"He was such a dick... Fuck him. I-"
He broke off. His eyes twittered up to me as he caught his own words in his mouth. He considered censoring himself but dismissed the thought.
"I don't even care that I'm ruining my father for you. He wasn't a bad man. He just wasn't a good one sometimes. Here's something you have to understand about men: there comes a time in every father-son relationship. An apex, a turning point. And it happens to varying degrees in every family. There comes a point when the boy says 'I'm not taking your shit anymore. You will never touch me again.' Well my father liked to poke me. He would grow his fingernails out too, so it hurt when he jabbed you in the chest."
He smiled to himself a bit, remembering. The passing of years made fondness possible.
"This time I poked him back. Well, he didn't like that. We went a couple of rounds. So I left. I didn't take a bike, I didn't take the car. I was your age. I didn't know where I was going, I only knew where it was I was leaving from. Every time I saw a pair of headlights, I got the hell off the road. I saw to it that no one knew where I was. I wasn't afraid of... you know. Bad people. I was afraid it would be my family.
"It took me some time before I realized I was heading in the direction of our church. Can you tell we went to church a lot? In my addled brain I somehow thought that the doors would be open, you know, as a safe-haven. Well it occurred to me later that they stopped doing that in the sixties because drunks would sneak in to use the place. I ended up sleeping in a clothes donation dumpster. Actually I don't think I slept that night."
He was sort of huddled over now, the memory forcing him into the child he had to be that night. His claw-like hands gripped each other. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened. I noticed how old my father was actually becoming.
"I walked back in the morning. Twelve miles all together that night. The driveway had both cars parked in it. I was not going back in there to face him."
Laughter at the thought of his teenage decision process.
"So I walked four miles back! I knocked on the church door and the priest let me in. And then he raped me! Just kidding. I called my mother, she picked me up, asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted this not to be happening. I couldn't have that wish. So I went to him. Me. To him. He should have come to me. Prick."
Sullenness now. A cut reopened. He leaned back in the chair, his brow furrowed with pain, regret, betrayal. He was exhausted by the opium of the past. I just sat there watching him. Waves of guilt washed over me. Why had I been allowed to live a perfect life, no cracks, no blemishes. I had escaped early childhood without abuse. Escaped middle school without an eating disorder. Self-harm played no part in my life. Death and terror were foreign to me. I was livid. I'm weak, I thought. I'm soft and naked. The test tube life had prepared me for nothing extraordinary, I could only pity others. What right do I have? I didn't want to live through these things; I just wanted them in my arsenal. I wanted to be able to reach back and say, "Look at the shit I survived. Look how strong I am because of it."
There's still time yet.
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