3

The next morning I watched Nadal win the French Open. It was the second time I’d watched him play. His athleticism seemed to have no boundaries. The reason obviously isn’t talent, it’s passion. He wants it more, feels it more, makes his body do more. Maybe passion’s not a bad thing, just soulfully exhausting. I don’t put myself on the same level as Nadal, but I have known passion and know the sheer bravery required to allow it, to risk such a level of exhaustion.
The sports announcer said of Nadal’s opponent: _He’d be winning if he were playing a mere mortal._

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That afternoon I walked to the location given to me by the secretive theatre troop. I was part of a group of ticket holders.
I was the only guy in a group of technically attractive, fashionable women, but I didn’t like them much. I felt like I should have, like W__ or K__ or House wouldn’t have understood me if I tried to explain it to them.
I should have if I were all visual and nothing more, the way a man’s sexuality is supposedly supposed to be. But due to the abuse I know for a fact that women are woefully just as horrific as any man could ever even imagine himself to be. So I had trained myself to see the inside of a woman, her character, because my children won’t be raised by an insecure woman. They are worse to children than Bad men.

_Yeah, you have to be so careful never to wear the same thing twice,_ one girl said to the other as they talked about the difficulty of being cosmopolitan.
I’d be ashamed to have sentences like that come out of my mouth. It seemed disrespectful, to so ignorantly change the context of life from horrific to cosmopolitan. To change the definition of ‘problem’ to something so petty.
Something happened toward the end where an actor playing an FBI agent came upon us out of nowhere. We were in the upstairs of a restaurant and I basically barked him down the stairs, calling him an M__F__, etc.
All these guys came out of nowhere telling me it’s part of the act, it’s part of the act.
Why did I do that? Maybe it has something to do with deployment. What if I had been the actor playing the FBI agent? I wouldn’t have deserved that.
I should have thought _Baby Boy,_ (the boy in italics) to myself. But I didn’t have time before I had already barked him down the stairs.
One of the girls made a motion with her hand, like ‘down boy,’ and I saw it because it was only intended for me to see, and I calmed.
After the ‘interactive theatrical experience’ was over, it was getting dark, and I felt sick and inebriated. I figured it was because I had drank such a dark beer at one location, and then later such dark wine at another. I hate when inebriation sneaks up on me, it makes me feel sloppy, unaware.
At first I was alright but then I couldn’t make out the street signs anymore. I was so out of it that when I got to a section of homeless people I curled up on the ground, trying to stop the world from spinning, wondering if someone had put something in my drink. I had had so little to drink, how could this be happening.
I fell asleep then woke up still curled on the concrete, my knees hurting from the position. I got up and walked farther but when I got to the next group of homeless I laid down again, too out of it not to.
My legs hurt so I got on a subway car but while I was sitting there I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there or why I had chosen this subway car in particular. I sat there for a long time, sitting thru one stop after another, trying to make sense of things, until I decided this wasn’t working and I should get off and get a cab.
I woke up at the correct time the next morning without an alarm clock. I had to catch the train home. I remembered the cab dropping me off at the hotel last night but I couldn’t remember how I hailed the cab or how I paid him.
I guess that’s what Ms J__ meant -- with that careful, worried expression she always has when it comes to me -- when she kept telling me the dangers of being as free as I am, traveling alone all over the place, never checking in with anybody.

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I caught the train.
I know the stats, I look around the train and I remember the stats, allow myself to shift to a world in which the stats are true. I know the majority of human beings know they are bisexual, even it they don’t articulate it to themselves. I know how many have STDs right now, I know they think about sex so many times a day, within so many minutes each time.
I’ve been protecting myself, not allowing myself to shift, only memorize instead. It trips me out seeing the world on ground-level instead of my head in the clouds. It’s like remembering. To remember the rapes, the abuse, Trevor, my list of crimes, and to carry it with me, all the time, so that it gives color to my perception, instead of just words -- it’s grounding, calming.
These are real people, I keep thinking to myself. As Real as me; and inside those eyes, just on the other side there is a mind or a soul, depending, who looks in the mirror everyday, who has sexuality despite their personal failures. They have homes or at least places to live. They have aches and pains only known to themselves, they have sensitivity to certain foods. They all were children once, and teenagers, and all face old age. Each one is a Real as me.
I learned this several weeks before, but now it’s gone forward to the point where I don’t just feel connected, but I feel like if I worked harder, was more Aware and disciplined I could do better. It feels like a choice -- to be your story or be your soul instead, taking charge of the story.
I never thought of myself having a chance before. But then again I never really looked around me before. I was too numb to know how to.
To learn time is hard, having come from sexual abuse. To be sexual as a baby, so sexual that as a toddler I was having sex with playmates of both genders, it makes time irrelevant. I knew it as the soul place. Timelessness.
On the ground, life isn’t a story out of Western literature with a rich cast of characters as setting. Instead each of those characters is the main character. Life is Real.
I don’t want to be better than others, it’s that once I truly understood that was impossible, and also vice versa was impossible, it feels okay to try harder, to surpass.

