Dear You
Dear You,
I see you there in the closet, hiding. Waiting. Anticipating. Feeling excited and special and secretive. And the not-okay pit at the base of your brain and buried in your 7-year-old gut.
You know.
I know you know because you can hear the others down the hallway, laughing, playing, rough-housing, not knowing.
You’re thinking Star Trek. You’re a captain of a space cruiser going where no one else has been, fearless and fearful for everyone else. You see yourself alone on the bridge except for a short skirted woman who talks to you with all the power. You can’t stop looking at the place where the hem lays against the back of the thigh. You’re not supposed to, but she tells you it’s okay and so you do and the excitement you have grows like a slow moving cloud of shame that only goes away when it explodes on itself, in your hands.
You know it’s wrong and all this time later this is a part of you/me that wants to punish you for that, a part that is unforgiving about the shape that this moment will give everything to come after.
I’ve dreamt of beating you in the face with my brutal and judging fist, knowing full well I am only smashing myself, knowing full well that I am achieving nothing but reinforcing that you are flawed and damaged from an event that was not of your making.
Oh, you. I am so sorry. You are trapped in the amber of my memory and I do not know how to get you out.
The odor of her body (pencil shavings) live in the amber stone and you still feel the synthetic excitement that her pantyhose gave off as they rubbed against your white underwear. “Someone’s got to show you,” she says as she guides your hand to her bra snap and the full of her breasts are suddenly there.
You don’t know what to do so you rest your head against her chest and feel the heart beating within.
Her hands urge your mouth down: Kiss me.
Dust motes twinkle in the air suggesting there is a mysterious structure to the world that is too big to understand. (Still, these glimpses will stay with you forever, reminders of what can’t be spoken about.)
Oh, you. I don’t know why it has been easier to forgive the one who did thing to you than it has been to forgive you for just being a boy. A good boy who read Pyle’s tales of King Arthur and who gazed quizzically on the art nouveau illustrations of Lancelot swooning in the wild over his passion for Guinevere.
Come with me out of the closet. You are a good kid. Let me protect you. Let me help you. I don’t even know how, but is this good enough? Can this be a start?
