(Wednesday)
I woke up this morning and remembered his name: Principal Wood__, that’s why I know what I’m remembering while on the pills is true.
I remember that all the men were monsters. They’d undo their pants and rape you in a minute.
That’s how I perceived it as a boy.
All the females knew it too, they just never let on and never protected me. Because what could they do? When the threat of rape was always right there?
It was a man’s world. The monsters set the tone, made the rules, and there was nothing more to Life but the soul and death and the Who Knows place.
I remember the lunchroom, while I was in kindergarten. A__ entering with her first grade class and them forming a line to the bar after us kindergartners had already gone through.
The women know it, they just pretend not to because what can they do. So they allow him to rape me. Because so many men are that way. But I’m not a monster, I’m not a male -- I’m Him.
I’m not okay, I haven’t eaten in so long and the hunger really hurts.
I wouldn’t have thought that rape would be the ultimate crime. I would’ve thought murder. But rape is done in the Soul place.
So the world’s this bad.
So it was my job to be strong enough not to get raped. So it’s Mom’s crime. She was the one who started using me as a sex toy. What did she think R__ was going to do? Not rape me nightly for ten years?
Principal Wood___; the principal of the elementary school I went to. That’s real. I almost remembered him last night, but I could only see the side of his face.
So all along the world was like a Henry Miller novel. A vulgar, monstrous one.
But I’m a Him, not an Ugly Man. I might be a Devil and an Angel all at once, but that’s okay because I’m Him. I can know the truth and also understand and still I am clean. I can say these truths because I’m Him.
Trust is how a woman orgasms, despite the man pumping into her guts. It’s trust that inside that animal is a Him, as he trusts that inside this other animal is a Her.
You're going too fast, he's not going to remember, something said in my head as I drove to work. He remembers Principal Wood__ now, so he know what I'm saying is true.
Did that just happen? Who was that? I think to myself. It was the Tough one, the numbed out one, telling the boy he was going too fast, and the boy said okay fine. They referred to me as He.
They're talking to each other about me, saying the boy's telling too much too fast and when I'm not high I won't remember, won't understand.
Because it can happen it means anyone is capable of it. Because the act of child rape can happen.
It doesn’t define the world like the boy perceived. Two sets of thoughts, two perceptions, the boy’s and the Tough one‘s, merging into me.
Now that I'm not as high, my heart's pounding and I don't feel confident. It feels like a symptom, not something soulful: I'm scared of everything that moves seems like, every sound.
I notice my annoying adult acne is cleared on its own, despite my being too high lately to stick to a skin care regimen. I'll break out sometimes on my shoulder or forehead, and because of my age it's embarrassing to me. But this morning there's barely a hint. I wonder if it's the new memories (and new perception) or if it's the being high or if it's the deep, relaxed sleep the high gives me. I sometimes can sleep for fourteen hours at a stretch when I 'm coming down off this stuff.
The nervousness is back, the memories seem vague now and far away. Work sucks my attention away from my heart beat and even though I can still feel that warm morphine when I concentrate on it, I quickly lose it to distraction. I don't have that Homer-3D feel, but if I concentrate on it, I do. I find it frustrating.
Just be brave, I tell myself, and it works for awhile, but I'll easily lose it to distraction, and fall out of it again. When that morphine feeling isn't strong enough to hold my attention, I lose the awareness of the inside of my body, I can't feel much on the other side of my skin.
It wasn't like this overseas .. The physical labor of connexes, the working with weapons and as a gunner and dismount, working and hanging out with guys my own age .. I think I don't like my job, it makes me stay in my head so much.
I wish I could be alright. The more present I get the more alone I feel. The Tough one is exhausted of being numb; the boy is exhausted of keeping secrets. It's on me now, to come back to life. It's hard, and it hurts.
I make myself feel masculine or feminine. When I look for my masculinity inside of me, which seems like the first step, I remember horrific memories, sweet, because I can feel my natural movements again.
