The Beginning

It starts the way almost everything starts, with a moment. A single, defining moment that sets the stage for everything that is to come. It's amazing to think that something that happened so long ago can have such a lasting impact. Amazing to think it can brand your soul with a pain that runs so deep that when it surfaces, you forget to breathe. My entire life I’ve fought it, dreamed about it, struggled with wishing for things to be different and embracing who I’ve become because they weren’t. Would I still be the same person? Would I go about my life with another purpose? 

When I was little I had only one goal, to get out. Everything in me pulled me forward to escape a reality I was barely surviving in. I learned early on that my capacity for enduring pain was high, but it left me with little trust and a lot of independence. Everyone in my life was just kind of floating, desperately clinging to anything they could to make sense of their own lives, their own struggle, and I was caught in between their worlds. There was a lot of hurt and pain to go around and after that day, the course of my life was forever altered, every relationship I was to have, foreshadowed. 

I walked into the courthouse that day holding hands with the woman I thought was a superhero, and I loved her with a ferocity that I cannot begin to put into words. She was my whole world. The first and hardest lesson I ever learned in life was on that day as we walked out of the courthouse, my hand in hers. I could feel her trembling, could sense the giant chasm forming in her soul, and when she lifted me into her arms and I held on tight, tears slipping down my cheeks, I knew then that superheros couldn’t possibly exist. 

He peeled my fingers from her coat, one by one, and nothing was ever the same after that. Deep inside there’s a part of me that has never left that day. It replays in sickening, heartbreaking detail and it doesn’t matter how old I am when the tears begin because I’m not just crying for that day. I cry for every day after that where it’s a struggle to have a connection with the woman who let go of me on those stairs. I cry for the man I grew to hate for putting his anger and pride above my pain, and I cry because deep down, I’m still that five-year-old little girl, her whole life being ripped away from her.

Every story has a beginning, and this is mine.