I am fortunate that he no longer lives here, but it never seems to stop ~ all this bumping into people from my distant past ~ people who are no longer my acquaintenances even ~ but who continue to bring up the past as if it happened yesterday.
I really do not want to talk about him or hear about him each time I see someone we both knew.
It is amazing how the whole afternoon can become a long trail of flashbacks just after hashing out some memory with one of his friends.
This time she asked about his son and if I had heard from him.
I gave her the update that I had from two years ago about the time I tried to find closure with his son after years of my own wondering what ever happened to him.
We met at a pizza parlour downtown, and I told him how sorry I was for him having to live with all that chaos.
And he told me, "If you had not been there, the abuse on me would have been even worse."
Was my purpose all those four years to distribute the abuse equally between us? My memories of our time together in that little green house still haunt me.
I remembered the night I called 911 on my abuser, and the cops wanted to take his teenage son to CPS. His son pleaded with the officers to let him stay. They asked him how his father treated him, and he lied about the abuse. They asked if his father took care of him and fed him, and he said yes.
So he got to stay as long as I was in the house while his dad was in jail. I did not want to stay in that house. I wanted to leave right then and there. But there I was staying in the house so his son did not have to go to foster care. By the time his dad was released from jail later that morning, I had secured a motel.
I can still see myself sitting at the kitchen table next to his son's room, making phone call after phone call to see which motels were pet friendly.
I could never turn to my family during this crisis. I was so alone. Except for my abuser's son who lay sleeping in the next room after being awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of my screams ~ the sound of my head being bashed against the wall ~ the sound of sirens coming to the gate ~ and the sight of the police taking his father away.
Uncensored
