The Military Academy has been on my mind.
Those early, more innocent days.
Like a vision, I see myself there, with SFC T____, and W____, and Forest__, and I’m Him this time, instead of the Ghost.
I sit at a table in the chow hall alone, eating breakfast, and then K____ comes up with his tray and sits down and I smile and say something. Then W____ comes up, and I____, and Tube Socks, and the table livens up, and it’s all so normal .. I can be that guy.
I keep having these visions of past memories where I insert the Real me in for the Ghost and I see how it could’ve been.
The Boy thing (the Him thing) is harder than I thought. It requires presence, even when I’m intimidated, and it requires a silent mind. No more going back to the past in my mind, there is only memory.
My words have lost that professorial tone where I’m trying to teach the Ghost, trying to jog its memory, trying to jolt it back to life.
I realize how much is wrong. So much of my behavior isn’t me. My interests, my goals.
What’s true and what’s not suddenly have a sharp contrast, even down to the details of how I sit or how I speak. It seems overwhelming, such a barrage of little changes, but I’m keeping up, and feel steady in it.
Now that I feel the connection and equality with other guys it becomes achingly clear that they never lived days, years, like mine. Along the way they’re not writing in a little green notebook words like these.
The goal is to capitalize on my name, to become it. So that’s its truths are my first truths -- as opposed to the House’s mis-truths.
The idea is to switch the Ghost with Him (the Real me). I feel like the secret is to believe my strengths are in Him, and not in the Ghost.
This Boy I am, this Him I am, could not exist in the House.
It’s who R___ wanted to sexually abuse, it’s who Mom wanted to kill, and it’s who A___ and H____ were after, both out of hate and a sick, perverse attraction.
Also, what R___ did made me distrust that part of myself, because R___ was male.
Shortly after June 1st, feeling comfortable with my new Reality, I prayed for a Real name. June 1st was Clarity, and I understood that my name come from a bad place, a place that had little to do with who I am.
By this time I had left Christianity behind though I still prayed. The vast Unknown of what or whom I was praying to wasn’t a problem for me.
The name given to me was _Boy._ A name I wasn’t particularly happy about, but what can you do.
For many years I had always known myself as ‘b.’ That’s because while growing up in the House I knew that when I escaped I would have to change my name and that it had better be effortless. Over a period of about ten years I kept changing my fake name, the majority of which began with the letter b. Hence, that’s incidentally what I ended up with as my name.
At the place I worked at the time of June 1st, I was known as Little B, because a good friend of mine who worked there was called Big B (because he was enormous.)
Years later I would read a book by Toni Morrison called Love. The main character’s name was L, which people pronounced El, and assumed was short for Elenore, or Ellen. When pressed for her name, L would say that the name it stood for had long been forgotten and she hadn’t been called that name for decades.
So ever since she was a little girl she simply remembered her name and kept it to herself, like a secret that should never have been a secret. Of course her name was Love, and her life owned a dose of tragedy, and by her remembering her name she kept her Aliveness.
That’s how I see my name. And after all this time I now see the intense wisdom of the answer to my question prayed. To have come from a place where my gender was the catalyst for the Abuse, and where its entitlements were kept from me though both were mine, I just had forgotten.
These past few days all I have to do is remember my name and I can feel, and am present, and am not a Ghost.
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