Secret/shame/sick

 I am alive.

Hour by hour I slice my cognition against the current of time. From dusk until dawn. Reverse. Cycles ticking like an atomic bomb ready to decimate. Biology recalls the twenty-four years that have now passed since the initial violation. My body has matured and evolved into a voluptuous woman whose body attracts the lust filled gazes of adults.

The process of integration.

The womanly body I now inhabit was a process that took me a decade to accustom to.

Puberty:

I recall the stark disappointment at age ten or eleven, the blossoming peak of puberty approaching in full fury. My nipples aching as they budded and grazed awkwardly against the edge of my fourth-grade desk. I was too ashamed to ask for a training bra. So I learnt to hunch my shoulders and wear baggy shirts to conceal the evidence. I obsessed over the sight of pubic hair, and each evening in the bath I would investigate for sprouts of those wiry black hairs that would signal the end of prying hands, dirty old men, and the stomach-churning secrets that fondled me in the most abrasive way, a tickling momentum that infused my body with a venomous and wicked mix of delight, and a nauseating terror.  I anxiously awaited the day I would become an adult, because at eight or nine years old, sitting on the stairs in the Saturday sun, at the rental brown brick house, I would sneak into my parents bottom drawer to read the puberty book they had hidden to one day give to me. I would sneak secretive glimpses of the developmental phases, and long for that day I became a woman. In the year 2000, when I was on the edge of puberty. That day as day signalled the end of a childhood that was infested with an endless stream of spider spindles disguised as fingers, and slithering serpents that oozed slime, and spurred droplets of thick goo.

In retrospect, I guess the inexplicable visions of a thick, fat, green snake getting split open by a rake and oozing white goo, is easier to take than a wrinkled, hairy man’s penis penetrating your tiny six-year-old mouth.

Pubic hair, the monthly blood of despair and breasts to feed any children I may bare, would surely ward off these monsters who preyed, and slipped their hungry fingers up past my four year old knee, the forbidden momentum of a arousing a child could not be denied as the old man slid his hands onto my thigh.

Not only once, but over and over. Five, six and seven. A short absence until age eleven. Each year I knew the secret, the sick sadomasochistic game was signalling it’s beginning.

But I was unable to move, or run away, I pretended to play but would be dazed by the confusing feelings and my refusal to object.

Frozen, locked in that moment of penetration. A slice of my soul was stolen as body split from brain.

The inferno of bile burning my throat, my stomach churning as my body froze. That’s the last conscious fragment that can be exposed.

After the disconnection, I could sense my heart racing, my mind full of regret, a shame so vile I can taste it, but unable to resolve the dichotomy of splitting sensation that had sent shockwaves up my spine.

Disconnecting my heart, separating my mind.

A sensory slither of latent energy which launched my soul into space, meanwhile back on earth my stomach was chained to the hull of a wooden old ship, tossed in violent stormy waves, between the deafening howling of the deep sea breeze that chokes a funnel of cyclonic wind up my throat, a signal of the sudden violent projectile spewing.

A splatter of undigested food that spills from mouth, to the bathroom tiles. Jupiter swirls mixed with blood come in a series of painful heaves after midnight.

Coating the room in multicoloured stomach juice. Violent retching, the acidic burn of yesterday’s meals, unable to understand why the sickness never ends. My mouth is sour, but the taste cannot be forgotten.

The image of a bathroom dripping with vomit. a scene that provokes my seven year old body into a trembling mess of uncontrollable sobs unable to workout why I have been so lost, dazed, dizzy, delirious and disconnected from the reality of being in bed with my pink bunny and bear, but the six year soul tells me she was flying through solar systems while an old man misplaced his spindles that mimicked fingers.

Molested, maimed, so damaged and dazed  I can’t even vomit into a sink.

Conflicted, I told myself it was me who would elicit this turmoil, by freezing when my knee would be stroked.

I am molten lava. I am on fire, beyond a flame.

A river of burning orange rushing down a rumbling volcano.

The game begins when he kneels down and puts down his hand, the bile forms a comet, the orange jet propulsion of a rocket is sending shockwaves through my six-year-old stomach.

His voice is hypnotic, but I cannot listen. The factoids are puzzles for my brain. Fragments of forgotten moments I was tarnished by sin.

For I am so fixated on his hand, caressing the flesh as he crawls up my leg. I cannot speak, for my throat is ready to launch a river of lava, if I move, I’ll create tsunamis and earthquakes.

To avoid the momentum I slip inside myself.

Outside he is telling me random factoids, genetics and magnetic forces, his voice is obliterated by the oscillated vibrations that simmer like fire, but my weakness is evident each inch of his caress.  That orange comet inside my chest burns hotter. I am full of lava.

Forbidden sensations of pleasure laced with the most venomous shame. A knowing deep inside that reminds me of how his hands will burn me alive, and I’ll be riddled with black ashes before I turn five.

Each moment he rests on my flesh, tells of centuries passing, locked out of paradise as even before I turn five. At three years old, I bear the burden of a tarnished soul. I’m already a wicked, seductress, a temptress, branded with the hell, flame and fury that incinerate, driving holes through my spirit; his hands relay the eternal condemnation of eternal torment as my soul burns in flames.