part 94, or "down, down, down today"

*** TRIGGER ALERT***

Happy New Year! I don't really mean it, I'm just saying it to be polite. I hate New Year's, almost as much as I hate Halloween. Just that one day, though, and New Year's Eve, not the whole year. January 2nd comes along and makes everything better pretty quickly.

I really do wish very good things for everyone in the coming year, but I guess I have a hard time acknowledging the significance between December 31 and January 1. My years are big circles, not bookended so much by traditionally celebratory times, not even my birthdays.

My years are bookended by my kids' birthdays, my wedding anniversary, my sobriety date, and now I can add my dad's death into the mix, as well (it will be one year since he died on the 15th).

There's just so much though. So much to remind me of the bad things.

When I was little, for a few years in a row, my family would check into a fancy local hotel for New Year's. A lot of people we knew would do it, too, and the parents would all go to the party downstairs, and the kids would run back and forth between each family's room and have a very fun time.

I don't know what happened. The first year was really, really fun, and I was excited about the next year when it came around. But I don't remember what happened, except that my parents came back to the room much earlier than they had the year before, and I made a nest in the closet and slept there, but it was right next to the door, so all night I could hear drunk people staggering around and being loud right on the other side of the wall.

That is the same hotel my dad and one of the neighbors took me to and took turns raping me and torturing me and doing things over and over again that I was certain would end my life. It was an especially humiliating and degrading incident. I don't remember if it was on New Year's, though, and I don't remember how old I was, but I think it was just before or just after I turned 13.

When I was really little, like three or four or something, my dad took me with him on a trip to do very bad things to someone. What I remember about that trip is an abandoned train car in a small meadow with two or three other abandoned train cars scattered about. My dad used one of the train cars as the room to do very bad things to this particular person.

I remember sitting on the edge of the train car - as far as I could go without falling out the door (it was a lot higher above the ground than I had imagined), and as close to the right as I could, almost pressing myself into the narrow side wall. The edges of the train had a lot of rusty spots on it, and I picked at them, and I could feel my dad doing things behind me, and sometimes he would say things to me, and tell me to do things, but I mostly remember just focusing on the rust and waiting until we could leave.

At one point I asked my dad if I could go look in the other train cars. I imagined that they would be like the one we were in, but with none of the bad things, and I could pretend I lived there. My dad said I could, but when I got over to one of the other cars, it was so dark and formidable, I was too scared to even look inside.

So I went back to the first train car and sat on the edge and picked at the rust until it was time to leave.

I became terrified of trains. Asleep in my own bed at home, I would be woken up by the train whistle a couple of miles away from our house in the middle of the night, and I would feel this terror, and I would go into my parents' room and tell them the train was going to get me, and they let me sleep in their bed with them.

My dad thought it was very cute, and would do mocking imitations of me saying "the train is going to get me" throughout the years following.

I couldn't fall asleep in their bed, though, because I would have to stay awake and stare at my dad's hulking back beside me and make sure he didn't forget I was there and roll over on me and smother me. I guess it was better than being by myself in my own bed with the damn trains, though.

It just sucks - it is so, so shitty - that the "safe" place I had to go to in the middle of the night when I woke up terrified was the bed my parents slept in. It's even shittier that I didn't feel safe there, I just felt less scared than I did in my own room with that train bearing down on me.

I don't know - I am bummed today. Being in this city is killing me. All of the bad things happened here, or near here, and all of the bad people (the ones that aren't dead) live here. The neighborhood I grew up in and got raped in and molested in and pimped out in is literally only a mile from the house I live in now.

I hate the trees here, and the sounds, and the stores, and the gas stations, and the streets, and the recreation centers, and the schools, and especially the churches. I hate the people who walk and jog and ride bikes with their kids. Well, I don't really hate them, I just very much resent that they can go outside and do things and not be constantly reminded of pain and terror.

I gotta get out of here. It feels like when I was waiting for my dad to die - there was absolutely nothing I could do but wait until it happened, and then gradually forget the way it felt to be in the world where he was alive. My dad was 62 when he died - it was in some ways interminable waiting for it to happen, but when it did, it seems like it happened much sooner that I thought it would.

I knew he was going to die, and I could not believe he had made it that far with how unhealthy he was, but I just didn't trust that it was going to happen.

And then it happened.

Maybe that is what will happen with being here still in this town. It seems interminable now, but it really will happen soon, and then when I am out of here, I can gradually forget what it was like having no choice but to be here.

That will be nice.