_________

　
So I guess I’m back to writing again, I thought to myself as I rode back home on the train. Despite the deal I made when I started taking the sixteen pills a day. After all these years I still can’t decide whether writing is healthy or detrimental.
Sometimes I think I write because I don’t have anyone to talk to. Other people get to talk freely, saying whatever’s on their mind to their loved one, but I come from horrific and most don’t, and to mention anything about horrific to someone not from horrific is folly.
When I scroll over the words, the pages I have written trying to articulate the story inarticulate-able, I think, this body, this body ..
I notice my hands and arms, the skin, the legs and leg hair showing where the material of my fleece shorts end. I watch closely, feel the separation between the soul I am and the body I’m in. I think: this body, (the this in italics), this body, this body was being drowned in the kitchen sink as a baby boy, this body was being raped raped raped, this body knew Trevor, held hands with him well after his death. This body knows more than I do. Though when I die I have to leave it behind.
This body was the baby boy and then the boy and then the adolescent. There’s a miracle to it, the concept of bodies, of what it’s like. To carry the past with you physically by way of age. I had never known the beauty of age before. To be so in your body the past is constantly, physically, honored, instead of it held onto in the mind.

__________

　
I tell myself this a lot: Stop being mean.
It colors my perception erroneously. I can tell the story of the House in two ways: one, the truth, the other in a fashion that is mean to my abusers.
It’s only the first story that’s horrific. The latter one isn’t true. It makes no mention of the natural love I felt for my immediate family in the beginning.
To stop myself when I notice the meanness and I think to myself: _Baby Boy .._ (the boy in italics.) And he relaxes.
There’s a darkness inside of me. I’m tired of being enraged, bitter. I wonder about my feelings, if they can be trusted. Who is this guy? He’s kind of jerk. Then stop being him, I think to myself. But where did he come from?
I watched the film Momento once. Out of anger the lead lies to himself. He has no short term memory and relies on his own notes, just like I did when I was in the throes of shifting. Out of anger of having been manipulated he writes something he knows isn’t true, while also knowing he’ll believe it.
The lie is that I list their crimes -- horrific ones -- but that’s not what I don’t forgive. What I don’t forgive is that they didn’t care about me.
When asked I explain that therapists are extraordinarily weak and civilian. They have no credibility but for a supposed education in the horrific gotten from courses and books.
But really my first therapist was so awful it hurt.
He had that always-annoyed flair about him. He chuckled when I mentioned I had problems with sex. He was only a little older than me but I was better looking, and he was reacting to it. I thought he was just treating me that way, but I ran into him and his family in a furniture store once. I hid behind a cabinet, it seemed so strange to see him out of office, I didn’t know the etiquette.
I had been so relieved at having a therapist. I had this idea of therapist in my head. I was well-researched by Mike Lew and Starting Over I knew all the tips of reading a therapist, but it didn’t matter, I was vulnerable enough for him to treat me like sh_t and me to allow it.
He was there with his wife and his two little boys. He still had that always-slightly-annoyed air about him. He acted like his boys were his largest annoyance. He was just a bad man, that’s all.
But when asked about therapists I’ll tell the first story instead, the one about their profession having little credibility because such a shocking few are from the horrific. As if it’s some secret that I have feelings that are vulnerable to hurt. As if it’s some great secret that there’s anything about me even remotely vulnerable.
When I catch myself telling the story wrong, I say to myself: _Baby Boy .. _ (the boy in italics.)

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