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Now that all this seems over for awhile, I get to go back to being Him again, wordless, clear headed.
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(Sunday 13JUN2010)

I know I will inevitably forgive them. I’ve been in this world long enough to know that. But lately has been the first time I’ve truly understood their crimes. It’s okay not to forgive until the truth is known. It’s makes more sense to forgive after.

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(Monday)

Oprah aired an episode where she interviews four child molesters. She says, of the abuse: _People think that it’s about the act. That’s not what the crime is about. The crime is that it changes who you are. It changes who you are._
_I killed who she could’ve been,_ said one, the younger one, who continued a manipulative sexual relationship with an abused cousin three years younger than him since he was little. _I killed her. Just because she’s up and walking around doesn’t mean I didn’t murder her._
That’s what if felt like to kill Trevor. To reach out and play with him like that. I don’t understand why he didn’t die all the way. Why he stuck around for me. I know I was a little kid too, maybe even younger than him. But later on what I did seemed tantamount to what R__ did to me.
I remember during one Christmas season when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen. I went errand shopping with L__, and I told her that we should pick out our Christmas presents, and the other person buy them, and the shopping day would be fun and the Christmas gifts would be more enjoyed. So we did. Years later she told me that was one of the most fun afternoons of her whole life.
That’s the thing. I was having all these sexual relationships with people and didn’t know it: R__, who had his erect penis ramming inside of me when I was a new born baby. A__, H__, and L__, who had me inside her and between her and R__ in bed before I even knew English.
That was the betrayal, the shame of it -- that I honestly didn’t know that L__ and A__ and H__ were all looking for me to do something sexual with them, and all felt betrayed when I didn’t ..
They’re the ones who feel betrayed .. _That was one of the most fun days of my life,_ L__ told me, as if I had betrayed her, being in that House and not registering the sexual connotations. How dare I be nice to her. To her it was like I was leading her on.
Listening to them reminded me of the sneaky, manipulative perversion I used to think was the definition of sex. I notice how men now still think that’s the definition of sex, manipulating the woman, getting her drunk, anything to get in there. And they think that just because technically her body enjoyed it that somehow makes it okay, just like the sickos locked up and talking to Oprah.
Maybe I’m a Real man, and these civilian versions I’m surrounded by who aren’t from horrific and tend to have sex the masochistic way simply don’t know what they do. It’s hard to know sex when it’s all been screwed up once; you want to believe your friends, but sometimes coming from horrific puts you ahead of them, not behind. It doesn’t feel that way often, but maybe it’s true anyway.

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(Thursday, 17JUN2010)

