Might be gone by morning

Everytime he yelled at me, which was everytime I spoke, I wish he would just hit me. Everytime he pushed me down, I wish he did it harder. When he left a mark, I wished it would last longer. There was so much shame in crying over words. But I cried so much living in that house. By the window over my bed, I counted down each day until I would graduate high school and escape his walls. It looked like something a prison inmate would scrawl in his cell. My mom painted over those marks last summer. There were at least 1500. I sometimes wonder if she saw them and if she knew what they meant.

Sometimes I get angry with myself for making him my excuse. But the cutting, biting, stabbing words build up. They make you question who you are and if you are even anybody. They are why I am empty inside. Those moments when he stared into my eyes and told me I was worthless, they do not go away, they just eat up everything human. It makes me understand how people can become murders and rapists and terrorists because when you are all torn up in your mind then you loose the capacity to be human. Compassion and guilt do not exist.

I don't cry about it any more. I don't cry about anything anymore even though there are times when that is all I want to do, just bury my face into my pillow and scream, letting burning tears leave footprints down my face.

I grew up knowing I had to be the bigger person, that I had to forgive him because it wasn't his fault for being a maniac. I had to accept him and understand that the things he said shouldn't affect me. I was seven. Were you serious? But by the time I turned 18 or so I just felt bad for him. I felt bad for his life, that he could never be happy. I felt bad that someone did to him every day, what he did to me every day. For my mom's sake I just couldn't turn out like that. So I learned to just shut it all out, the be okay with the fact that I let him destroy my opportunity to feel emotion. I had to find mechanisms to validate myself, so I became a cocky, stuck up, workaholic that nobody likes once they realize my magnetic personality is just a cover for my hollow insides. I'm not sure what is worse. To feel nothing or to have no control over your feelings so that you are compelled to destroy your step daughter with words.

And that's why I wish there could have been more bruises, more physical pain. It would make it so much easier to explain, so much easier to feel and so much easier to get over. When it got really bad and I would lock myself in a bathroom so I didn't have to listen anymore, I would sit there for hours trying to think of ways to make it all stop. If he hit me, I would punch myself a thousand times more. If he slapped me across the face, I'd try to make my nose bleed. If he pushed me down, I did everything I could to make it hurt more.

Now we only see each other every couple of months and its easy to pretend for a couple of hours that everything is normal so we talk about the latest issue of Car and Driver or we talk about politics. But almost always, the monster escapes at some point and while it doesn't make me as angry as it used to, there is only so much left to destroy, it makes me sad that my sisters have to see that. I hate the most that they feel bad for me.