I Wore a Onesie Courtney Dowling + Sofie Sund

Sofie Sund Courtney J. Dowling Photography by Writing by I WORE A ONESIE

Some betrayals cut so deep there aren’t words to encapsulate the grief. It’s more easily explained through moments: moments so unbearably tragic, so indescribably harrowing, you genuinely aren’t sure if you will live to see another day of sunlight. You don’t believe that you will ever feel beyond anguish.

When I was nine years old, I celebrated Halloween in a hot pink flapper dress complete with a pair of black satin gloves and a sequined feathered headpiece. It was my favorite costume I ever wore. My parents decorated our lawn as an elaborate graveyard concealed by fog machines while orange and purple string lights wrapped around the pillars of the front porch. I filled a pillowcase with candies collected from neighbors and traded Reese’s for Twix and Kit Kats for Skittles on the landing outside my bedroom door with some kids from school. While I’d known him since the first grade, that night was the first time I’d ever spoken to [REDACTED] and spent time with him outside of a classroom. It wasn’t until years later that we truly became friends under the rosy glow of the summer sun and idle mischief at the childhood home of Laurel Acosta — Fairdale, we called it. Drunk on daiquiris and the innocence of youth, we spent the summer before senior year lounging on the pool deck, taking the train to the city for exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, and making family of whoever was around. Laurel and I, alongside our actress friend Gwen, had bonded the previous academic year through our mutual involvement in high school drama (with a capital D). We grew our squad — as Laurel’s mother Joanne aptly called us — through theatrical affiliations and old friends. I began a brief affair with Seth Gerber, an extremely tall and extremely immodest pal from Laurel’s past, that came and went with the season. My friends would hop into the backseat of my ‘97 Wrangler while I drove to watch the sunset over the Golden Gate behind the glittering night of the San Francisco skyline — windswept as we soared across the bridge, The Beatles poured through the crackling car speakers as we belted along: “are you sad because you’re on your own?... No, I get by with a little help from my friends.”

We graduated the following May, and though we all went our separate ways we remained tied together through juvenescence and its strings of naivete. That first Thanksgiving we returned to Fairdale, reunited for a last hurrah at the house we all made a home of in our indulgent nights of high school cliche. We toasted: “To the family we chose.” As we grew older, and others grew apart, something about us was timelessly intertwined. We loved

each other too much to ever let our family go. So as another year came and went, we once again found ourselves reconvened, this time at Joanne’s notably smaller apartment one town over. That November we gathered in our old prom dresses and tuxedos, playing dress up from easier days long lost to the interminability of existence. We drank heartily and danced even moreso, as though we all knew it was the last night we would ever be together. The minutes ticked on and we eventually fell victim to drowsiness. I swapped my ball gown for a sparkly unicorn onesie. Laurel took the top bunk while [REDACTED] and I shared the bottom.

His eyes met mine.

“Do you want to cuddle?” “No.”

I turned over and went to bed.

At three in the morning I awoke to find his arms wrapped around me, stuck in a spooning chokehold that I verbally rejected. Still, I thought nothing of it. He must have done this in his sleep. I removed his grasp from my body, rolled him back to his side of the bed, and fell asleep once more. It wasn’t for another two months that I became aware of the full extent of what happened to me. It took something far more heinous for the reality of my situation to dawn. To think of it is reviling. To try to envision it is unthinkable. But the rage came to fruition in the dark January evening when Gwen and I went to a Goodwill to buy cheap, breakable items we beat up in the woods with baseball bats. Screaming. Trying desperately to free ourselves of strangling despair. [REDACTED] molested her too. Only she was awake.

His fatal flaw was attempting damage control. The morning after he violated me, he spoke with Seth: “CJ must have been pretty drunk last night because she kept putting my hands on her boobs while she slept.” The morning after he violated Gwen, he spoke with Laurel: “Gwen must have been pretty drunk last night because she kept putting my hands on her boobs while she slept.” With our revelations came Laurel’s, whose own repressed memories emerged with our trauma to a night he had done the same to her two years prior. She told me later, “I didn’t think anything of it. He was just sleeping.”

When you love someone so much that, even in lieu of blood bonds, you still refer to them as family, trust is unyielding. You don’t excuse red flags because you don’t even see them. But then comes the crashing wave of gut-wrenching treachery and remembrances reemerge from the shadows of subconscious.

