I have spent all week avoiding the news, turning pages, clicking past, closing my eyes. Closing my ears.
But you can’t.
I’ve spent the week trying to avoid the knowledge that I was being triggered, in the most massive of ways, just by coverage and words. It’s like my insides were retrieved and pulled back in time, to another place. I wasn’t that little boy the the showers, but dammit if I don’t remember the feeling of knowing, of knowing without a fucking doubt that someone knew. Someone saw and someone could have stopped it and someone did nothing.
I have lived my life with the knowledge that I wasn’t worth saving. That I wasn’t worth the effort of protecting.
It sounds like the simple choice an adult could make. Get involved, don’t get involved. Walk away. Pretend you didn’t see. Pretend no one if hurting. Pretend there isn’t a little girl naked on film, film in your hands.
Wash yoru hands of it.
To me, it makes you complicit. It makes you guilty, If my eyes had reached to you, much as that little boy would have reached, in anguish, in horror, in terror, and you could walk away, are you any less a monster?
Somethings are just wrong. I, like many others this week, have spent time reliving our monsters, playing it over and over in our heads. The knowledge that we just didn’t matter.
That we were something to walk away from.
***
I can’t listen about the man who just got 5 years for 4.5 MILLION images of child pornography without wondering if I’m one of those pictures. I will never know. I will never know if the man who took the pictures while the other man directed the action ever felt bad when he walked past me in the street. I wonder if he ever thinks about what he did, about the full impact of what he did.
On bad nights I wonder if he kept them and enjoys them still.
On bad nights, the voice whispers to me that I must be unworthy, I must be garbage, less than some, a null value. Why else? Why else did this happen? Why else was there a cold wet tongue in my mouth at 8, fingers at my chest? Why else are there memories colored by condoms and pain and frigid terror, a red wash to the skies behind my eyes while my body goes rigid and eats it’s own screams?
Why the fuck else?
Why else would anyone destroy a child, if they were nothing to begin with?
***
I don’t have the answers. But you know what I do have? I don’t trust anyone. I try, and I bind my lack of faith in pretense and poetry, but there is a nagging doubt behind me always, nodding. They will betray you. They will ruin you.
You will deserve it.
I hate myself. Every child who has been touched, every adult who has felt the power leave their limbs will nod and understand this loathing, the scars on my body where I’ve dragged metal through skin, the sudden shudder to my voice. There is such hate inside of me, a burning seething wreck, stranded lonely. I cannot soothe it, or break free from it. Instead I cover it with the cotton of time and walk from it in hope.
And you will never know.
Your skin will turn cold at a lover’s touch. Your stomach will curdle, your breath will catch and you’ll resist the urge to call out your own name in rememberance. You’ll forget the difference between memory and a dream.
As if there was ever one anyway.
Spin Me I Pulsate 
just needed to say i was here, without words of my own but fiercely stirred by yours.
what made me cry, what made bile in my throat, was that they left those little ones, gave them no help, no assist no voice. so many grown capable adults, so many saw and said they ‘did’ something but really did nothing. it is horrific. it is terrible. and i am so sorry it is something that you know, something that happened to you.
I can’t imagine. Lord give some comfort, some cushioning (without illusion), not only to Thor but to these others.
I am so sorry this has happened to you and to others – innocents who lost your innocence in such horrific ways. I wish wishing was enough to undo what has been done.
Oh, I hate this so much, the lasting hurt that has been in your life. I’m so sorry, I have no good words, but I pray and hope that people will stand up for kids, who ARE so worth it, so worth protecting from the hellish evil in this world. I’m sorry they let you down. It’s all their fault. xoxo Thanks for writing it down.
I’m sorry, hon. I wish it weren’t so – for you and for all the others.
Sucker punch….I’m here too.
Also, my best friend was the prosecutor in this file. She is the leading child porn prosecutor and she’s long tried to TRULY know (without being fully able) to understand the impact of the actions on others. I’m not sure you can, unless you tragically have been victim to the act.
Can I point her in the direction of this blog post so that she can read it? I somehow think this will help her in the fight…even if the fight comes much too late for you, and many others.
I apologize for being human that this has happened to you.
I should talk about forgiveness, peace and the freedom of love as as christian but I hope that they burn in hell, each and every one of them burns for the pain they are causing you, when you were young and still when you are much and much older.
