quite process what had happened to me yet.

I nodded off in the lobby while they figured out what to do with me. At some point, I went to the bathroom to throw up more, and one of the workers knocked on the door to make sure I was okay. I don’t remember much else from that moment on, but eventually, one of the workers had her friend, who also lives in my dorm building, come get me. Her friend doesn’t work for SDSU. She didn’t have to do this—yet she went out of her way to walk from my dorm building to his dorm building at 2 a.m. just to help a drunk stranger. 

I don’t remember her name, but I’ll never forget her kindness. As we walked, I threw up into some bushes. She held my hair back and kept saying to me, “You’re okay.” I wanted to tell her my hair was already soaked in vomit, but I couldn’t get the words out between heaves. I later managed to tell her I thought I had been assaulted, but even saying that felt unreal like it happened to someone else. 

The four days between the incident and our phone were absolute hell. I replayed every fuzzy memory, trying to piece together what happened, unsure of what to do, or if I should do anything at all. I kept asking myself if this was somehow my fault or if I had somehow provoked you. I wondered if I had asked for it in some way or if I’d done something to make you think it was okay. I thought about whether I pressured you into letting me stay over. I even questioned if you telling me “no pressure” to drink more was actually a subtle attempt to get me to drink more. I still ask myself why I went over to your place and why I decided to drink with you. 

After we left Eureka, you tried to leave, but I was the one who asked, “Wait, don’t you want the wrapping paper and to try the alcohol?” Everyone tells me not to blame myself—even you said it wasn’t my fault—but it’s nearly impossible not to. 

They say drinking doesn’t change who we are but can bring out a side of us people don’t usually see. I began to wonder if your actions reflected something deeper, like feelings or thoughts that were already there. I still don’t know what your intentions were that night or if you understood how incapacitated I was and saw it as an opportunity to take advantage of me. I may never fully understand why you made the choices you did that night and that’s something I need to come to terms with. 

I wrote out a bunch of texts to send you, but none of them felt right. I even thought about talking to you in person, but that definitely wouldn’t have made it any easier. Those four days were exhausting and emotionally brutal. Every hour felt more draining than the last, but they made me realize that if I stayed silent, I might regret it, not just for myself, but for anyone else you might hurt. 

When I decided to call you, it wasn’t easy. I almost didn’t. It took a lot of encouragement from those around me. Reliving that night, putting it into words, and saying it out loud to you took so much out of me. It was like trying to fix a broken mirror, each shard cutting deeper into my hands as I relayed it back. Part of me wanted to forget about it and move on, but I couldn’t. When you said you didn’t remember much, it left me questioning even more. 

I don’t know if you truly don’t remember what happened, or if you do and were just hoping I’d be too drunk to remember.. I can’t know what’s going on in your mind, and that leaves me with so much uncertainty. But the fact of the matter is, you ended your very first semester of college by sexually assaulting an unconscious, drunk girl. That’s the choice you made. That’s what you will have to live with.

I understand you were drunk too, but alcohol didn’t climb on top of me. Alcohol didn’t shove its way into my mouth. Alcohol didn’t call me a bitch. Alcohol didn’t ignore me when I told you to get off. Alcohol didn’t strip away my autonomy. You did.

At first, I wasn’t going to report anything as I wasn’t sure if this was anything serious or if this was just drunk making out. I didn’t know if this even had grounds for Title IX. However, one of my friends asked me, “What if he does it to someone else?” I couldn’t ignore that. I don’t want to imagine how I’d feel if I found out you did this to someone else and I hadn’t done whatever I could to help prevent it. 

I didn’t even fill out the report myself; a staff member who works with sexual violence prevention had to do it for me. After she filled out the form, she handed me her laptop so I could put in your name. I couldn’t do it. 

This staff member works in the same office as I do and I’ve met her before, which embarrassed me a bit because of the situation I was in. At the end of our meeting, with tears streaming down my face, I still managed to tell her, “If you ever see me at work, I was never here.” 

She laughed a bit, and even though it was very brief, it reminded me that despite everything I was going through, I hadn’t lost myself. I was still in there somewhere.

When I met with the Title IX Investigator, that was when I gave out your name. The next day, I received a phone call from her telling me she had spoken with the Title IX Coordinator who verified that you had violated the Affirmative Consent policy. Afterward, I met with the Victim Advocate who encouraged me to ask you to meet in person, even though I was a bit hesitant. 

The reason I chose to withdraw the Title IX report was that I wanted to give you the chance to learn from your actions and make a real effort to grow. You have no idea how lucky you are that I didn’t pursue anything further. Just because I didn’t pursue an investigation doesn’t mean your choices weren’t wrong, and it certainly doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt me. You have no idea how much grace I gave you by not going down that path. You are so, so, lucky. 

