2

In the back of my mind thoughts constantly ruminate over what exactly is wrong with the Toughness now. It always goes back to sex.
I have never been loved appropriately, throughout these years. Of course it would get me down, especially about my looks.
It is true I’m afraid of sex. Hence, I am only comfortable in relationships where sex definitely will not happen.
With E___ I turned out to be wrong. With Ms M___, I was right. With Homosexuality I was right. With other Hims I was right. I just want to be myself, I want that intimacy, I only act that way when I feel safe.
Yet the closeness makes others suspicious. Like how people joke that me and K__ are gay, though it doesn’t get more hetero than K__. Or how people suspected that me and Ms M___ had something going on even though she was an old woman. Or how people assumed me and E__ were sleeping together all along, when really it only happened in the end.
I should be getting that close with a girl I’m sleeping with, but I go out of my way not to.
I am capable of closeness, of intimacy, of being liked for who I really am -- I just do it inappropriately, with people I have no real future with.
I was always Him. What I always wanted, what I always felt shitty about not having, I always was, I always had already. I was always eligible.
I catch myself seeing the world through the boy’s eyes, because he can’t feel sexuality. As long as I am A-sexual, I am still a boy.
Despite the inherent pain, I can feel proud of the abnormal-cy I exhibited in the House. It was like I was trying to be abnormal, to the point of grasping at straws.
I refused to be anything like Mom or Ray -- people who I didn’t know well and generalized according to their genders -- which gave me little room to maneuver.
If I had acted normally, it would have grown up to be like R__, and would have married someone like Mom, and -- especially -- would have been a part of the sexualized nature of the House, an atmosphere upheld and encouraged by my sisters.
The abnormal-cy felt at the time like it had to be that way. I was angry. I couldn’t let people think that the House was normal. I couldn’t go along with it or help encourage others to go along with it.
The abnormal-cy that made my childhood lonely and difficult -- that unacceptance that led to numbness and unAliveness and unRealness -- is what saved my future.
If I had accepted my childhood as normalcy I would’ve become an abnormal adult -- and the generations between my legs would suffer for it. It’s what saved my sex, my sexuality -- my Soul.
I hated those people, I judged them.
_The closer you are to accusing wrongdoing, the farther you get from God,_ is the old Catholic quote.
I felt a judgment when such Bad people were attracted to me. An intense shame every time it happened.
K__ said that all his girlfriends just happened, he didn’t go out and artificially look for them. That’s how life works, he said. But I had attracted Bad.
The abnormal-cy manifested mostly as not-wanting-to-be-liked. The need made my dealings with the outside world -- including relatives, social workers, etc. -- impossible.
I was a foster parent’s worst nightmare -- angry, distrustful, having taken every thing into my own hands by eight years old.
Not being liked was Difficult, Honorable.
Sex and sexuality in the House was wrong. I knew this, and felt confused, because everyone else acted like it was normal.
I can still feel like sex is wrong. There’s a difference between incest and sex. I’ve blamed myself for all the anxiousness concerning sex. I thought it was proof that I was as abnormal and Less and inhuman just like they had said.
Once the physical and mental abuse stops, seems like all it takes is a kind of mental acknowledgement that it was all Abuse and meaningless -- a kind of Tough maturity and understanding, and I’m alright. Sexual abuse is different.
Sexuality is what means you’re Alive. According to Eastern culture Want -- all wants -- even the most mundane and ordinary, are Sexuality, and that Want is the language of the Soul, manifesting itself into physical, present life.
When sexual abuse takes that from the individual -- traumatizing them to the point they can’t even register their true Wants -- he seems to become less human than the Monsters who abused him.

__________

　
I went back to the BAS for a follow up on the bump on my foot.
Soon I found myself strapped to a stretcher and being flown on a helicopter to a hospital in Baghdad. It was a spider bite that was trying to rot my foot off.
I wanted to continue to hang out regularly with my buddy, but K__ was going on leave back to the states in a couple of days, and I was going on pass to another country in about a week, so I felt it was good timing, at least.
In the emergency room I had to bite down again because it remained impossible to numb the area the medics kept archaically cutting into.
I stayed in ICW for three nights, unfortunately it’s also where they board the mentally unstable.
When I was released from there and housed in the regular ward, I met another guy who had been released at about the same time. His name was Rod___. He was a reservist from Arizona.
He was Latino, with the same bilingual way of talking as the guys I had hung out with at Fort Knox.
What struck me about him was how impossible it was for me to guess his age. He turned out to be nineteen, but could be easily mistaken for thirty. I began to recognize his youth by how he talked so much. Everything means more when you’re young, because you have so few stories.
He was very mature acting, very confident, and composed. There weren’t any actual old features about him. I swore it was his eyes, but couldn’t be sure.
He was from Abuse. He was happily married with a baby on the way. When he found out I was from Abuse, he told everything, for days. I didn’t tell him about the sexual abuse, didn’t mention any of the after effects.
When I was a teenager it’s what I hated about myself, the fact that the employers and co workers never batted an eye when I said I was eighteen, twenty one, when I was really fourteen, fifteen.
I kept trying to slow the maturity down, wanting to be young, care free -- Difficult under those circumstances. Once, an attractive woman who was involved with the youth at church went with us on a trip.
She had assumed I was a grown man. When she found out I was fourteen, she gaped as if that had to be impossible -- had to be. As if I had no youth whatsoever.
Rod___ wasn’t classically good looking, didn’t look particularly young -- was even a bit overweight -- it literally didn’t matter. I think they call that a baby face. Charles Dickens claims I have a baby face.
_People can‘t guess my age because of the way I carry myself,_ Rod___ explained, as he showed me around the base, now that I could walk again.
I work on being Him from the inside out , but I can also work on it from the outside in, by paying attention to how I carry myself -- a concept I can easily understand.
I don’t feel bad now, about how that woman gaped at me for being fourteen, as if it was unnatural. The way the Abuse matured me wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it didn’t physically sap my youth from me.
Rod___ showed me how to play Call of Duty, and Guitar Hero. The nurses started to make fun of us and our fast friendship.
I hadn’t been around women for so long, I wondered how I was going to get rid of the constant hard-ons without any privacy.
Rod___, who comes from a large, coed FOB, was unfased, and kept laughing at me.

__________