A Year Away

Chapter 3

Tonight was bad.

Tonight was really bad.

I was getting ready for bed when all the sudden it just cracked.

I just cracked.

Suddenly, I was back in the camp. The walls to the cabin weren't painted, the bed was hardly anything more than springs, and there were no windows. It was dark in there. So dark.

But things got worse when the light came in.

When the sun rose it meant another day was coming. When the sun light was let in through the door and the Father walked in to start you on a new day of purging your sins, you wished the darkness would come back and swallow you whole.

We would all eat together. All of us sins gathered in one room. The longer I was there I realized there were three types of us.

Type one: the ones who weren't actually sins. They had wandered into a phase in the beginning of high school or so and their parents had overreacted and shipped them to camp. They usually left quickly.

Type two: the type that was sin, but more devoted to the man above than themselves that they learned to convince themselves otherwise. They took longer to leave, but they left in a good head space.

Type three: The sins. The sinners who knew they were sins, who knew they were wrong and dirty and ugly but couldn't for the life of them stop it. Who had just as hard of a time being someone else as accepting what they were. They didn't leave early. They stayed the whole year, until they were kicked out for the next wave of possible sins.

Type three was subjected to lectures, preachings, yellings, beatings, and anything else that would get God's word across like type threes didn't already know it.

They were made to think of themselves only as sin. As nothing but the dirty scum that man spit on.

But it was okay, because they could change. They could become better if they came closer to God and got those silly thoughts out of their heads.

And when the preachings didn't work, the bad spirits would have to be removed with force.

And when that didn't work, then they were unfixable and demonic.

Type threes went home bruised and broken with smiles on their faces only because it was over. But those smiles went away when they got home and realized nothing was better.

They were still sins. And they hadn't left damnation.

I was a type three.

There was a priest while I was there who decided that the thing making me the way I was was a demon.

I was strapped to a chair, soaked in holy water, and exercised.

It didn't work, no demons were taken out of me, so the priest got mad and took his rage out on me. That was allowed there, since we were sinners. Since we were Satan's projects the priests could hurt us because we weren't anything worth protecting, worth keeping safe.

The priest had taken his cross off his neck, turned me around in my chair so my back faced him, and whipped me with it. Over, and over, and over again. He would yell at me, spit slurs, recite bible verse. And when I went to bed that night I got blood on my sheets, so they took away me sheets, and through the last few weeks of winter I laid curled up and cold wishing I could disappear, wishing I could leave, wishing it was over.

I remember talking to one of my cabin mates, the only time we ever talked after the beating we got for it. I remember her asking me if I believed there was actually something wrong with what we were. I had thought she was insane, but I still found I wanted to believe her words.