Self-Occupation

The last time we were here was the beginning of the end of me. What felt like it, anyways.

Finding out he had cheated on my mother began an internal siege that would continue for the following year, leading me to where I am now, sitting at the same table where my deterioration began one year ago.

These are my pieces, but not my whole

I am more than this flesh, this boiled blood

My scratched up skin does not portray what lies underneath

My smile doesn't tell you how I really feel

and my hollow eyes cannot possibly show you my depth.

It seems strange that when I think back on this fight, it was the fight that changed my whole world, and I can't even remember how it started.

That night was simply a battle that would wage a war inside of me, to be fought slowly over the next year.

I am no longer an object of someone else's poisoned will,

I'm only a prisoner to my own body

except

my body does not feel like it belongs to me

Not given a say,

forcibly used by another

and another.

Despite having my heart crushed by the reality of it, I do confess hearing those secrets spill out that night did answer a lot of questions I had struggled with for most of my adolescent years.

I remember being young and having a friend from school. His name was Cameron, and his older sister babysat me almost every day after school during my younger years. I, of course, at that time was unaware that his recently divorced and unstable mother would at some point have some sort of affair with the man I previously considered to be my father. This was one of two major secrets revealed that evening.

Even my own mind

is dictated by my body's sensations at times

When a simple touch of arm triggers a memory,

my hands will hesitate to make contact with even people I want,

people I love.

I have a sister. Her name is Eva and she is the most complicated and wonderful person I have ever known. When we were young, we had family friends that we knew as "aunt" and "uncle", although they were of no relation. One day, many years ago, we were abruptly disallowed to ever visit them again. For years we wondered and questioned but our inquiries of why this was were always unanswered until last summer. As it turns out, our father had committed yet another act of infidelity, this time with that "aunt" and "uncle's" daughter. They had been caught, and we were to never see them again. I remember missing their swimming pool and their two dogs, Pebbles and Marker, and for years on end yearning for an answer as to why they were cut out of our lives. The one thing I can say for that night is that it answered all these questions. The question I have been asking myself since it happened, though, was if it was worth it.

All these pieces of me have been put together, but they feel disjointed

My lips may long for my lover's kiss,

but my hand will push it away

My arms may cry out to be wrapped in my lover's,

but my body will tighten, responding to an expected attack

Even if my body is flaunted, it's self-conscious,

ready to be judged,

it is used to being a vessel for another's greed.

That evening triggered memories in me that were buried deep. I wonder sometimes whether, had that fight not happened, if I would have remembered. Every day I change my mind about whether or not I'm glad that I did.

Some days every touch is a button that triggers an old memory

or a new one

My own personal theatre of trauma past,

reruns and reruns and reruns

they wait for the right time to play

Home movies are nightmares

that provide understanding for my tendencies

Unlike real nightmares, I cannot wake up

and say it was just a dream.

The memories started about a week after the big fight. We had returned home from the cottage, and I was horribly angry with my father. After learning of all the grief and pain he had caused our mother, I was unsure of whether forgiveness was a possibility. I had been difficult and hostile with my mother for years when it came to the two of them. As a child, he constantly manipulated me into believing he hadn't done any wrong, and that she was cruel towards him for no reason. Finding out the harshness that she always directed towards him was coming from a place of intense betrayal and heartache came with an amount of guilt I couldn't express. I took the side of a terrible man for years, and she was too kind to tell me that he, my father, was truly the awful one.

I have tried to reason

with both my mind and body, but they belong to the past.

They are a beautiful, complex puzzle

that I am slowly piecing together.

The picture of who I am

becomes clearer with each bit of me,

Impressive because it is hard to know who you are if you weren't whole to begin with.

One night, being angry with him but on speaking terms, I was sitting at our home desktop computer, working on a homework assignment. I am 18 years old, starting off my last year at Inglenook Community High School, and I am unprepared for the memory that hits me.

I have never spoken out loud the details of what I remembered that night, and I am hoping this purge of writing may give me the courage to do so over time.

I think it may have been my new knowledge and disgust of my father's sexual promiscuity and indecency that allowed my memories to slip through the wall that my psyche had carefully built to protect my already fragile heart and mind.

I now speak directly to you: you are powerless.

I have a conscience you can only imitate.

You live in a world of brokenness, of false pride and fragile egotism.

You are truly alone.

Look at yourself and realize that had you spent more time healing and loving, rather than fighting and hurting, you would be one with this world and not a destructive force within it.

My pieces have slowly come together

to create a gruesome picture of who I was.

The pieces cannot be reconfigured

to change the ultimate image;

my picture of my past will always be the same.

But the difference now lies

in how I choose to view it in the future

and who it belongs to

(just me.)

A vessel for my own greed.

Self-occupied.