He couldn’t stop with her right behind him. She was poisonous, toxic, killed him from the inside out. He didn’t understand why she hated him so. So much like his father, the man who broke her. No that wasn’t him…that was her father. A man he never knew.
There was never a good example of a man for him growing up. Maybe that’s why he never really became a man. Maybe that’s why he can’t stop running, like the tears down his face as he thinks about another unpleasant memory, which hit him like lightning after seeing a happy little kid with their parents touring campus.
Standing there frozen, bitter, cold from all of the nights he was supposed to be protected when instead he was continuously left exposed to be slashed and scarred by trauma that I’d rather not rehash on the page, but with my therapist who thinks, like all of the other people in his life, that he is strong considering what he had been through.
But what does strong mean? Because I don’t feel strong when I cry in response to a well-meaning joke my friend made about something they really couldn’t have known would hit a sore spot. I don’t feel strong when I get unreasonably angry over not being able to find the sock I swore I left on my bed and I’m suddenly standing in the middle of my room, chest heaving, thrown across the floor. I don’t feel strong when I apologize to my friend for needing to isolate myself because I feel as if I’m an unlovable piece of shit out of nowhere. I don’t feel strong when I’m running away from her.
Her is my mom, and hers, her is her sister, her is all of my exes, her is my first love, her is my first kiss, her is my future wife, her is every woman I’ve ever known and yet to know, her is the little girl that my family still sees when they look at me. She chases me in my dreams. Whispers in my ear memories from before I ever understood what a boy or girl was. But I look at him in the mirror. And the man staring back at me is strong enough to say goodbye to her.
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