It’s Still Not Normal Now

Ten years from now, I will describe this year as painful, exhausting, and intermittently terrifying. Hopefully, I will be describing it that way. I plan to be alive 10 years from now, even though just lately the 1930s-Germany cosplay makes me pretty nervous.

The thing our country reminds me of most this year is my house, during high school. I grew up in rural Ohio and we didn’t have internet — the web was new, and very expensive. We were pretty cut off, and somewhere on the line between grifting and starving a lot of the time, especially before I was old enough to work.

We didn’t have people over.

We were also those weird kids, so people didn’t have us over much either, not at first. I learned how to be friendly and not just a weirdo by the time I was halfway through high school. I’m 40 now, and I’m still working on being real friends, especially now that I’m stuck back in the house with just my family.

If you’re reading this and you miss me, I’m sorry, and I’m trying.

When I think back on that time, it’s dark in the house, and it’s damp, and it’s always November, even when it’s summer outside.

My parents divorced when I was in middle school, and my mother remarried a narcissistic pedophile who — according to the family counselor we had — probably had borderline personality disorder. He was a nightmare: you couldn’t say or do anything that made him angry, or he would scream in your face, assign punitive chores, or hit you. After a year or so, once he’d made my mother refinance the house, he quit his job and stayed home, the better to do cocaine and terrorize our family.

One, very small, example: Once, my brother had sassed him somehow, or done some chore badly, and apparently when John (the stepdad) confronted him, my brother wasn’t apologetic enough. John grabbed him by sticking his fingers in both of my brother’s nostrils, pulled up, and dragged him out into the yard.

I don’t know what happened next. My brother might have caught a beating, he might have had to do yard work with John standing over him and hitting him, he might have just screamed into his face. If my sister is correct, he might have raped him. My brother can’t tell us, because he doesn’t remember.

I don’t remember either.

There is some very interesting research on trauma and memory — apparently, we can make up new traumatic incidents around traumatic…