Like a film cut into scenes, I remember short clips of my life before. I sat in that loveseat in the dark because I was told that demons run rampant in the bedroom I took comfort in. the only demons I knew of were my own, though I was too small to recognize them. they grew each day back then. The love of a mother had always been eclipsed by the love of the holy Bible.
that's why I was straight then. I wasn't before, and I wasn't after, but for those weeks where demons kept me from my own self, I was what she told me I should have been. I had been washed clean of that disgusting lifestyle in the holy name of a saint in a church I couldn't remember, a saint who wouldn't do it the second time. Disgusting - the first word I'd heard spat in the direction of a man in heels and a sparkling scarf. oh yes, she wanted everyone to know that I was clean. she wanted my friends to know, and so they heard by phone in my small voice, trying to hide from the numbers i dialed. though they didn't love me, or so I'd heard, so I saw little point. she wanted family to know, and they heard too from her sunken place in the doorway where phone met ash. I couldn't escape. I could see the saddened eyes of anyfew I could see then, eyes that knew. it wasnt until she came to me - in a plush robe, which would have otherwise blinded an unfamiliar son - speaking in tongues that you can only hear on the corner of 8th and Riverside, that it all came to an end. It washed away then, soon after the gun pointed away from my head, just as she wished the saint could have done back then, and fear was replaced with other things of both light and dark. I felt the demons were there, the demons left in that room by demand, those that flocked to me when she pressed me to the wall and spat at me. the demons of emotions I wasn't allowed to feel; sadness at the loss of all I knew, anger at the one person who deserved all of it yet none of it at the same damn time, relief that at least my brother was safe. there is a rigid, sharp thing without a name that appears under the ribcage within the loathing of someone you love - a person close to the heart that cannot be blamed for what they did not choose, but they chose it all the same. you know, you KNOW, YOU KNOW that when blood calls for sedation, it takes everything to resist, but you know also that giving in is a choice. it is later I learned that choices are double edged swords, and they always cut. there were demons there, then, but they were not in my bedroom; they were on the bathroom counter, in the master bedroom, on tables and surfaces that would GLOW with a blacklight. as the blue uniforms took us all, I did not know where I would go, nor my baby brother, but anything was better than the house on Archer.
gamechangershow
gummygunk
2087
areudirty
yousharknotpass
stormborns
izzy806