"I'm Not Crazy"

XXX.

I was going to tell you everything that happened, but I've changed my mind. I didn't even know I could do that; change my mind, I mean. It's just that I have come to realize a very new to me concept: I don't owe anyone all of the details.

I don't owe anyone all of the details, even if I've maybe shared enough to sometimes warrant an explanation. An explanation is different. I'm willing to explain.

I get to keep some things close to my chest though. I don't need to tell anyone in order for my feelings to be validated. I don't need approval from someone else in order for what happened to still be unequivocally not my fault. It was not my fault. The therapist even said that. She said it loudly and repeatedly.

"It was never your fault, Charlie," she said. "I just really want to make sure you know that."

She said a lot of things actually. She said more than I would have expected, and none of her words had anything to do with thinking I belonged back in the hospital. She did not believe that what I was saying made me a liar or a sinner or guilty of any crime. She did not believe that I was crazy. She really didn't think so.

As a disclaimer, I maybe did leave out the part of my story that was an actual crime. That was for me to keep, and hopefully for Riley to keep as well. I simply couldn't control whether he decided that it was important for him to inform others of what he knew. I had pulled the trigger. Riley could tell someone I'd he wanted. I just saw that outcome as unlikely.

And maybe what Matthew did wasn't as bad as I'd allowed myself to believe. Maybe what I did was a slight overreaction. It wasn't as if Matthew ever actually finished the job, so to speak. He wasn't a rapist. I can say that definitively. I've known that. I've always known.

"There's nothing you did to make him act that way, Charlie," the therapist said.

But maybe the other things were just as bad in their own way. Maybe Matthew came into my room and threatened things. Maybe he taunted me. Maybe he provided perverse descriptions to a small child, and maybe he relished in the way she squirmed in discomfort. I did not understand exactly what some words meant, not at first anyways. I didn't know things, but I knew enough to feel as though the words were violating and wrong. It became easy to know more soon enough because a teenage boy was educating me anyways. I at least always knew to be scared. I could be scared without a full understanding, and so Matthews torment was not left without proper audience.

"Nobody would ever know."

"Nobody would believe you."

"They don't ever come when you cry. Why would they start now?"

"Do you know how much bigger than you I am?"

"What are you going to do about it?"

And then maybe I became desensitized to words. Maybe I started staring stone faced forward, and Matthew was forced to lash out for the reaction. It was fear he was looking for, and power. We had so little power in that house, and then we had to listen to such horrific things occur. It was a child mimicking behavior. The aggressive misogyny that chorused our household had nowhere to go, and so Matthew took power into his own hands. He used his hands to take it. He did things that were maybe not as bad as the worst crime, but then who measures a crime like that? Who decides when it's bad enough for sympathy? Who decides when pain becomes too much for a child?

And so there were words that spoke and hands that touched, and suddenly I was very afraid again, and Matthew was no further satisfied because life sucked anyways. Life sucked so much that he wanted to die. He put a gun in his mouth. I know this, but our life sucking did not make him less bad. Matthew was bad. He did very bad things.