By anonymous
Although its been quite some time now, you have somehow integrated yourself into my daily routine. A day doesn’t pass by without something reminding me of you, of your nose, your smell, your hands. Hands are beautiful, hands are the fabricators of the universe, snipping at the threads that stitch up the stars. Hands begin lives and at the same time dismantle them, they are the creators and the destroyers of the wonders of the world. Those are not hands at your wrist, for they seep with bacon grease and protrude like nests of fungi. They grasped and smeared the sizzling fat across the years of my childhood. I always knew something was wrong, always tense, never comfortable, and yet I continued in blissful, ever so slightly confused ignorance, never questioning why I felt the compulsive need to wash my hair after every meeting.
It’s been a quite a few years since our last meeting, and yet here you are, popping back into my life, your name around every corner, drooling with your vomit-induced saliva. I’m told I should be sympathetic, you’re in pain, you won’t be here much longer. Perhaps I’m not such a good person, for despite this, I find a hollow joy in the idea of your suffering. You are the reason I would freeze (and still do sometimes) anytime someone would touch me unexpectedly, even just a gentle tap on the shoulder, the reason why I drifted in and out of depression, the reason why every time a discussion comes up in class or around campus about sexual abuse my hands start shaking and I have to look my friends in the eye and lie as I tell them it’s the lack of sleep. The lack of sleep, I should add, that was worsened by memories of you at 2am.
I think what infuriates me even more is that I didn’t even realise what had happened until you popped up again recently, and I had to deal with flashbacks and shocking realisations and denial, so much denial, because I didn’t want to be “that kid”, a statistic, a whispered, pitiful comment.
But you haven’t won. You might have left an ugly scar on my life and no amount of metaphorical healing balm is going to get rid of that, but I will not let the things you did to me hold me back, because now I am all the more determined to be successful and actually make something of my life. Yes, I still don’t talk about it a lot. Yes, I can barely remember half the things that happened with you. Yes, I will still be hiding behind an “anonymous”. But since I realised what happened, I have opened up more than I ever thought I could, and I am happier now than I have ever been without the shadow of you looming over me anymore. I am full of potential and opportunity, and you are dying, no longer the hulking monster I once knew, no, you are a weak, pathetic rat, and I’ll be damned if I let a rat like you destroy me.
Maybe one day I’ll forgive you, but today is most certainly not that day.
