It’s 1:42 AM and I’m still awake, staring at the
ceiling like it owes me answers, or some grace?
Recently, there’s this statue in Maastricht that dragged something out of me I’ve been trying to keep buried for years. It's apaprently an old wound I never learned how to heal. I guess childhood trauma is the closest name I can give it, though even that feels too small for something that has been haunting me all these years.
When I was 10, I fell in love for the first time. Not
the kind of love people laugh off as childish or temporary. It's actually the kind
that makes a lonely kid feel like the world isn’t entirely against him. Well, I got a
pet dog. And I named her after some telenovela character, hoping she could get the same kind of beautiful tv ending she so much
deserved. Spoiler alert: she didn’t.
I was a quiet kid back then. Not hated, not loved, just
invisible. The kind you don’t notice unless you’re looking for someone to
ignore. I had no real friends, I would say (sad, but true), because no one actually stayed.
But then I had her. She stayed. But not for long.
Unlike my playmates, classmates, and cousins (who comes and goes), she didn’t ask for anything in return. She didn’t ask me to be
anything. She chose me just the same. And somehow, that was enough to keep me from
completely falling apart, even before I understood what falling apart actually meant.
And they took her. From me, from this cruel world.
Not gently. Not accidentally. They decided her painful, brutal fate. She died at the very hands of people who were "family", people who should have known better AND should have done better, over some backward superstition. That’s what they called it, to justify the merciless killing. It all boiled down to fcking superstition. Like giving it a name made it less disgusting. Like ignorance deserves forgiveness.
I was there and I vividly remember. I did nothing. I couldn't do anything.
And that’s exactly the part that eats at me. Not just what they
did, but what I couldn’t do. I was 1, yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that I simply watched her die. I couldn’t protect
her. I couldn’t even try hard enough, not in any way that mattered.
And so I find it hard to be kind to my younger self. It just doesn’t land. Because all I can think about is how she cried, and how I stood there, useless as fck. And it inflicted an eternal pain. That kind that sits in your chest, never leaves, and rewires you. Something in me snapped that day. And it didn’t snap clean. It splintered. It twisted the way I see trust, love, loyalty, all of it, all at once. It left me with this constant, simmering anger that never really burns out. And there were things I’ve done in my head because of it. Things I would never admit out loud anywhere else. Anger that's ugly that doesn’t just disappear but looks for somewhere else to go. And sometimes it goes to places that scare even me.
They say time would eventually heal everything. That’s a lie. Time doesn’t heal everything, at least not yet. It just makes you functional enough to pretend it did. I carried that day with me for years until I found an opportunity to leave. At fifteen, I got out, went to college, and cut that place out of my life. I thought distance would fix it. I thought leaving was the closest thing to justice I’d ever get, since forgiveness was never on the table, but I was dead wrong. Because here I am, years later, in a completely different place, heck, on the other side of the world. And all it took was some stupid statue to bring it all back like nothing ever changed.
Maybe this is the price of holding on. Of letting
anger root itself so deeply it becomes part of who you are. And this is my personal (dark) Roman Empire.
___________________________________________________
You were never replaced. Not once. Not ever.
It’s 2:30 AM now. And I can still hear you. Clear as the day it happened. And it makes me sick how it still hurt this much.
