The pain of which I remember.
I remember always hiding away in my room.
I remember how hard it was to fall asleep.. how I would lock my doors at night.
I remember how vivid my nightmares were, how I would wake up in tears..
I was constantly being struck or insulted.
I remember how it would hurt to sit after his attack.. how I hid the bruises.
I learned early that if you didn't cry out or whimper, it would just get worse.
It's almost as if he liked to hear the pain.
I would always tell him (afterwards) that I was going to turn him into the police.
That I was done with his abuse, that there would be a day soon that he couldn't hurt me.
He would laugh at me.. he would encourage me to do it. Hand me the phone and start dialing and tell me, "Who are the police going to believe? Someone who volunteers and is friends with them or a child that can't even speak a full sentence without crying?" "You will never beat me," He'd laugh, knowing that he won.
I'd run off and hide until my mother got home.
Whenever I would tell her about what happened while she was gone, it would always turn into what Crystal did wrong. How I needed to not provoke him.. that I was simply asking for trouble by talking back to him. She would always say, "Pick your battles, Crystal." Great advice there, Mother.. You did real swell job on protecting your child.
She tried, my mother.
She tried to keep her family together.
She did what she believed to be best.
She'd forced us into my room when I would reach out to her.
She'd have him hold onto me for hours.. I would shake and cry.
I would beg for her to have him let me go. To just leave me alone.
She never heard me..
As I said before, it is all so hazy.
I have just shattered memories..
I remember how he would slap me across the face whenever I spoke back.
I remember crying myself to sleep every night, praying/hoping for an end to come.
I would plead to be cursed with a disease that would kill me off.. it never came.
When I was 11 years of age (or so), my life went further downhill.
During this time is when my memory is the worst.. where there are more black holes then there are actually memories. It is also the hardest time of my life it is to write about. This is where my nightmares grew into night terrors, my reality turned into a darkness that I couldn't escape.
I developed early as a child.
By the time that I was in fifth grade I was already a "B" cup.
By the time that sixth grade rolled around I was already filling a "C" cup.
I continued a fast development from there which gained attention from not only kids at school, adults along the street where I would bicycle all day (in attempts to avoid my home life) but also at home. I won't get into details of what went on at home. It's not because I don't want to share with you, it's not that I don't trust you or that I don't want to get things off of my chest. I just don't want to expose something in detail that wouldn't do anyone any good. I will tell you that I was scarred for life and that there isn't a moment in time that I don't wish that this could be something that I could forget. Something that I wished that I didn't still have nightmares about..
[to be continued..]
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