I have been a part of the bookish community for just over two and a half years now and it seems that a huge back and forth topic discussed is why people love dark romance. Well…that is exactly why I am here. To share about why I PERSONALLY love dark romance and the impact that it has made on my life.

Now just to warn you all, this may be a tad long and I will be getting very personal. I promise it will be worth it in the end…or at least I hope you think so. Let me also just say now that I will be covering very heavy topics and sharing my story. I will be talking about rape, drug use, a suicide attempt, domestic violence, and homelessness. If you find yourself triggered by any of these things, please proceed with caution. Please remember. YOUR MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS. I wish I had someone in my corner reminding me of that when I was young.

Today is September 26th, 2024. My 30th birthday. It is a bit of a surreal feeling. I can honestly say that there was a time in my life that I didn’t think I would live to see the end of my twenties let alone my thirties. I love when I say “man, I feel so old” because the response is always “30 isn’t even that old”. Little do people know that I have gone through some real fucked up shit in my few years on this earth. I FEEL OLD lol.

I guess I have to give some insight into high school Elena because trauma always stems from that sort of place, doesn’t it. How very cliché high school movie of me. I was lucky enough (lots of sarcasm) to attend a private Christian school, kindergarten all the way through graduation. I grew up with the same kids. We had the great joy of watching each other go through our booger eating phase to the puberty thing and so on. I graduated in a class of 97 or something close to that number and we were the largest graduating class at the time. I graduated in May of 2012 and I couldn’t wait. It’s funny looking back at my time there. I thought I had so many friends and I was so happy. Turns out a good few years away put a lot into perspective.

I was never “the pretty girl”. Ever. I was bullied constantly for being black. The boys didn’t like me because I was too tall, or I wasn’t skinny enough or my boobs were too big. Yes, that was real, which is crazy because boobs are SO fun! I promise this is all going somewhere. I was never told I was pretty, aside from my Mother. I was never asked out on a date. I was never kissed. My own father told me is was too fat to find love.

Towards the end of my senior year one of my best friends at the time started dating a boy who did not go to our school so naturally we started hanging out with him and his friends and through them I met my now long-term best friend and mother of my god children Stevi. However, we were not always close. There was this boy…because with high school girls there is always a boy. This was the first boy to ever show me attention. One night after consuming way too much blueberry vodka (gag) I not only got my first kiss I also gave my first blowy and let me tell you I was hella proud of myself. The performance review came with a standing ovation. Wink wink.

Have you guessed it yet? This boy belonged to Stevi. Another person I considered a “friend” who had introduced me to all these people did not tell me this and she did not hesitate to run to Stevi and tell her everything and proceed to come to my job to have a yelling match with me over this boy in public. All of a sudden, I was dropped from the friend group, and no one would speak to me. Now for a 17-year-old girl…that was life shattering. Everything felt too much and what does one do at 17 when you don’t see an out…swallow a bunch of pills and hope for the best…

Fast forward to the summer after high school…when we first met…Katy Perry…I had to. Anyway, it was the summer after high school, and I was going to a party. My friends and I had mended our issues and moved forward, and I was feeling good and ready to get fucked up with my friends. In Albuquerque where I grew up, everyone knows everyone. At this party some kids that I went to high school with showed up. One of them was a guy that was the “white boy gangster wanna be SoundCloud rapper”. Everyone had one of those right?

Him and I were never really friends in school and we didn’t really talk to each other so this party gave us the opportunity. Others we went to high school with joked about how the two loner kids who never dated anyone had, OF COURSE found each other at a party and hit it off. Now at this time I was feeling prbetty good. The drinks were flowing and this guy had asked if I wanted to go somewhere more quiet. Again…so cliché and original. Me having only one blowy, and a kiss under my belt with a guy who coincidentally drove me to said party, had no idea that this guy had things in mind other than just talking. The girl who threw the party, we will call her A, let us go into her room. Before I knew it his boy was on top of me pinning me down and forcing his hand down my pants.

