In the United States, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will experience rape in their lifetime. Every 68 seconds, another person is sexually assaulted. 80% of women have experienced sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime. These numbers mark frequency, not depth. They cannot hold the aftermath. The way trauma lingers, reshapes, and quietly redefines a life from the inside out.

At sixteen, I was sexually assaulted by someone I trusted. In the aftermath, I turned inward: became sharp and unforgiving, convincing myself I had “allowed” it, as if harm requires permission to exist. The blame took root quickly, growing into something dense and unrelenting. I carried it everywhere. Grief settled in my chest. Shame traced the outline of my body, and embarrassment became a second skin.

Then the world went quiet. When the pandemic began, isolation was no longer just internal: it became physical, inescapable. The loneliness deepened, echoing against itself. There was no distraction, no distance from my own thoughts. Only repetition. Only the constant return. I felt myself diminish. I dreaded waking, inhabiting a body that no longer felt like mine. Even existing began to feel like a burden.

And beneath it all, there was fear: constant, suffocating. Not just of what had happened, but of it being known. I feared exposure more than silence. I feared being seen as ruined, damaged, broken, as disposable. I feared the words that might be used in place of my name. Whore, slut, skank. I feared that love: familial, unconditional, assumed- suddenly felt fragile. Conditional. At risk of disappearing. I feared losing everything because of something I never chose. Something I never wanted.

Sexual assault does not end. It settles. It echoes. It returns in fragments- uninvited, unresolved. It lives in the body as tension, in the mind as repetition. Grief becomes cyclical. Anger flickers and recedes. Shame embeds itself in places language cannot reach. There is a before, and there is an after, and the distance between them is immeasurable. The Weight of What Once Was exists within that after.

This work does not attempt to reconstruct an event. Instead, it moves through what remains–the emotional residue, the quiet ruptures, the slow and often invisible transformation of the self. The images are photographic, but they resist certainty. Printed on silk organza and transparent decals, they are suspended, layered, and translucent. They drift in and out of visibility, dissolving into one another, into light, into absence. Like memory, they are unstable. Like the body after trauma, they are difficult to fully locate.

A bed sits at the center of the space. An object of rest, of intimacy, of vulnerability. Here, it becomes something else. Above it, a canopy of silk images hangs, enclosing the space in a fragile veil. It hovers between protection and suffocation, a thin boundary between what is seen and what is withheld. To enter it is to step inside a mind that cannot quiet itself.

On the bed rests a quilt, stitched not only with fabric, but stained with thought. It holds the things that persist: reflections from then, from now, from the in-between. The edges are dense, crowded, almost unbearable, unreadable even. Layered with language, with memory, with feeling. But as the eye moves inward, the surface begins to empty. It fades. It softens into white. This absence is not peace- it is consumption. It is grief expanding, overtaking, silencing.

Above, the ceiling carries its own contradiction. Wooden and silk flowers, once part of a wedding, once symbols of celebration, of union, of purity, are transformed. They gather thickly at the edges, burned, darkened, stained. And yet, toward the center, they become pale, untouched, almost pristine. This false purity lingers, even after damage. It asks what it means to be “untouched” in a world that demands it. It asks who is allowed to remain whole. Nothing in this space resolves.

There is no closure here, no clean narrative, no return to what once was. There is only the ongoing: the quiet, relentless negotiation between memory and survival. The body carries. The mind replays. The self reshapes around something it did not choose. The Weight of What Once Was is not the moment of violence. It is the life that follows.