I’m sorry out the deepest of my heart and soul, they might walk the streets now, when they die, even if they die in their sleeps a long trial is waiting for them I’m sure of REAL JUSTICE will be served on the day of judgement.
Underneath all the self-hatred, the torment, the emotion, the rage…there is a part of you that they couldn’t touch nor take away. I can see it so clearly in your words, in the spirit you convey. You are a being of light that no one can darken.
Lame prose by written by undeveloped intellects pretending to a cultured mastery of human experience, as if the truth of existence can be encompassed and clearly seen or understood by so few trite syllables jammed together in weak emotional arrogance and intellectual dishonesty. Victims of abuse notwithstanding, the prevalent language on this website is weakness in character and meaning. The weakness of sophistry in support of self-indulgent beliefs callowly accepted as pathetic victimization must be seen to be believed. If you don’t see this, you should try looking differently. No questions are raised here, no challenging insights given or elicited, no truths revealed. There is nothing here to be learned, so only fools would believe these words. Look otherwise to true genius, or be left with the bottomless vacuum of meaninglessness which will present itself to you as the void, empty and endlessly meaningless. This is the kind of writing common in the art of America today, smug arrogance sincerely practiced by pseudo-intellectual fools who wish to believe in the power of poorly developed falsely transcendent psycho-babble nonsense, not unlike Brittany Spears believing her successfully marketed childishness comes from a deep source of creative power. Accepting this brand of poor writing is a prematurely proud albeit shallow stand against the reality of abject failure in the demand for practically useful intellegence. So forget about art such as this as anything other than responding to calling for self-pandered pandering, simply and wrongly to establish or bolster puerile infantile adult perceptions, because this is not art or science and therefore can never solve problems. Your real problems are not addressed in any way whatsoever by believing this is anything more than weakness. My advice is to grow up, get over the pain and the horror of abuse, and take responsibility for living a life without pain, unless you would prefer to live as if your belief you are filled with pain will one day lead to a meaningful life. Pain filled myths of how hard life is when obsessed with self-serving justifications of an adult with childhood memories of abuse are still only myths, a powerless waste of time. Wake up and witness the majesty of life before you waste another second obsessing compulsively over the sad state you were left in when everyone or someone you trusted betrayed you. The horror of abuse, as tragically formative as it is, is not worth one iota of attention, unless the experience can be used to help put an end to evil, the story just help to keep the horror cemented in place. Stop doing that, I would advise. It happened, to you, to me, to millions alive today, as it happened to everyone, and you continue to lay the stultifying pain of abuse on others as if that can help you or anyone else. This is the height of a tragic mistake ridden through with misunderstanding, held together by mistaken science and twisted humanity. It cannot solve anything, but keeps the perspective solidly in place, as if necessary in some absolute sense, such as the necessity of death. We have all been lied to, yet we are accepting of and writing Nguyen educated to believe lies about who we all truly are. Stop this or we will stay stuck in the useless paradigm of narcissistic victimization, among other sad mistakes. Think of racism and it’s effects, if you cannot get over the hurts inflicted on your sensitive soul, try imagining something much more awful, such as child abusers who get off free because they have expensive lawyers. Now that is what really sucks, the endless evil that lives because people would rather whine and complain uselessly than be responsible adults. Just because you can do it out of habit and unfocused emotionally twisted perspectives on right and wrong doesn’t mean this is the best, or only way of seeing yourself and others. Nothing works like this, in such black and white absolutes of justice, fairness, or truth.. Choose courageously or be abused the rest of your life by your own irresponsibly abusive use of out-of-control obsessions. Stop wasting your own and others time. Be courageous and make it your job to bring about the opposite of the pain which was inflicted, which we all insist on maintaining through stubbornly persistent failure of nerve. Forgive my intolerance and my more obvious mistakes of reasoning, because please, this way of looking at your problems is possibly more compassionate than pretending forever your problems can be resolved through shallow exploration of painful memories of shattered trust. There is so much more to art or exploring meaning than the irreconcilable conundrums everyone conventionally accepts as transcendent truth. Get a clue kids. The Web is destroying the foundations of intelligence because now everyone seems to be able to easily get away with pretending to transcendent intelligence and artistic excellence, which is so unrealistically widely assumed in today’s society that there is a legitimate possibility the American civilization is on its way out. How else do we end up with a child abusing sexual predator leading the Nation? Think I’m wrong, or full of it? What if I’m right and all this has nothing to do at all with politics or popular belief?