It was the night I first prayed, properly anyway. Down on my hands and knees, nestled by the toilet and begging the so called ‘good lord’ to do something.
Having a misguided relationship with sex means you have a misguided relationship with everything. It led to assault of every variety, a mental and sexual ambush. Well, that’s in my experience anyway.
When you’re hurt deeply, irreversibly, you find the kindness of man a pantomime. A concurrent flurry of manipulative daydreams bent on luring you in again and again. I’ve fallen for it more than once, settled in the fact that all I have to give is what others want to take. It’s a dangerous path to go down but one that’s unavoidable when someone begins to take from you. Stealing rose after rose until you’re only left with thorns.
I not only lost myself but the world around me. It all became a fakery. I was walking through a painting splashed with the shakings of disassociation. Travelling on the bus became more than a chore, it became a feat of man and one I had to conquer every day. It was a wonder I managed to get anywhere, mellowed in a near meditative state of depersonalisation. I was no longer real to the world. My place was void.
On the bathroom floor I had hoped it would all change. I hoped that I would wake up in my cold bed and there would no longer be those shadows behind me. Their kind faces, soft hair, slender fingers. That was, of course, not my reality. I had awakened in a sweat and the shadows were still there.
I don’t know if they’ll ever dissolve, fall into the earth like blowing the steam from a boiling kettle. But I know that those calls, those conversations, the reams of writing about my past will help. That’s what I was told anyway. Learn all you can about yourself, dig deep for the scars in your muscles and knead them out with a self kindness that still seems so foreign. One day, I hope, it will all fade. I don’t need God. I only need myself.