Months after my rape, I remember telling people I had once been pregnant… and that I had a miscarriage.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand why I said it.
Looking back now, I realize—I was speaking in code.

I wasn’t trying to create a story. I was trying to express a loss that felt too heavy, too personal, too painful to explain out loud.

Because something was taken from me.

Not a pregnancy… but my sense of safety.
Not a child… but a part of myself.
Not something visible… but something deeply mine.

And “miscarriage” was the closest word I could find to describe that kind of loss.

It was the only language I had at the time that could hold the weight of what I was feeling:
grief, confusion, emptiness… and a quiet kind of mourning.

I was grieving something I couldn’t name yet.

So I spoke in a way that people might understand—even if they didn’t know the full truth.

Now I see it clearly.

I wasn’t lying.
I was coping.
I was communicating the only way I knew how.

Sometimes trauma doesn’t come out as direct truth—it comes out in symbols, in stories, in fragments.

And that doesn’t make the pain any less real.

If anything, it reveals just how deep it really was.