Ow. Bah, it ain't too bad. Got hit by a car. Nothing's broken, but my shoulder is semi-fucked. It will be fine in a week or two. Y'know what hurts more? Being actively provoked by my CIA trained life partner to incite triggers in me revolving around my father's abuse, so that I do regretful things like use the n-word when I am referring to how he treats me, how like to my father I am innately inferior and am by default always wrong and how, as an innate thing I must do to appease my superior lord, I must come up with an ever-wrong apology.
Literally, when I was eleven, I failed to take out the kitchen garbage one day, so my father destroyed everything my mother, who died from AIDS two years earlier, ever made me, then blamed me and demanded I come up with a correct apology while throwing my around and severely abusing me.
No apology I ever made was ever right. My life partner says my apologies are never good enough. He says he doesn't know what my father did to me. He lies. He read my book. This is a chapter. Pic related; I'm about entering stage three of enlightenment, while my life partner is entering stage four, or so, at least according to this depiction of karmically defined reality tunnels.
I Forgive You
I forgive you, but I can never forget.
I'm sorry if I make you look like shit,
But your heavy hand and sharp wit
Damaged me greatly; then you gaslit
Me, denying everything, and I quit
Knowing what was real. I even slit
My flesh open so that I could get
A sense of what I could feel. So, I sit
Here now explaining why I wasn't fit
To handle this world that I saw as a pit
That I escaped only when God had lit
A beacon of light with some magick.
Chapter Eight: Trauma
On that fateful day, one of the countless pets my dad kept, a black, stubborn minipig named Harley, had made a literal pigsty of the house. The trash was scattered everywhere, and her litter box had been tipped on its side, spilling much of the contents. Objectively, that's just small potatoes, but understand that I just had an awful session with my therapist. In short, he made me feel like a piece of shit. I wasn't perfect, but I wasn't going to just lay down and get called a terrible person because of how I behaved in treatment years ago, when I was still very lost.
The scenario in question triggered my feelings of failure, which rippled into waves of unstable emotional dysregulation. In my explosive rage, I broke the microwave and put a basketball-sized hole in the wall behind my makeshift bed in the attic that I was allotted after they gave my brother my room when I left for a job I thought I had but turned out to be bait to lure me into a hive of unprecedented villainy; a cult by other names.
Well, my father came home after a long day at work, saw the microwave, and had enough of my bullshit. He came thumping up the stairs, livid, ready to rip me to shreds verbally, and proceeded to start doing so, when he saw the hole I had made. Beside himself, he demanded I get out right then and there. I wasn't welcome in his house anymore. Being the volatile mess that I was, I broke down crying right then and there and begged him to let me stay, grappling with his leg as a wounded bear might wrap itself around the base of a small tree looking for any shelter it can find in a storm.
That just made him madder. He kicked me off, and accused me of a thousand things. The ones that stuck were that I was just like my mother and that I was beyond anyone's help. As it happened in a heated flash, I don't remember exactly how the exchange was put together, but it ended with me asking him how all the hand-crafted trinkets and doodads my mother made for me before she died had gotten destroyed and thrown away. What he said next drove me mad.
"I'm still pissed that you made me do that."
I'll illuminate you with the scenario in question. I was eleven, and my first stepmom was away at a darts tournament. I think my dad somehow got the idea that she was doing drugs and cheating on him. I don't know, I was eleven. I just remember some of the things he said over the phone, and then what was said when they divorced a few years later. But, whatever the case may be, I would later learn that I had also agitated him by not spending that much time with him while she was away.
Over the course of my stepmom's absence, he got continuously more pissy, like he did the year before. That's when the sewage line broke and he snapped into a violent rage because I had waited until Sunday to do my homework while he was forced to clean literal shit up with a shop vacuum and haul it outside.
That was a scary day. The thing I remember most was how red his bald cranium was as he smashed my head into the kitchen floor countless times. That was before he forced me to get the door for him, which I slammed once out of nervous shock, resulting in me going back on the floor for round two of his assault. I'll never forget how terrified I was when he came back inside after everything was cleaned up. Following a much needed cigarette break, he barged back in to find me doing my homework instead of standing there obediently waiting for him because I thought that's what he wanted. Fortunately, he relented when his girlfriend at the time miraculously called at the exact moment he was going to grab me again. Instead, we all got to hang out while I did my best poker face, trying to act normal.
Seeing the same pattern in my father a year down the line put me on edge. That feeling then doubled after I put my feet up on the new couch and he grabbed my leg and punched me in the tibia as hard as he could. Alert and alarmed, I kept trying to do everything right to avoid being attacked again, but alas, in my anxious worry, amnesia struck me with the precision of the sniper the Illuminati hired to keep tabs on me and take care of business when I waver in the slightest in my loyalty. That meant that I forgot to take out the kitchen garbage on trash night.
That triggered a whole day of what might not be considered torture, but certainly was child abuse, which started as he cleared my two shelves full of memories like a terrible, thrashing tornado as a clear inferno burned inside him. I just watched, dumb-founded and expecting it to play back in reverse. My dad would eventually bag up the shattered remains of my past so he could take them to the dump, but only after he laid his hands on me.