I can trust that I was once Him, before Trevor died, before the violent rapes in the bathroom til I was in fifth grade. And now, in the present, where I'm on my own taking care of the boy and the Tough one, I can make myself feel masculine by making sure to perceive the world my way - the masculine way - to see myself my way - as Him - and to do the masculine things I like to do even when they seem frighteningly unfamiliar - like fixing things, watching basketball on TV, building things, being entrusted, being a lover, etc.
Whenever I silenced the left side of my brain, and lived wordlessly for awhile, I always felt myself, but at some point I had to start to think, in order to do my task like fixing things, working on the Jeep, watching sports, I would use my brain, and it would be a different voice, the one from the right side of my brain, and that voice came with memories and knowledge and flashbacks.
When I didn't feel physical and was numb in this world, it's like I was my soul. I worked on realizing who I was and found out that I was Him. My soul wants to live, it wants to feel, and it wants to have such good sex that it would choose that and be happy to physically die because of it.
Like that fly that lives one day, to see the world, to have true sex, and to die having missed out on nothing.
I notice I have to use my other senses more than my brain. When I really look, and I really listen, the answer to what's going on can be completely different than the answer the left side of my brain will have.
I know the left side is all that was left of me after the rapes. The majority of me is on the right side. So I have to be brave and choose a perception I've never learned to trust. I've trusted the left side of my brain to get me this far. Same as I trusted the Tough one, and the boy and his secrets, but now it's on me, the Real me, the alive version of me, not just my soul, but the soul all the way in this physical world, with His physical senses intact and in use.
I notice I have to slow down a lot. While before I was in a hurry to get myself to a better place before I could handle the truth of my life -- a place where it would be okay to fall apart if that were to happen -- now I slow down, because I'm in that better place financially, physically, and I have all the notes and education I need.
It's like I'm the opposite of a transsexual. Where a transexual's insides are correct and the body wrong, my body is correct and my insides wrong. My insides don't match with my soul. My emotions and sensibilities have been made reactive, effeminate, by violent rape, and abandonment, and memory loss.
The secret is to not follow the rules. They are man-made, so they don't apply to me. I can make the rules. I don't have to go to formation tomorrow, I can make an excuse, because that's what's best for me. The unit I deployed with is different than the one I belong to, so they want us deployed ones to meet up on the weekend. It’s too much for me.
The Major said I had lost weight. Really I weigh more than I did before I deployed, but me and K__ worked out twice a day, so I know what the Major meant. The compliment surprised me, with all this whirling around in my brain.
Sometimes when I write it's not a story, it's where I need to know the answer to a mystery. It's like I'm handling it like algebra. I need to know what x multiplied by y multiplied by z equals.
So I start with finding out what x means, and maybe that takes about a week. Then, I use that to figure out what y means, and maybe that takes another week and a couple of days. Then I figure out what z means, and it all comes together for awhile, and I move on.
Lately that's how I’ve been moving forward. When I write, I'm writing things I know won't change, things I can bank on. I thought I needed to get away from the notes, because I was using the left side of my brain. But maybe I'm just handling it mathematically, which has always been just as much a masculine field as any other.
I guess it has more to do with which way I enjoy thinking, the left or right side, and has little do with which side I have needed to use the most. The only difference is that I trust one side more than the other, but both sides are mine.
Maybe both sides were masculine all along. It was just my motivation that separated them, one feeling effeminate, the other masculine. One made me feel a connection with women, like I identified more with them then men, the other made me remember something horrific.
I wish I could converse with Einstein, feel him out and his ways, decide how to judge myself and my actions concerning the left side of my brain -- the side of the brain he seems to have preferred.
I don't like the left side of my brain. It hurts. It goes against who I would've been if I had not been abused. I used to be a boy who was strong and though abused had not been truly shocked yet.
I went grocery shopping after work. I made a stop and acquired more pills.
People tended to not like me, though I was raped and I was a baby. They sense I was raped, I think, and treated me rudely because I allowed myself to be raped. I should have been stronger, braver, smarter.
The man in the grocery looked at me because I was in uniform. That time I saw him for what he was: an older version of me. Usually men seem so foreign to me.
I identified with women due to rape. Not because they had been raped but because they seemed familiar with the idea of being penetrated, of feeling that pleasure. A pleasure that had been raped upon me.
__________
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