It’s 1:42 AM and I’m still awake, staring at the
ceiling like it owes me answers.
Recently, there’s this statue in Maastricht that
dragged something out of me I’ve been trying to keep buried for years. Not
healed. Not resolved. Just buried. An old wound I never learned how to clean,
much less 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
for months now, bleeding into my sleep, into my days, into everything.
I didn’t ask for these memories back. I already have enough noise in my head. But here we are.
When I was ten, I loved something for the first time. Not
the kind of love people laugh off as childish or temporary. I mean the kind
that makes a lonely kid feel like the world isn’t entirely against him. I got a
pet dog I named after some telenovela character, hoping that giving her that
name could promise her the same kind of beautiful tv ending she so much
deserved. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Not even close.
I was a quiet kid. Not hated, not loved, just
invisible. The kind you don’t notice unless you’re looking for someone to
ignore. No real friends. No one who stayed.
Except her. She stayed.
She didn’t need explanations. She didn’t ask me to be
anything else. She just chose me. And somehow, that was enough to keep me from
completely falling apart, even before I understood what “falling apart” meant.
And then they took her.
Not gently. Not accidentally. They decided it.
People who were supposed to be family, people who should have known better AND should
have done better, killed her over some backward, brainless superstition. That’s
what they called it, like giving it a name made it less disgusting. Like
ignorance deserves forgiveness.
It doesn’t.
I was there. I remember.
And I did nothing.
That’s the part that eats at me. Not just what they
did, but what I couldn’t do. I was ten and that doesn’t change the fact that I
watched something I loved die, because I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t protect
her. I couldn’t even try hard enough, not in any way that mattered.
So I always 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.
That was my first heartbreak. Not the dramatic kind
people post about. But surely the kind that sits in your chest and never
leaves. The kind that 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. It just stays.
There are things I’ve done in my head because of it.
Things I would never admit out loud anywhere else. Anger that ugly that doesn’t
just disappear but looks for somewhere else to go. And sometimes it goes to
places that scare even me.
People love saying time heals everything. That’s a
lie. Time doesn’t heal everything, it just makes you functional enough to
pretend it did.
I carried that day with me for years until I found the
perfect 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 wrong.
Because here I am, years later, in a completely
different place, on the other side of the world. But all it took was some
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 something that old can still hurt this much.
