Sliced Trees and Dead Words

22 - Finding a way to live through death.

- DALEN -

My issues with my parents were never really to do with my parents. My issues with them centred around their unwavering love and support for my pop—Darren Sr, the incestuous paedophile.

By mere coincidence, Luna was with me when I heard word from my mother that my Nan had passed away from cancer. I initially wasn't going to go back for her funeral, but Luna convinced me it was the right thing, as did she convince me while I was there and having constant panic attacks from being around my childhood abuser, to disclose to my parents what he had done.

Where I hid when he would sneak into my room while my parents were out.

Where he had made me touch him when I was five.

Where he had first touched me when I was seven.

Where I vomited five minutes later.

Where I was when he first raped me when I was twelve.

Where all the gifts he gave me for my silence were hidden under my floorboards.

Where I would get blazed beforehand if I knew he was coming over when I was thirteen.

Where I first shot up after I couldn't stay hard while fucking my girlfriend for the first time when I was fifteen.

I thought going through all that sucked. But there is something altogether more heartbreaking when your own parents don't believe you, and assume you're such a junkie that you made up something so heinous like getting raped by your own grandfather countless times as a child.

To be honest, I probably deserved their disbelief in some ways. Heroin is a beautiful bitch of a thing, and when it finally gives you some reprieve from your day to day misery and becomes one of the biggest and best parts of your waking hours, you know you've gone too far and any comments about being a crackhead are fair game.

But even my imagination wasn't capable of making up something this disturbed, and it hurt more than anything my Pop ever did to me to hear them so vehemently oppose my claims against him, and insist that I just go to a psych hospital to deal with whatever fanciful delusions my brain had concocted in all my years getting high.

I've never seen Luna as mad as I did that night. I thought she was going to burst that vein in her temple she was so worked up. She wanted me to go to the police. To report him. I don't know why I didn't. Or, more so, why I couldn't. Internalised shame at being repeatedly raped by my own grandfather, even as a teenager with some agency to stop an older man. The additional shame it would bring on my whole family if and when it were to get out that one of us was a paedophile and another one a male rape victim. It's a small community where my parents live. Everyone would know in a matter of ten minutes, and they would have been shunned from a community they've been a part of their whole lives.

The only thing I regret about my decision not to charge the bastard is not knowing for certain that he'd never have an opportunity to do it to anyone else. I had a few cousins, but they were all older than me by a good ten years, and they all moved to Victoria to build their families so I knew Pop never saw them and so didn't have to worry about him doing it to any of them. He barely left the house as he got older, and as far as I knew, never had any jobs involving kids.

The night I left home was the only time I ever really considered it. I was leaving for good, and I had no hope in my mind of ever coming back. I passed the cop shop on the way out of town, parked across the road and sat there for a while, trying to gain the courage to go in there and tell these women and men about my ongoing sexual abuse as a child. People I already knew because of how many times I'd been cautioned for drug possession in my earlier adolescent years before I figured out how to hide it all properly and keep them off my back. One of the senior constables was even the father of my one of my old girlfriends, who found out who his daughter's boyfriend was and put an end to that relationship quicker than I could count to three.

The people in there just weren't going to believe me, and at that age and with how messed up I was, I just couldn't fathom having to go in and explain to them just how and how many times I'd been assaulted for the large majority of my life by a man who I share the same last name with.

I had a panic attack right there in the car just thinking about it, and threw open the door of my wagon and ran and ran and ran until my body had no choice but to force itself into breathing again, ragged and exhausted though it definitely was. I was on the outskirts of town by the time this happened, and didn't even have to force the vomit that spewed forth from my mouth as my body tried to rid itself of every vestige of evil associated with that awful place.

When I finally quit gagging at the rancid smell, I stood up and tried to gain my bearings to figure out where the hell I was. I hadn't been concentrating on where I was running, just that I was. Nothing else mattered in that moment. I assumed nothing else would ever matter again . . . until I heard a rustling in the overgrown grass and dry weeds on the side of the road, and looked down to find a tiny grey and black runt of a pup, writhing in the dirt with newborn eyes that couldn't even open yet. Beside her was her mother, nowhere near as active and alive as her daughter. In fact, just the opposite.

It was a sorry fucking sight, if ever I saw one. And this was coming from a kid who regularly woke up to bloodied underwear as a constant reminder of an old man shoving his dick where it didn't belong.

I was never really one to believe in 'signs' or anything like that. My faith in anything remotely resembling good and pure had been shattered long before that day. But I'm also a firm believer in being open to the possibility that nothing is forever. That time will pass, and pain might fade, and hope may be restored, and forces outside of the ones that make undeniable and justifiable sense might actually exist, and possess some other plausible explanation as to why things just are what they are, and happen when it's right for them to happen.

For me, in that moment, something just felt right. Something inexplicable. Something I never remembered ever feeling before.

My throat ached from vomiting and my breath smelled wretched. My muscles felt depleted and my legs were barely holding me upright. I was homeless and living out of my car at seventeen, and already missed my parents. I was barely even a shell of a human being; existing, not at all living, in my own internal hell of abuse, self-loathing and mind-numbing drug addiction. It was cold. I had only the couple hundred dollars I stole from my dad's wallet, and the rest of the money I'd scrounged selling off all my worldly belongings in the months before I left as I planned my escape.

And here I was now, standing alone in the dark looking down at a dead dog and her struggling newborn pup, desperately fighting for life in a way I'd totally forgotten how to do myself.

The way the long grass naturally curled around her head as she lay there crying with her eyes closed reminded me of a greek goddess who had snakes for hair and turned men to stone with a single look. My heart was already made of stone and I was ironically terrified of snakes despite growing up on a farm; but this little cutie was fighting for life, even after losing her mother, and I needed some of that hope in my life.

I buried Medusa's mother in a ditch I dug with my bare hands, not having anything else on hand to dig with, and carried Medusa back with me to my car, bundled up in my shirt as I walked topless and solitary through the streets at three a.m. in the morning. The pathetic thing about it was that it wasn't the first time I'd been in this situation, being plenty familiar with a late night, drunken and/or high walk of shame through the streets back home or to a mate's place. It was, however, to be my last . . . in that town at least.

Medusa lay on my front seat until she was big enough to sit; and then when she was big enough to stand, she did that too, tongue almost always flapping in the breeze as we took to the road. I don't even want to begin to imagine how many flies and mozzies the poor girl has consumed in her lifetime with her head hanging out of our car window.

I honestly don't know where I'd have ended up if I hadn't chickened out and run from the police station after having a panic attack and barfing on the side of the road where, by mere happenstance or cosmic intervention, I just so happened to find Medusa that night. Probably decaying in a ditch somewhere similar to her mother. Or maybe selling my used and unwanted body on the streets of King Cross just to satisfy the constant itch in my veins.

All I do know is that that four-legged, furry, slobbering orphan saved my fucking life when she somehow found a way to live through death.