Secrets That Need Lies
Sometimes you live your life in a way you never imagined you could. You live with secrets that you bury so deep inside even you can't reach them.
Eleven years ago I was a different person. Not that you could have told. I looked almost identical.
I was an unsocial non-entity. I hid from the terrors of the world outside. I stayed behind real walls and psychological ones.
I had one person that I ever had to deal with beside myself. This person paid the bills and fed me and kept a roof over my head and she did all this because. . . I'm never sure whether it was because she really wanted to, because she really thought it was "saving" her, or whether it was because she owed me. She did owe me. She will owe me until the day one of us dies, but that wasn't the way she should have paid.
(People can say forgive all they want. I've tried. You can't forgive someone who would do the same thing again in a minute, if you'd ever let her get away with it. Forgiveness requires remorse. She feels none. Maybe not her own fault. She was raised that way. Unbelievable but true.)
No. I should have left her behind ten years before. No, twenty. I should have left that afternoon, in the summer of 1981 and called my father and begged him to let me live with him in the back woods of Alabama and then the Alaskan wilderness. I should have sat in the Houston police department and waited for someone to help me. Really help me. But I didn't do that.
Instead I sat in a trailer in Lincoln, Nebraska during the hottest summer I've ever known and slowly lost my mind.
It was early 2001. The year was so new and all the things that happened hadn't happened yet.
It started slowly. First it was A&E and a song that I remembered from so long ago.
(The rest of this story may never be written. It's a true story, you see, and I'm not that good with non-fiction.)
