Chapter 5.

If monsters and molesters were easy to pick out in a crowd…it’s not a sentence even worth finishing. Life experience helps cultivate some kind of awareness when encountering a person with less than noble intent. I admire that some people are just born with the ability to sense a slant. It’s like a superpower, and I wish I had it. I believe it would have saved me from writing this shit.

When I stopped sleeping I started thinking what my life would have been if I understood what was behind the flattery I got as a twelve year old from a twenty year old guy. I was immature, I had zero experience, and no clue why this older guy paid so much attention to me. I mean, seriously, no twelve year-old should need a superpower to avoid a predator, but that didn’t stop me from trying to figure out how I could go back in time to fix that.

And there was another superpower I really wanted: time travel. When the flashbacks began, the insomnia got worse, so night after night I tried to figure out a way to make my mind stop looping into those bad scenarios. I began to believe that bringing back the years I blocked out, things I hated to think about because those memories-even the good ones-were tied up in terrible things. I began trying to remember events to the specific day because I wanted to change what happened so I could make counterfactuals, and I half believed if I remembered the exact date to the moment, I could relive my life-and I gladly would have. A total do-ver without all the shit. Night after night I stayed with creating an alternate reality until it hit me: going back in time would completely erase the existence of my oldest son.

That realization destroyed the weird peace of mind I generated to live with this internal panic I felt all the time. When I understood what I was doing, it felt like a concrete block dropped through the ceiling onto my chest. I could not breathe, didn’t deserve to breathe for thinking that. It brought me to the conclusion there was no way out of what happened.

All I had really succeeded in doing during all those sleepless nights was scrape up years and years of painful memories. I managed to bring up things I buried deep because they were so wrong, so disturbing, and those memories put me in an incredibly lonely cave of depression that, for a long time, felt like I would never be able to leave because I really wasn’t strong. I didn’t get out. Whatever new life I thought I had was a joke because I was back in a garbage pile of flashbacks; terrible memories, unwanted thoughts. After smothering those things until I thought I forgot, they came back. And it felt worse than I remembered. It was rock bottom.