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Boys can't get other boys pregnant. That's what he told me when I was younger, except men can get pregnant and women can be the ones who get them pregnant and oh God, isn't that terrifying? When you're taught to believe that one gender is inherently the safe one because this world is fucked up and then you get to learn that even that fucked up rule is a lie.
One shift of the axis and I could have had a kid when I was still so young, what the fuck.
It would have been my fault too, right?
My cousin announced that when I was a kid I would start talking about things that made even him blush. Incest and rape and the way bodies decayed slowly over time. Why do those things make him blush? I wouldn't have understood then and I don't now. It's not like I was the one bringing it up over dinner and wine, unprompted, right in front of the salad.
Mom always said to say nothing if you had nothing nice to say. She also said not to talk with your mouth full and so many people put things in there, like words and ideas and fingers and long expanses of skin, I can't vomit it up, I just have to plaster it all behind bared teeth and loud laughter. The hyena is identified by its laugh, I use mine as a disguise.
I didn't say that he was the one who kissed me first, when I was sixteen and he was older, in that weird little nook in that giant house of haphazard walls and nonsensical supports. I didn't say that his wife and kids could learn so many things about him if I dared to dismantle that shit-eating grin.
I wonder what I would do with a child if I had one.
I would probably hurt it, if I'm being honest. I would have back then. Intentionally or not, there would be damage. We'd have been an ouroboros, my baby and me, eating each other's tails until all that was left were stomachs and fangs as we gnawed ourselves down to bones filled with hate instead of marrow.
What the fuck am I supposed to do with that information?
Forget about it, I suppose.
When I was in college we were asked to write a letter to a person who had hurt us. It was an exercise. It was also around the time I started to remember the half hours stolen in the daycare bathrooms while everyone else was watching Tarzan or drawing stick figures, and someone else's tongue was in my mouth and my knees ached on the tile and I wondered if this was what love was meant to feel like (it wasn't, it isn't).
I wrote my letter to that person. It was around 700 words long. In it I asked them if someone had done the same thing to them. We are, as a species, prone to mimicry after all. It's the sincerest form of flattery, isn't it? Who did you admire, old friend, that taught you to how to kiss other little boys and how to make them want you to do it and how to put things in their mouths and anywhere else they'd let you?
(Even when they didn't let you. Even when they didn't want it. Making them think that is a skill worth killing for.)
Who was it? Your father? Another child, older? A sibling right on the cusp of making this statutory? I'll never know, but I won't lie; I want to. I'm not angry. Our experiences are formative and I am happy with the person I am, but God I want to know, so badly: who was it? Can I hurt them for you? Can I cut off the head of the snake that devoured itself and you and then me before it finally stopped?
Or did it even stop? Is that snake still out there, I wonder? The father of one of my friends is in prison for life for touching his children. We had sleepovers together. I watched them feeding their piranhas in that big tank in the living room and wondered why those predatory fish didn't eat each other if they were so hungry. They always looked so hungry.
So did that man, now that I think about it. But he didn't touch me. At least, not that I remember. My friend's little brother always wanted to sleep without his underwear. I've never willingly or purposefully fallen asleep naked.
Sometimes I dream about big scary men sneaking into my room at night and telling me they love me with bruises and bites I have to cover come morning. They wear the same shit-eating grin I do when we're at the breakfast table and discussing the weather.
There was a woman in that creative writing class, who had written a letter of a similar theme: she talked about stumbling home with bare feet and scraped knees and a burning pain between her legs, she talked about sobbing into her teddy bear and flinching from the neighbor when he came around to visit. She spat poison and vitriol and I wanted to take up arms for her. I wanted to hand her a weapon and tell her, 'I am here, beside you. I will hurt him for you'.
I didn't, of course. That's not the kind of thing you say to strangers in a college class. The professor remarked on how both of our approaches were so vastly different. It left a bitter taste in my mouth: these were real stories, and he treated them like we were stretching the wings of our writing technique and not baring our souls and traumas to a class of 30 in the hopes of getting an A.
