love means nothing at all

You’re listening to music, trying to block out the thoughts. You’re in despair. Hopeless, really. Hopeless is a synonym of despair. You’re both of those. You’re numb when he’s here, but after, it’s after that the impact truly hits. You start wondering why you’re still alive. You’re alive, you know that because otherwise you wouldn’t have a body that could feel. If only you couldn’t feel, maybe you wouldn’t feel this maelstrom of self-loathing, anger unable to be properly directed at its target, this indescribable despair that only ever hits after…

What does it even mean to love someone? You’re not sure you know. You have to love your family, and you do, maybe. Sometimes. You unclench your jaw, unsure when you started tensing. Metaphorically, you’ve been tense since March break, since your older brother did something no family member should do to another. Love was just another joke to him, like everything else about you. 

Yet again, you’ve been touched and now you’re listening to music, love songs, like you’d be able to recognize what love was if you experienced it. The different forms have been blurred, being intimate with your own brother, hands having teased your waistband before moving in on your inner thigh, on - on - words, graphic, explicit, against the rules. Everything’s always against the rules, just think about what you’re doing. Maybe no writing could put into words the reality anyway.

Why do you keep trying? You’re depressing, making strangers pity you when they can’t actually help you. You’re supposed to love your family, and you do, so why - you shouldn’t feel as lost, as wrong in your own skin, in your own existence as you do. Your ex-therapist used to say not to ‘should’ all over yourself, that thinking about how you should feel won’t help, and she was probably right. Maybe you want to feel worse right now, though. 

Thinking about your feelings, your failure to live up to expectations, at least then you’re not remembering what he did to you last night - what you’re not sure you’re even allowed to write about. You’re allowed to write about your emotions, that’s what the prompt even asked you to do.

You’re hit by horrendous guilt when you reread what you’ve written before, the words called poetic, that have others hoping you’re healing as if what’s wrong is a scab and not the entirety of living in a body that’s been sexually violated. What’s wrong is what’s always wrong, what continues to be wrong. You’re repeating the same story because that’s what happens with autism: he repeats himself, repeatedly makes the same mistakes while denying they are mistakes, and you repeat yourself, your despair, self-pity, selfishness, to anyone who would condemn themselves to reading your writing. The guilt repeats itself every time, every time you see him, whether he touches you or just looks or ignores you completely. You have difficulty determining which makes the guilt hurt worse. Probably when he ignores you, when your parents’ pretending you’re a normal family actually feels real enough that you feel insane. Maybe you are insane. After all, if it’s not currently happening, did it ever happen?

A dark world aches for a splash of the sun, whoa croons the Glee cover from your headphones, as you contemplate why you’re even writing. You’re not creating stories, not doing what you ought to be, what these contests are designed to encourage. You pause the music, typing this in silence. You’re alone now at least. Ironic, really, how often despair only hits when you’re theoretically safe - nobody can touch you when you’re the only one here, yet being alone in your misery is why you write to begin with.

 Maybe you continue to create these stories because if you were a character, that means you’d have to end somewhere other than where you started. You’d have to follow a story structure. Ideally, you’re currently in the tragic backstory phase of that story, before you meet someone or fall into a job somehow. Escape.

Like a fictional character, you turn the page, leave the house for a walk in the woods. No longer alone, you’re surrounded by organisms immensely smaller than you - flies, dragonflies, a frog stared bravely at you. 

You’re no longer inside your head the way you were when you woke up, and the philosophizing starts. The internal justification starts again. He doesn’t know any better. He’s never going to be his own guardian, be able to take care of himself. You could. If you really didn’t want his hands on you, you could have been anywhere other than at a family dinner, but you chose to remain when he… when…

You don’t know how to put to words what he’s done, but you do know how you feel. You feel yourself tense, freeze like what you are: an animal. You’re an animal, like the creatures you watched in the woods, like the chipmunk you startled into freezing before it darted up a tree. That’s exactly what you did, only you didn’t have a tree to dart to, until today, after the despair hit. That tree is what you continue to repeat:

It’s not real. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Not only is nobody touching you, but nobody ever did. Nothing happened. You’re fine. You’re not afraid of anything or anyone, of being touched, of hands, someone standing too close, you don’t avoid leaving the house because you’re afraid of what happened inside of it happening outside again. 

You have friends. You texted them on your walk. In theory, maybe you could tell them, but what’s the point? Nothing’s wrong. You’re more human, surrounded by the green, sending pictures of the larvae feeding on leaves. You don’t think about how humanity ruins everything. In nature, sex is why we have flowers and fur (setae) on bee’s bodies, to facilitate it, and the bees themselves don’t do it but a foraging wasp could theoretically reproduce. You’re reading a book on wasps. 

You’re a good person. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re doing something wrong by publishing this, but you already did that and won an award for it. You won’t win any awards this week. You don’t have any income, spending money on the possibility of money would be a bad decision. You’re tired, a type of exhaustion sleep only really delays, the one you maybe call despair. Is it depression if you have an extremely real reason to be depressed? Maybe. Maybe none of this is real and you’ll wake up to it being January 2023 again. You know better, but sometimes, it’s nice to pretend. Maybe you’ll get your act together some time this week to actually write a fictional story addressing the prompt.