I knew that this was not how things were supposed to go and I said no. I said no so many god damn times and he laughed and told me that I should consider myself lucky that anyone would want to fuck me. I thought maybe he was right. Maybe this was all I was ever going to be worth. The girl who’s room we were in opened the door and came to check on us because apparently we had been gone for a while and this person, this “friend” of mine, looked me in the face and when I asked for help she closed the door and left me there. He finished and left. This person who had just raped me, someone I knew, didn’t even have the decency to say bye. He just went back to the party like nothing happened. I slept in that same bed that night. I locked myself in that room and cried myself to sleep. The next morning when I woke up, I left the room to find all my friends cleaning after a night of “fun”. A immediately started making jokes about what she saw. I sat there and let her. I was so ashamed about what had happened, and I was honestly rather taken aback by her joking about something I could barely wrap my mind around.

I sat there and listened to all my friends laughing about the night that would replace my failed suicide attempt as the worst day of my life. They all laughed about how I lost my virginity to the school loser. The “wanna be rapper”. They all laughed about how I had to be driven to the drug store to get a Plan B because I wasn’t on the pill and I didn’t know if this person had bothered to wear a condom. Days later my friends were still laughing when I told them I had to schedule a doctor’s appointment because how did I know this person had given me a STD. It took seven years to finally admit to someone that I lost my virginity to rape. I still to this day will not drink Jager.

It wasn’t long after this that I decided that trying drugs would be fun. I started smoking weed like everyone does, but then I wanted more, I wanted to try harder stuff. It was fun at first. Nothing too crazy. Some shrooms, some ecstasy and ketamine. You know, party drugs. Then cocaine happened. Hell of a drug. Something people don’t say enough is the reason people do drugs is because they are fun. Drugs are fun. Before I knew it, I though it wasn’t fun anymore. I was full blown addicted to cocaine. There is so much that happened in the middle of all of this but it involves people whose stories are not mine to share.

I found myself homeless and with a dog. One of my friends was renting a room from a very creepy man who bought drugs from us and they both offered a roof to sleep under and who was I to say no. I moved into this bedroom with my friend and it was great! We slept by day and by night we did and sold lots and lots of drugs. Drug houses are real. Like shit you see in movies where women and children are in houses weighing and bagging drugs in their underwear…yea real. Some of the shit I saw I will never unsee. We thought we were living the life. Freedom to do what we pleased. So young and stupid.

One day this girl and I woke up to find our house empty. We had slept through an entire house being packed up and moved. The guy we were staying decided he wanted to move to Texas on a whim. We didn’t need to be told of course because we never signed a lease so fuck us. We had another man who was staying in the house at the same time and he said fuck it lets squat in the house. What else were we going to do? Two girls with no jobs who sell cocaine to old creeps…squat we did. We had no power and no water. To be honest, I don’t even know how long we stayed in the house like that. Weeks for sure.

One night the guy we “lived” with Tom I think was his name started acting really weird. We didn’t know it but at the time in those few weeks Tom had started to do meth. A lot of meth. He was tweeking HARD. We couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was being very erratic, and we knew we weren’t safe there. We decided that we were going to get our dogs and try to leave the house. What a mistake. That pissed Tom the fuck off. I still to this day do not know where the knife came from, but it was big. This man tried to kill us. We had to barricade ourselves in our room. I had never felt fear like that before. Did we call the cops? Nope. Just two scared girls high on coke squatting in a house. Luckily being shady means knowing shady people and let’s just say we were safe that night. (no one died, lol, I realize how that sounded. People came and removed the man just maybe not the most legal of situations.) One would think that a night like that would have put my life into perspective but nope, why would it. Drugs and boys keep Elena’s life “interesting”.

One thing I will say about my very healthy drug lifestyle (sarcasm all the way) is that I got SO skinny. At my smallest I was a size 2/4. For reference I am 6 ft tall and big boned and I should NEVER be a size 2/4. I had never been so thin and people who knew me in school always said that they couldn’t believe how good I looked. Just so you all know I was skinny but I didn’t look good. Somehow, I still felt like the ugly fat friend. When me and my two friends were together it didn’t matter what I did or how good I thought I looked, no one noticed me. I thought it was because I still wasn’t thin enough. My life was snorting drugs and shoving my fingers down my throat but who cared because I was skinny right?

At this time my friends and I started going to a new dealer. We will call him J. J was hot. We was tall and muscled and man, was he charming. The three of us girls loved going and hanging out at J’s house. He would always give us free drugs and alcohol and we would party with him and his friends and it was always such a good time. It was very strange at the time that he would go through girlfriends like no one's business and he was very, very controlling. He had a thing with both my friends at the same time and one night that came to a fucking head.

