What Was Done to Me Is Not What I Am

I stand within my life as one who has come through it, and not as one merely carried by it. There are states of existence that resemble survival, yet differ from it in their gravity and meaning, and I have known both, and the long passage between them.

•

Some would say that time should have resolved such matters by now, yet I speak as one who has lived beyond that expectation, and I say instead that I am not over it. I am above it. In that height, all moments appear together, layered and visible, and I see what once was, and what became, and what still moves upon the present. From there I observe a life that resisted its own possibility and yet continues.

•

He was young when this abuse took hold of him, young enough to suppose the world showed itself in such a manner that certain children were appointed to receive what others could not bear. In time, I learned this was not truth, though at the time no voice rose to define it otherwise, and so it remained, unchallenged in his understanding.

•

A sound in another place, and the world yields its surface, and I find myself returned without willing it, drawn backward into a condition that once governed me. There, the body remembers what the mind has labored to set aside, and I am again that smaller boy, contained and guarded by fear. Yet even there, something endures that is no longer bound by it.

•

And somewhere, a boy learns the art of vanishing while standing in plain view, though he cannot yet know the outcome of what follows him forward through time. That knowledge belongs to another self, one who has already endured what he has yet to encounter, and who will, in time, choose to dwell differently within the world.

•

There was departure, though it did not come in a single moment, nor in the order one might expect. What came first may have followed after, and what followed may have preceded it, for such was the nature of those years, when sequence itself seemed uncertain. Yet a truth emerged from this confusion: that return was not required, though memory would attempt to persuade otherwise. What remained behind was my fathers to bear, and I claim no ownership of it.

•

The man I am now rose this morning and chose the outline of his day, and he carried them forward as one who has learned that such choice is not given but earned through passage. There was a time when such a thing would have seemed beyond imagining to the boy, I once was.

•

He rose again and again, though the repetition of days offered no promise that they would differ. His growth and his suffering moved together through time, though neither kept pace with the other, and still he continued, as though compelled by something deeper than expectation. And I, looking upon him now, find in that endurance a form of reverence that words scarcely contain.

•

I am a man grown now, and what was done to me has not been permitted to determine what I am. It sought such authority for many years yet did not achieve it. I remain here, and this remaining is the whole of the story, and though it is not a small one, it is the one in which I stand.