I’m not afraid to tell people to what had happened to me several years back. It was an embarrassment at first and mostly fearful. I had to swallow a hard lump inside my throat each time I thought to weep about it, to hold in my tears so that nobody would figure it out. I would lie inside myself, pondering deeply of the things around me and somehow, I began to understand what pain really was within me. I felt neglected, left in solitude, left in the small feeble corners of my mind only to find myself with suicidal thoughts. Such sick twisted thoughts. My mom sometimes asked whether I was okay, why was I crying and why I did I look so depressed. To be honest, having writing about this makes me a bit uncomfortable, but I’m believing that all truth has to come out sometime to the world and It’s possible to be one of my goals in life.

I was an incest victim. When I was a child around five or six, my mother would send me and my two older siblings to Dominican Republic to spend a month or two at my grandma’s in Laguna Salada (a small comfortable town where everybody is familiar with one another) I loved the tropical wind, the brisk summer heat, and the astounding nature bordering my grandmother’s home, but most of all I loved my parents being there. They never came along with us at first until most of the summer died away. So it was really harsh having to deal with that for many summers. I still love them deeply to this day.

Sometime during the afternoon, I was visiting my aunt’s house nearly fifty paces away from where I was staying. All of my aunts and uncles lived near each other; that’s just how it works. The orange sun was beginning to wilt as soon as I got to the open front door. The walls where made of solid brick, unpainted. The door was brown, ugly wood, coated in shiny wax. The front of the house would be the opposite from where I stood. An old green-coated woody ranch was behind. I’ve grown use to the kind of atmosphere they have here and in some sense, I thought living here in the Laguna Salada was the richest place to be. It wasn’t all fancy or anything like living in Florida, trapped inside your home. It was more free and open. I was anticipated to see my favorite cousin of all. I had deeply cherished him because the way he would love me was no like no other love. It was the brotherly, innocent affectionate love that drove me closer to him and later on, desperately confused. He was a surreptitious, handsome young boy around sixteen years old with amber colored eyes, soft black hair, and tanned skin. I was still a youngling, but what befuddled me the most at that age is that I had done nothing to have had him give me that “rougher” kind of affection that afternoon.

Going in details isn’t really necessary in this case of mine. It would be bashful to expound any further to the dark sexual niche we were both in for long while. Every summer, I returned, thinking the worst. I was growing, my body flourishing by the time I was thirteen. I had actually started to have feelings for him as he did for me in a sense. I really loved him for real this time and I actually embraced it more than ever. His affections were practically the strongest appetite I’ve held of him. It more like I was looking for some sort of clarity through it, searching a deep consciousness with the will to love me and the desire to hold me till the very end. Part of me was trying to understand him while the other doubted his own love for me. Still, I cannot help but loving and hating all at once when he toyed around with me. It left me some sort of strange dark chills whenever we were alone. It was almost like drowning in a pool of guilt and yet my mind twirled, reversed into gullibility of him. I’ve been chiseled out and mirrored myself into a stronghold of oblivion. The world was in haze.

I had to forgive many people to move on in my life. I held grudges that replaced the light inside of me into a cold, jellied darkness. Incest didn’t fall into my consent. It wasn’t my fault. It felt like a metal plate was glued to my mouth to explain anything to my parents, to anyone in the world. Hell! I didn’t even have any friends. I considered most of them acquaintances. I thought my wounds weren’t so obvious, but when I started seeing my loved ones rejecting me, I grew even icier. By middle school, I was completely autistic, livid and faint-like as a ghost. I saw the world turn inside out before me, a blob enveloping me into its eerie cocoon. Somehow I was developing some sort of an imagination, writing poems and always having my diary close by. It was almost like I had the repugnant mind of Edgar Allan Poe whenever a story popped into my head; dark romance and paranormal things.

I always sought for something more in life, yearning to be love and he took a part of my soul that would change my life forever.

My senses had come to me when I was fourteen at the end of my eighth-grade year. I beheld a small light gradually getting wider and wider through the small crevices of my life. That’s when I withdrew the courage to tell someone, my mother. At first, she didn’t believe me, but as moments passed silently looking through my eyes for the truth, tears began well up. In the end, she chose not to believe because that was her dearest nephew. I didn’t blame her. He married then and now has a year old daughter that I fear for in the future. It’s too late now, I tell myself. Slowly life began to turn around for once and I was no longer entwined with my past, memories finally tucked away.

Maybe I was sensible. Maybe I was considered weak and too easy to be ensnared by any man with charming looks, gullible even. I can’t think days will ever change or see in the future any benevolent man old fashioned enough to pull a chair for me, open a door for me, or even to sweep me off my feet for a deep kiss. There comes a point in time when I hardly believe in love and when I do. I mean, who is to say what love is in this world and can completely be devoted to their beloved? It comes then it goes like reincarnation, hardly eternal. It only exists beyond the clouds, I say to myself. It’s funny actually. Humans are limited to love because love is more of a noun than a verb and if it leaves you, it leaves.