It’s a surprisingly beautiful day. It makes me wonder about moving. The house is like a Frank Lloyd Wright but done on a low budget, so the materials make the house look like a log cabin. It has spacious porches, front and back, and a balcony. I looked out the window and there was a wild turkey walking alone through the yard. I’d never seen that particular wild animal in my yard before. The squirrel, the same one as always, looked at me peering out the window, kept looking at me, then maneuvered its way over to me, standing on the table outside the window, looking right at me, like a dog that wanted to come inside. For a minute there I wondered if I could take him with me when I moved, if there was some way. But there isn’t.
It’s possible now: the house is packed up to the point where I feel it’s possible to move. Before, it seemed an impossible venture. I’ve chosen a school, and have signed up for its familiarization course. Last night I forced myself to start googling for apartments in that area. It went well, me forcing myself to carry out the plan I’ve chosen, the plan I’ve always had, since I was little.
When I woke I noticed how alone I was. Could feel its potential for ridiculousness, insanity. By the end of the day I was watching Game 7 of the NBA Finals, secretly rooting for Boston, despite the impressiveness of the Lakers. It still surprises me how much I love to watch sports, how easily I get it now that my mind’s unlocked. During the game I noticed the alone-ness again, but didn’t mind it that time. You’re not alone. You’re enjoying Him. You’re enjoying being Him. That’s how it works.
I got a lot done, mainly due to the motivating weather. Worked out first thing, then dropped off thirteen trash bags full of clothes to the goodwill store; it took two nights of going through my clothes to collect the thirteen bags worth, something I’d been meaning to do it for years. I bought a kind-of-father’s day gift for J__. The card read: Happy ^ the-Army-thinks-you’re-my-foster Father’s Day. The gift was a small box of Nike high-performance golf balls. I washed and waxed the Jeep by hand while doing laundry at the laundry-mat across the street from the car wash. I started to feel capable, as if the life I’d chosen was possible.
Tomorrow I leave for New York again. These trips were planned a month ago, while I was working a job I had no business working. At the time I felt the New York trips were absolutely necessary, in order to get me through. I had found a loop hole, a way of doing the four day weekend for under three hundred bucks, not including cost of food, so I felt comfortable with it. Now that I’m trying to enact my plan, the pre-planned trips seem inconvenient, mistimed, but maybe not.
I’ve been skipping out on my post deployment military obligations. I’m supposed to meet up with them once a month for post-deployment briefings aimed mostly at keeping us from killing ourselves or our families or both. I know a lot of soldiers back from deployment skip them, but lately I’ve been feeling like I’m ready to start up again. I’ll have to answer for the ones I’ve skipped, have to allow them to treat me as if I’ve done something wrong, taking care of myself post deployment.
Secretly I don’t mind that my timing has cut it so close school-paperwork wise. Maybe it won’t be done in time for the fall semester. If not, I have a plan B I might like better: get the paperwork done for starting school at the end of January, then get a Christmas job through November and December, then go on the bike trip September and October. It still feels ambitious, but getting all the paperwork done in time for the GI Bill seems ambitious, too.

__________


I watch this show Two and a Half Men regularly. I’ve seen every episode but still watch, because I feel like there’s something there for me. The setting is two brothers from an abusive mother.
One brother handles it by overpowering women, the other handles it by being passive and being overpowered by women. Does it have to be such a stark choice? Why have the characters never unidentified with their mother?
The word ‘narcissist’ haunts me because of L__. She was just as abusively narcissistic as the mother who sets the scene in Two and a Half Men. H__ seems to have inherited the same narcissism, and I swear I didn’t.
I swear I learned the difference. Narcissism is exhaustingly awkward, because the narcissistic individual is keeping an eye on himself as well as on the present moment. It takes twice as much energy, as opposed to someone who trusts themselves, maybe due to the fact that someone approves of them to the point of love, whether platonic or not, and the individual can now live fluidly, smoothly.
I know that loving myself is by knowing I’m Him and not That. It’s experiencing myself that way, choosing that perception. It’s difficult to do when you’re the only one who’s ever known you as Him.
.. To know you’re being watched always, to live as Him, instead of the always-articulating soul .. To come all the way into the physical.

__________

　
J__ called and offered to give me a ride to the train station, in order that I not take a cab. He had hoped we could squeeze in lunch.
I notice things have changed, now, as we ate at a fast food restaurant. He’s the elder and I’m the youngin while before it was more like we were equals and the strange age difference was purposefully ignored for my benefit.
Now when I see J__ and Ms J__ it’s like they’re checking up on me, like they need some kind of status report, as if in their minds they’re calculating what might become of me.
It makes me nervous, causes me to take on an unnatural attitude. Instead of naturally telling them about Red and the baseball game I was to see in New York, especially my new excitement concerning Red now that it’s won so many Tony’s, it was like I was bragging, like they were bullet points I was inserting onto their mental balance sheet of whether I have a future or not.
I wonder if my plan to leave work and cash in the GI Bill really does sound like a fine plan, like J__ says it does, or if really he doesn’t feel that way at all, and is only humoring me. I’m starting to think the latter.
Turns out Tr__ is addicted to prescription pain killers. He was the only normal one, the only one my age in the family, I had had hope for our unofficial brotherhood.
Now I have to keep in mind that our conversations, our communications, might not always be genuine. Just like me, I suppose. I’m only genuine on an anonymous website; others only have bits and pieces of my story; even if they all exchanged notes they’d have little to show for.
When I’m around this family that’s supposedly mine, I’m always asking myself: Are you Him of That? Which are you identifying with right now?

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