I don't understand

Trigger warning: physical harm, self-harm, language, mental health

I don't understand.

These were the words of an eight-year-old who had just gained consciousness after forgetting every past year and being introduced into a world where things weren't peaceful and lived on autopilot. I remember when things felt different, when things changed; It was in the middle of when my father used to come home early the next day after late shifts at McDonald's, and when my mother worked at daycare facilities to teach other kids how to write their names or encourage them to be creative with their surroundings. Hostility isn't what I called it, but it's exactly what I felt when my mother became resentful towards me and when my father would crack me on the back, or wherever really, when I'd done something wrong and sometimes even took the blame so that my sister wouldn't have to deal with the sting of knowing who they really were.

Aggressiveness while getting ready in the morning, the violent tugging of hair, before I screamed the words "I hate you" to my mother, and she dropped the hairbrush in shock. Days when my father would force us to eat the same thing for dinner, there was no diversity in the meals, just chicken and rice, hot dogs and fries...so many fries. He would stare coldly at me as I had to shovel the lukewarm slices of crinkled potato down my throat, begging that I was full, but he didn't stop screaming until I was bent over my toilet retching the rest out of my chest until there was nothing left, not one sign of regret laced within those eyes. He wasn't sorry. He would whip a plastic ruler against the doorframe, calling out echoes of my name, thinking I was playing a wicked mind game, and those nights I dropped to my knees, and I cried. He wasn't sorry.

Fast forward, four years. He's constantly groaning, bitching and moaning, constantly coating his words with sugar to my mother, she tries to free us out of it with a cookie cutter when she herself is baked in the dough. At nine years old, I found that I had stopped receiving birthday presents and had to share a single cupcake with this twin sister of mine, both of us looking at the flame and realizing that we were struggling. The weeks that passed had us shuddering at any movement coming from the doorframe, any shadow, any argument, any words, thinking that when we grew up...things would be better, they would get better. And it got worse.

Back then, slipping hands, glasses breaking, but I didn't know. It was the morning snack run that caused me to walk around all day in the apartment that weekend, only to realize when I had stepped foot into the bathroom that a sharp pain and a pool of blood, blood that was soon on my hands, released a shard of glass from my foot. Now I live in a house that has been prayed in, a house that has malice, a house that holds a family that isn't quite happy anymore. He thinks of other women when she rejects other men, they yell at their children, and the children's lips are sealed thin. I thought about therapy, but I didn't understand; I didn't understand how something that started as whimsical and fleeting turned into something fiery and defensive.

I went to school, I got a job, the more I did, the more they couldn't hate me, or so I thought. My partner, the one I had known since sixth grade and started dating the December after my sixteenth birthday, had never been enough for my father. My father stressed me, burnt me out, and had me tired, and on top of all the fighting and bad days at work, he hated my lover. My lover is what keeps me strong and fighting. The day that I shut my door after coming home from a closing shift, my father started yelling at me for calling him and not saying what was wrong and opening the door. That day, I tied a belt around my neck and tried the unthinkable.

I know it was wrong, but so much of me wanted to be free of the family that had become of us. I begged to go to college, and my grades took a downturn. So much pain, so much distraction, and my mother can sit here and still call me a disgrace to my education and a failure to be such a perfect gem that my sister had turned out to be. A shut-in, not knowing how to socialize or make friends, because she sacrificed her life to make our parents proud. A sister that I've known was the favorite ever since the whole thing started, was always yelled at last, was always obedient, was always alone. I was a surprise to my birth until the ultrasound was scanned and handed to an unknowing mother and a father who was blitzed out of his mind to process the possibility of twins, and yet, we were so similar. I sacrificed everything to make my parents happy, my personality, my happiness, my friends, and my own identity.

I knew it hit like a bullet, telling my parents that I was "pan". The immediate doubts and assumptions made after two years of questioning myself, being thrown at me, and making me burst into tears. Every time I decide to open up and show my feelings, when things seem to feel better, it all goes back to how it was before. Cold and accusatory. I wonder where we lost ourselves along the way, how they used to hold me in between breakdowns, and now they glare daggers, telling me that water along the pores of my face is the only comfort I should feel. I think about when they started to distance themselves, when did they truly decide that I was a daughter who was no longer worthy of individuality and confidence?

Today I sit in my room, covers neat, earbuds that dig deep into the canal like how the music reaches my brain. Thinking about earlier outside today, gentle sunlight grazing my skin, reflecting off the leaves of the tree that stands tall in my backyard. It feeds my touch-starved needs as my room satiates my need to stay in the dark; that way, I look smaller. I stare at my screen as the last lines of the song ring in my ears, remembering everything that I've been through, and I think to myself.

Do you understand?