Sometimes I think about how, just a couple of days before that night, we were sitting in the Student Union, chatting and petting dogs together. I kept sending you Snaps of the dogs licking my face, begging you to join me. I remember the long walks we took at night, those moments when we’d talk about everything and nothing, the kind of conversations that felt like we could walk forever and still have more to say. You would smile and dramatically roll your eyes whenever I made a stupid joke, and I’ll miss the quiet laugh and the way you’d scoff like you couldn’t help but find it funny. 

Those little moments meant a lot to me, as small as they might seem to anyone else. That’s what makes it so hard now, knowing what came after. It’s like those memories belong to someone else entirely. I feel like I’m looking at two completely different people. I don’t know which one is the real  __    . Maybe you don’t either. I don’t know if that person ever really existed, or if I just created that version of you in my head. But I hope the person I thought of as a friend still exists somewhere, buried beneath whatever made you capable of hurting me like that. Because I miss him. 

Sometimes I think about how we only knew each other for three weeks and how it felt like we instantly clicked. Since we lived so close to each other, I was looking forward to seeing you over Christmas break. I wondered what kind of connection we could have built over time. 

Instead, I spent the break surrounded by people celebrating the holidays, while I felt hollow inside, like I was watching life happen from the sidelines. While everyone else was enjoying the season, I was hurting every single day, trying to match their vibes while quietly carrying the weight of everything that had happened. I should have been looking forward to seeing you, to reconnecting, but I was barely keeping it together. It felt like the world was moving on without me like no one could see just how much I was falling apart. 

I’ve always understood the purpose of content warnings for sexual violence, but they seemed like things I could acknowledge loosely. I’d scan through them online or see them on TV and move on. During the break, I was listening to a podcast and heard one of those warnings and it felt like those words were directed at me. Now every time I hear them, I have to pause and think about whether or not I want to continue whatever I’m doing because it has become personal in a way I never wanted it to be. 

It’s also insane that we met at a campus event where we were given a copy of Know My Name by Chanel Miller—a book meant to empower survivors of sexual violence. I never imagined the bitter irony that the guy sitting next to me would assault me just three weeks later. I had plans to read the book eventually, but after the incident, I immediately picked it up. 

The more I read, the more I felt like I was reading pieces of my own story. Like her, I was also incapacitated during my assault and in the aftermath, we were both blamed by others for simply being older than the men who hurt us. Her words gave me the validation and comfort I didn’t know I needed, and she helped me begin to comprehend my own experience. Her story will stay with me forever. 

I strongly encourage you to read it. It might help you understand the weight of what I’ve been carrying, the emotional toll it’s taken on me, and the confusion I’ve had to navigate. Reading it could give you a better sense of what I’m feeling now and the struggle I’ve gone through.

I remember two days after our phone call, we ran into each other at the exact place on campus where we had met just a few weeks ago. I’ll never forget how different the interaction felt this time. When I saw you, my heart started racing and my chest tightened. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and all I wanted to do was run away. I almost hid in one of the empty rooms just to get away from you. Instead, I froze and turned to my friend and shared everything with him. I was desperate for some kind of lifeline, something to hold on to. I felt like I was drowning and I needed someone to help pull me out of the flood of anxiety that was trying to swallow me whole. 

A week after we talked in person, I was prescribed anti-anxiety medication. Your actions have infected my everyday life, the way I think, the way I sleep, the way I exist. This is something I’ll have to deal with for a long time. I don’t expect to have all the answers or to feel fully healed anytime soon. But I’m learning that it’s okay not to be okay. 

Despite everything, I am choosing to offer you forgiveness, but let me be clear—it does not erase my pain, nor does it take away the burden you’ll carry for what you did. Forgiveness in situations like these is very rare and never offered lightly. I haven’t fully reached that point yet; it’s a messy and complicated process that I continue to work through every day.

I’m offering you forgiveness not because I have to, but because I want to. It takes strength to forgive, strength I’m not even sure I have. It means I’m choosing to believe in the possibility that you can be better, but that choice depends on you proving it. 

People told me I owe you nothing. They said I should hate you for what you did, and honestly, there were times when I wanted to. But I believe in the good that still exists within you, and I want to believe the person I considered a friend is still there. I hope this experience stays with you forever—not as a source of shame, but as something you can look back on in the future to see how far you’ve come.

Do not take it lightly. Do not take it for granted. Let it humble you. Let it change you. I hope you learn from this, make better choices, and ensure that no one else has to go through what I did. 

I am giving you the chance to rewrite who you are. While I believe you can do better, it’s far more important to truly recognize how your actions affected me—not just for my sake, but for yours as well. You can’t undo what you did, but you can choose what comes next. I don’t believe people are defined by their worst moments, but I do believe they’re defined by how they respond to them. Let this be the turning point that shapes you into someone better. 

If you or a loved one need support and/or to explore your options please check out https://cphd-titleix.sdsu.edu/title-ix