My head was used as a battering ram against my door first, which I believe was how a handful of dents were put in the back of it, but my dad denies this and I don't know the truth anymore. I could be gaslit, or I could be delusional. Regardless, when he finished with that and slammed me back on the wood floor and then my bed, I instinctively reached out and grabbed his wrist. In response, he growled, "Don't resist or I'll make it worse."
Feeling my spirit collapse, I helplessly accepted the next phase of punishment that then ensued. Mostly, it consisted of him using my head to pound the knowledge that I fucked up into my brain, with much hair pulling and getting tossed to new locations, once being told to lay there like a dog in the wet remnants of a broken snow globe while he went for a smoke break. Thankfully, or maybe not, depending on your perspective, he never struck me. Even so, I felt like a punching bag; forced to take my punishment because that's why I existed.
After much of that series of traumatizing events, he had me sit still and think of an apology for him for hours on end. While I was busy doing that, he would then have an epiphany, telling me that I should stand, as I didn't deserve to sit. I didn't care about such details at the time. I was in shock, petrified that he would tear my room apart and find the homework I again failed to finish or the porn I had taken from my stepmom. Fearing total annihilation, I stared unwaveringly at the letter "E" on the spine of a book on my bookshelf. There was a ringing in my right ear that is the same tinnitus I'm experiencing now as I type this out, and it was like I was watching myself from outside of my body.
Never relenting in his anger, my heavy-handed master would come by every hour or so and ask for an apology. Everything I said wasn't good enough, and each attempt earned me scathing criticism, but I kept trying to perfect my apology. I still remember the gist of it. However, my memory is jumbled, so really I'm creating this apology now to reflect how I felt in those moments. Hopefully it's good enough now:
"I sorry dad, I deserve everything. I'm sorry I caused you grief and failed to do my duty of taking out the trash. I won't ever forget again. I haven't been putting my best effort forward, but I realize that I need to do that to be a good son. You do so much for me. It's only fair that I pay it back to the best of my ability. That's what I had to do for mom when I chose to play video games while she was dying. I wasn't thinking about other people then, and I wasn't now. I'm so, so sorry. I promise to be better, because I need to be if I'm messing up this much."
For reference, my dad loved using the fact that I escaped into the worlds of my video games after being told to spend time with my mom near the end. With much cruelty, or perhaps just simple ignorance to the effect he had on me, he'd bring up and hold that fact over my head anytime I was in trouble. Yet another big reason that feeling like a failure is cemented in my head. It made me feel awful, absolutely atrocious about being a bad son that I would often contemplate suicide. I almost jumped off a giant waterside when my dad and I went to Disney World at age ten, but ultimately I'm glad I talked my way out of jamming a knife into the back of my neck. I had thought that the muscle allowing me to nod my head was really my brainstem. That would have been painful.
But, back on this day of doom and damnation, I was too numb to think of killing myself. I was simply a raft on a river floating downstream where the current may carry me. Practically in another dimension, I stood there for hours, too terrified to even stretch my tiring legs. My mind was fuzzy, and all it could do was focus on making that apology better. This was shock, pure undeniable shock. I may have never gotten the chance to serve my country in the Army like I wanted to do, but I tell you, I know what it's like to have a bomb go off right next to you.
After many attempts at apologizing and the resulting razor sharp lectures later, approximately eight or nine hours worth of events, he barks at me to come to the living room, where he starts yelling at me that I'm just as irresponsible as my mom, just like he would come to do when he kicked me out of his house. This time was unimaginably worse though, as this was actually how I first found out what AIDS really was; I was told very little about it up to this point. His shaved bald head was as red as a cherry tomato while he barked at me, spelling out what it meant, how you got it, all while telling me that I would die like her, because I was irresponsible. That hurt. It hurt a lot. I felt like the definition of a shit stain, in a number of different ways.
But soon, my attention became focused on my vision. I couldn't see straight, and not long after my dad's roaring visage disappeared in a sea of amorphic gray figments, I apparently passed out. I remember waking up on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on my head. Standing over me with a dire look in his eyes, my dad was clearly worried. He asked me if I was alright before asking if I remembered what happened. I shook my head. Seeming relieved, he gave me some space for a minute. Thankfully, I was allowed to go to bed after that. I just laid there wide-eyed and shaking, feeling completely helpless and thoroughly motivated to try harder moving forward.
The next morning he was completely changed. He was remorseful upon seeing me and wrapped me in a big hug. Yet, he seemed scared, like he realized he went too far. I thought about telling my teacher or counselor about it the next day of school, but something in me told me not to. It's the same thing that's making me hesitant to write this shitty chapter at all. It's love, but this hell I went through is also a part of my story. I'm sure you're upset, dad, but I've been told I help people by sharing my story. I just want to show how badly broken I've been, so others can know how far I've come, and thus be inspired to create change in their lives.
It's all cause and effect really. You hurt a traumatized child in the wake of their mother's death, and is it any wonder that they fall apart later in life? I'll go on record saying I was never a bad person, just broken, impulsive, and hopelessly conformed to the whims of my faulty biology. I had bugs in my operating system, but I'm eternally grateful for all the help I had while on my spiritual awakening, which you might call a psychotic break that spanned years, but I knew it better as specialized CIA training.