Trauma used to be easier to talk about, in college. I'm not sure why. It felt like everyone had it. Speaking out was an act of defiance, an antidote to the snake's poison, a spear in hand and ally by my side.
I got an A. I don't know if she did too.
I still want to hurt him, for her. Whoever he was.
I wonder if she thinks about me. Who I am, what I've become. I don't know what the fuck I am. I'm an enemy to some because I dared to write words that expressed ideas, presented a narrative, and God forbid some of those ideas and narratives are sordid. God forbid they reflect reality.
My trauma will never be swept under a rug or hidden away. I am not ashamed of things that were done to me because I'm a delusional martyr who tells himself that my suffering means sparing someone else. Someone smaller and more innocent who didn't kiss their cousin or blow their best friend at daycare and who doesn't like dreaming about big sneaky men with shit-eating grins. I was not targeted because I was 'strong enough to bear it'. I was targeted because the world is full of balanced equations and the time I took up in my abuser's arms meant someone else stayed out of them.
I'll work on my martyr complex someday.
To others I'm a source of entertainment, a machine chained to its own self that will produce content or die trying. Some I would dare to call friends, but I won't say that out loud because that's not the sort of thing you say on the internet to a stranger, in an open forum of ridicule and romance. I am something that feels like a fever dream, that steals moments of consciousness and levity and eats it all up like a last meal on Death Row and doesn't care how heavy it all weighs when there's no outlet. I have my outlet: this. Trying to poke holes in me only relieves the pressure.
What the fuck am I?
I am someone who thinks himself a hero, I suppose. Some white knight who sits on his couch all day with a coward's heart and the actual ability of a mouse. Too many bong hits and empty cans to be useful. Who am I, to say, 'Tell me who' and act like I can do anything about it? I'm the guy who writes this sickening shit that is a 1:1 reflection of my morals and beliefs (apparently) and the guy who went underground during COVID because it terrified him (it still does).
I'm the guy who thinks about destroying things I never had. Who knows that if I had ever had a child I would not have had it for long.
I'm the guy who asks you 'Have you tried turning it off and on again?' when you call tech support.
It's strange, to be a machine and a person. It's strange to know there are people out there who have read that little personal essay. They were probably disgusted by my forgiveness, by my curiosity. Trauma is supposed to be pretty and suppressed and if it must show itself, it must be ugly and loud and rage, rage, rage.
It must be an ouroboros, and eat itself to death. Be its own last meal. Quietly, behind the scenes, so as not to trouble the pretty, happy people who do not have trauma and are trying to convince themselves so desperately that they are the majority.
For a very long time I suppressed those memories, and the feelings associated with them. The perk of being alone all the time is that you can think and stretch within the confines of your own jagged consciousness. The pitfalls and traps are known things that I navigate now without a map.
The snake must eat. That is a fact of life. It must eat, until you are at a point where you can starve it, and rip its tail from its mouth. When you no longer salt the Earth with your tears, and flowers can start growing. Bugs and birds and bees, and finally something brave enough to challenge the snake. Something big enough to cow it into submission, into retreat, into coexistence.
Regardless of what point your garden is at, whether you are still watering it with the blood from your scraped knees and your sobs and the panic-fueled sweat you get when your parents talk about the neighbor, whether you have dared to let the sun start warming the dirt but haven't planted the seeds yet, whether you have flourished in this new garden and are simply waiting for the ground to stop shaking, I am proud of you.
I am so, so proud of you.
You are not alone, and you are not wrong. It's okay to be lost and uncertain, to feel like there will never be a garden again, or to wonder where to even start.
I don't have answers, just my own experience.
Existing is defiance.
Refusing to be devoured is strength.
The snake will not be around forever.
So, what am I? What are you? What are we?
We are a garden.
And we are alive.