cw: Please read w caution. CSA.

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I wasn't hurt.

That memory wasn't a memory at all, but a dream. That

sour itchy summer hour was a cascading irritation born

out of a forgotten cone of ice cream. My pain was

Scrooge's undigested piece of beef. That rag was

Marley's chains. I never touched a washcloth with

anything more than water on my hand. Maybe soap.

I didn't need to drop it.

Stop it.

These thoughts aren't helpful. They're delusions. They're

fabrications of a child who saw one too many books

on anatomy. Except there was pornography. I remember them

shown to his friends. Except they weren't his friends

either. He told me they were evil. They weren't worth my time

or given to sublime thoughts on morality, and

phenomena so splendidly extrasensory. I was a seed,

bursting with potential to be a fundamental part

of a new regime. Only I needed to follow his vision

to every collision with every mind too small or amoral

to connect with mine. I needed time to process what

he said, to understand that he was right and I was

braindead. That's why he always asked me about my memory,

because he knew I was too dumb to trust. My lack of lust proved

that I lacked the cadence to explain my pain to the suits in court

who made decisions about my fate.

It's too late to be honest.

Tell myself that the consequences were beyond

us, that I had no way of knowing what my lie would

protect. It was what's best. I was already losing

a sister and a father, did I need to lose a brother?

I don't know if he hurt her.

I don't know who I hurt by being silent. I'm beyond

this moment. I made my choice. My fib took my voice and it

wasn't a course of action I could ever take back. I am a sack

of shit that chose ignorance, only it wasn't bliss. I was remiss

in my duty to protect my sis. I am a sack

of shit who deserves a garbage fire, only guilty tears

keep justice away.

It isn't my day.

I have to wait for my body to fail.

It shouldn't be hard. I've already squeezed out

the blood of my failing heart. My morals are

empty. My mind a bad scene, written by an out

of work screenplay writer

from nineteen-eighty-three. There's a reason he was

fired and why I can't be hired.

My brain is a play with a small stage on endless replay. No

matter where the light is. No

matter who talks. I'm there on

the sidelines, singing about

my childhood gone.

Ours was a vision he made into my own.

It was no shelter but it was my home.

He took me upstairs because we were alone

and made me his lover with no words of my own.

My hand was his pencil my body his manifesto.

With each poetic flourish I tasted sour

from my end up. He wouldn't do

as I wanted so I had to compro

mise. Without the strength to

fight or led to

write my scene, I did as I was ordered

and behaved as an adult incomplete.

Never could I satisfy. Never was I right.

Never did I please him or give reason to my plight.

I was a child of trauma and an ugly one at that.

But one fact saved me, it was the heat itchy on my back.

So I promised him later

and to this day

I worry what I owe.