They obviously found out while we were at his house and boy, did shit hit the fan. The girls were fighting with each other. They were fighting with him. I was doing drugs in the corner sipping my metaphorical tea watching everything go down. One friend left so now it’s just the three of us. My other friend asked me to talk to J and see if he was okay. I went into his room and we talked for a bit. I had never been in such close proximity to him let alone being alone with him. If you don’t know what’s coming round the bend…HOW!

Yep, this man kissed me and what a fucking kiss! Like Mia’s foot poppin from the Princess Diaries good. I knew immediately I had fucked up and I stated as much and I left. A few days later J called me and asked me to come over. He said he broke things off with both of my friends and that after talking to me that night he knew I was the one he wanted to be with. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This had been the first time EVER something like this happened to me. He said we couldn’t say anything because the dust needed to settle. He didn’t want me to lose my friends on his behalf…HELLO DUMB BITCH…RED FUCKING FLAG!!!

A few weeks go by and one night I go to J’s apartment with my roommate friend from before (she was one of the girls he had been with) and J was being strange. We of course did drugs but he wouldn’t let us do the same stuff he was doing. He was giving us coke from a different bag. I don’t know if this man had a big trip or if the drugs were laced but fuck. As cheesy as it is, the eyes really are a window into the soul. That night when I looked into that man’s eyes I saw nothing. I am not exaggerating. NOTHING. I have to this day never seen that sort of look in someone’s eyes and it was terrifying. I can not fully put into words the things I saw that night only because I still can not understand. I have talked to the girl that was there with me numerous times about that night and it’s a mind fuck to both of us.

J was never the same after that night. He was aggressive. He was mean. He was angry. I know at that time I was skinny, but I was still a big girl and the way he started throwing me around…scary. He had a party and all the usual people were in attendance and I had done something to make this man mad so in turn he decided to tell my friends about us, or rather he told he them that I was trying to fuck him and get with him and that I took him to his room when I had arrived and kissed him. Which to be fair that was true but we had been seeing each other for weeks so… That night went up in flames so fast. This man flipped like a fucking switch. He was breaking shit, punching shit and had just lost his mind. I was hit numerous times in front of people. Everyone cleared out and no one stayed to help me.

Me being a stupid young girl at the time just thought if I can calm this man down everything will be okay. I was so wrong. Never did I think that I would be someone who would be abused again. I finally left his apartment because his neighbor called the cops. I am so glad they did because when they broke down the door I was in a ball on the floor and J standing over me holding a giant shard of mirror. He kept screaming that I didn’t know crazy and he would show me what true crazy was. He was squeezing that shard of glass so hard he bled on me. Twice in one year I thought I would die at the hands of a man.

When I read these dark romance books that authors have written there is so much parallel to my life. Believe it or not I have also in fact had a stalker. For me at least because I can’t speak for everyone out there, but I like dark romance because it makes my experiences feel validated. Why the fuck would I not want to read about these people who go thru some of the toughest shit life can throw at you and still have a happy ending. It’s not about romanticizing rape or murder or sexual assault. It’s about healing and growing and learning to deal with the fuck up parts of life.

I have had this happen myself and I know other people who have had similar instances of others assuming that “I must not have gone through enough trauma and that’s why reading this stuff doesn’t faze me. Lol, jokes on them. I wish that were the case. I wish I didn’t know what I felt like to be raped or to think that I am going to die by the hands of someone I cared for. Unfortunately, I do know what that feels like. So how do I cope? I read. I can’t sit here and say that some of this shit isn’t hard to see in print or hear via audio but knowing that those people can find happiness does something for me.

Because of dark romance and my love of it I have found an entire community of people who love what I love and have gone through shit like I have. I will NEVER be able to understand why people are so pressed about what someone else wants to read. WHO. FUCKING. CARES. While all you keyboard warriors burn holes in your keys spewing all your hate, maybe take 2.5 seconds to think about that other person or that author. Take that extra moment because you don’t know the hurt they are dealing with or the trauma they are trying to heal. Books have helped me so much to move on and come to terms with a lot of shit. I can’t lie…there are moments when the assholes almost won out but fuck them.

DO NOT LET PEOPLE MAKE YOU FEEL LESS. YOU ARE IMPORTANT. YOU MATTER. YOUR TRAUMA MATTERS. YOUR MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.