It wasn’t an accident. He didn’t roll over in his sleep and land on top of me. To know a deception so disfiguring is deathlike. I thought I knew pain before this; I thought I knew suffering. But I was only a child living in a dreamlike state of idle credulity. My friends were my family, that was something I once believed to be not an idea but a fact of being — like the blueness of the sky or the intangibility of faith. Before, I believed in the goodness of others. I believed that people were made to have benevolent intentions but were corrupted by the evils of the world. But [REDACTED] was not made evil: he was born vile. And he robbed me of hope.

To be assaulted may as well be a woman’s rite of passage. I was in eighth grade when someone told me one in six women will be sexually assaulted in their lives. At the time I thought that was some kind of sick exaggeration. I was still young enough to think it inconceivable. But a few months later a friend of mine was raped for the first time. She was only thirteen. The following years saw every woman in my life become a statistic. One by one, they fell like dominoes. It became a question not of if it would happen to me, but when.

I thought that it would be in a frat basement at half passed midnight, or in the grimy underbelly of some European club I would stumble upon in a daze of adolescent impropriety, or, perhaps, in the alley behind my South LA apartment. I like to wear mini skirts and high heels, the sorts of garments they say attract assault, so I carry a can of pepper spray and the shiny pink Smith & Wesson blade my father bought me in a desperate attempt to protect against the inevitable. I often keep the knife open in my pocket, gripping so tightly my knuckles turn white as I walk darkened streets. But I never thought to bring it to bed with me, to sleep next to a friend I’d known almost as long as I’d been alive. Dressed in a sparkly pink onesie with a shiny rainbow tail.

I returned to Los Angeles in a matter of days as a broken version of the girl I used to be. Nights fell, mornings dawned, time ticked on — and as it went,

so did I, becoming less of a person and more of one’s shadow. I filled my schedule excessively to avoid confronting the reality of my loss. Not only of a friend, but also of myself and everything I once believed in. Stuck in traffic on the 405 I found myself screaming, banging my head against the steering wheel, desperate for a reprieve from agony. I left mascara-stained teardrops on all the furniture in my apartment, sometimes escaping to the porch stoop to smoke a cigarette in the hopes it would burn away the anguish. Still, I carried on: school, work, making movies — distractions to quell the heartache. The only times I didn’t suffer were the times I was too busy to allow it. But then the world fell apart as an unknown virus ravaged the globe. The university sent us packing.

Everyone else lost sophomore year. I lost my sanity.

Quarantining at the scene of the crime, I saw [REDACTED] everywhere I looked. He was on the edge of my bed when I tried to sleep at night, talking to me about Randy Newman’s scoring just as he had three months prior. He was in my yard sharing White Claws and laughter. He was on the landing trading Halloween candies with the nine year old version of myself. I couldn’t be in the house without being encompassed by rage — but I couldn’t leave the house at all. So I sat in silence and watched the world burn as I became more and more infested with unflinching despair.

My family was forced to watch me disintegrate. They stood over my heaving body as I sobbed on the kitchen floor unable to move. They witnessed the blood drip from my knuckles as I released rage upon my own body. They saw me starve, slowly, as weight shed from my already dainty frame.

One night I collapsed in the dirt of the lime trees, pulsating, screaming at my mother that I wanted to see him suffer; I wanted to see him bleed. My parents tried to empathize, telling me stories of their own pain to help me feel less alone — but it only made me worse. Knowing the wickedness of humanity transcended what already consumed me. Knowing that inane agony is the only universal truth. Knowing my faith in integrity dissipated alongside my idealism.

On December 20, 2019 I texted [REDACTED] asking him to drive me home from a friend’s birthday party.

ME: Ok could you swoop? Perchance? [REDACTED]: Yee I’ll leave in a min ME: I love you

By that time he already assaulted me — I just didn’t know it yet. We drove around town for a while talking about everything and nothing. Dreams for the future, aspirations regarding lives neither of us will ever live. It was the last time I remember seeing him. These were the last texts we exchanged. I never confronted him and he never contacted me. A silence so loud it could break glass.

Today I live in a stasis. I once found meaning in love for those around me; now, I find meaning in impermanence. Every moment of existence is fleeting. Every person you know and love with a deepness that seems inexorable will someday no longer breathe in flesh but only memory. Only once my innocence left me did I realize I still had it. I know now to nurture what I can’t afford to lose.

My year was spent recovering from emotional holocaust, and though there were times I genuinely wasn’t sure that I would, I survived. The three of us survived.

To Gwen & Laurel — the family I chose.

Sofie Sund is a photographer based in Trondheim, Norway. Her work features vibrant self portraits to express herself.

Courtney J Dowling is a student at the University of Southern California currently pursuing a major in Cinema and Media Studies.

Photographer & Model Sofie Sund