cabaretic

The father was a creepy old man...an alcoholic.
He sat in his armchair lazy-y-boy and swilled beer after beer.

This was 1988 and I was eight at the time.

I had been hanging around his two boys for a few weeks, and had picked up on their unusually precocious sexual banter. A commercial for a weed wacker came on television, and, parroting the boys' sexual innuendo, I said, "Huh. Wonder what it would be like to have a dick wacker." What a terrible joke. What terrible consequences that joke was to have.

I didn't want to remember what happened next for a long time.

They ran outside, and I was left alone. The father took me into a room alone and raped me.

"Raped me" is almost too kind a turn of phrase for what happened. I remember screaming and thrashing about...with no one listening and no one around to hear my cries of pain.

I remember the tears that ran down my cheeks.

I remember the shame afterwards.

I was a shy child, painfully shy. Socially phobic. Afraid to socialize, and highly trusting of any adult willing to take the time to really get to know me.

So I never told anyone. Not until I told a therapist around three months ago.

I didn't really remember most of it until then anyway...the mind has a way of locking down on memories so painful you wish they'd just drift away and leave you.

But they return, when you hear about another trusting young person in the company of another man...and the violence and the terror they must have been feeling.

And you realize why you hate men. Hate the sight of them sometimes...why you don't trust them.

Why you hate yourself...why you make a million bitchy comments about them...when all you're really talking about is how much you hate yourself.

You can't even trust yourself half the time. And you blame yourself for being so stupid as to put yourself in the company of strange men and alcohol and strange situations.

I haven't even told half of what happened to me that day, or what happened to me over the course of several days.

The man is dead now.

I would like to believe in a burning hell sometimes...and that there is everlasting punishment for such people...but it often flies in the face of why I have come to accept.

And you want to believe in blood punishment for loss...no matter how "humane" it might be to not kill people for killing others...legally.

And you want to wrap your arms around the innocent...the sheltered, the unprotected, the vulnerable...and you want to guard them against your own foolishness.

The world broke your heart back in 1988...and you want to believe, deep down inside, that there are such things as romance, magic, the supernatural, dreams that come true...and fairy tales.

You wish all these things, with tears streaming down your cheeks, as you type these words...and you wish you could change it all...wish you could take it all back sometimes.

Wish you just understand why things have to be this way...broken on the ground in pieces...and why you can't manage for the life of you to put yourself back together long enough.

Wish you didn't have reoccuring nightmares about perilous situations beyond your control...where you are at the mercy of some force beyond you feeble power to stop.

Wish you could just understand why...why...why...why you cry at night for no good reason...

why you lose your temper and your patience so easily...

why you feel like a composite sketch of a million people who had it easier than you did...people you wished you could be...the outsider looking in to a world of smiles and good feelings and cheer that have been ultimately foreign to you.

and you wonder sometimes why you're even still here.

and what for, after all...and what for?