Virginia
On the morning of September 13th, 2023, I sat on a park bench, overlooking the neighborhood pond, and I wrote in my journal:
All I wanted to do was find a bridge.
Or a cliff -
But in Ohio??
A “scenic overlook?”
So I Googled.
Google said:
“19 minutes to the closest scenic spot” -
It was a park that boasted a row of tall pines.
A reviewer said that it reminded him of Washington.
But my gas tank was on E, and I had sixteen dollars to my name.
44 years old and sixteen dollars. Not even a cent squirreled away in savings.
What an abject, fucking failure.
My dad told me 7 years ago, when I cried about not having a purpose,
that my children are my purpose.
And so, I stiffened my upper lip
like I always do,
and I followed instructions.
I put my all into it.
For nothing.
Because I have failed at that too.
Despite breaking my back,
suffering,
sacrificing,
only to be met with children who appear to hate me,
or children who are failures too.
What a colossal fucking waste of a life.
Of multiple lives.
Despite my best efforts,
It was never going to be enough.
And so, instead of a bridge, or a “scenic overlook”,
I sit at the neighborhood park wondering if it would be possible to drown myself in the pond…fill my pockets with rocks, like Virginia Woolf.
What would be required?
And how long would it take?
And would someone see?
And could I just slip in…
and away?
And would I even be missed?
Or would everyone just miss all of the things I did for them?
And you?
You don’t even deserve your name to be mentioned in this letter.
You wasted and sucked away five years of my life -
Years that maybe,
just maybe,
I could have been happy.
Fuck you for that.
This would be the last time that thoughts of suicide would ever cross my mind, after having been tormented by The Darkness for over 30 years.
It would be the last time I would feel the Sullen…the Grey.
A few weeks later, I would be standing in my kitchen with a gleaming butcher knife in my hand. If he tried to protest, tried to suck me back in again with his black, snake charmer eyes, I would stab him in the chest just like he told me he would do to me that summer night in July.
Except I actually would have done it.
Luckily, he knew this. He quickly got the fuck out.
And then, I lived in anguish for over half a year. The withdrawals. The pain.
Jesus, the pain.
I was convinced it would split me open.
And then, just as quickly as he had arrived, that warm evening in October of 2018, fresh off the Greyhound, he vanished. His energy released the chokehold it had on me.
And I woke up.
I got out of bed.
I began to breathe on my own again.
Anyone who has been a victim of abuse, and has had to excavate a monster from their bones – one that has replicated and metastisized and clung to every strand of their DNA, will never be the same again.
Once the spell has been broken, and you take one last look back at the miserable cage you had been living in, it isn’t there anymore. It actually never was.
It’s like waking up and realizing that that the last five years didn’t actually happen – it was just the world’s longest nightmare.
And then…
Well.
Then you can never go back to sleep again.
Once you have seen that there was no cage to begin with, and once the fog of cognitive dissonance fades, then you can see all of the cages. The bigger ones.
They operate exactly the same. It’s easy to spot their patterns after you’ve lived for years in terror, hypervigilance, always looking for hidden, silent clues and taking note of cycles.
Having control and ownership over your own brain is the greatest gift humans were given. Free will. Our inalienable right.
Only survivors know the true terror of having our minds taken from us.
And only survivors understand how truly sweet it is to be free.
So as long as my mind stays free,
I’m gonna fight like hell.
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” – Virginia Woolf