by Motavenda Melchizedek


I sit here obsessed with thought of suicide. With images of butcher knives slamming into my heart and long, long falls into dark, cold swallowing bodies of water.


After many years of work on myself I am here. In this frightful place. And I feel worn thin. Worn thin by this relentless compulsion to repeat. To repeat these horrific scenes from my early life.


I am three months old. My father is brutally abusing me. I am in my baby crib. He penetrates me with his big rough hairy man fingers. I am freaked out. I am a trapped animal. And my prey has just begun to feed his tormenting pleasures.


We are not alone. There is my mother. She is here, yet she is not. We will never say that this is here, but we will always know. She pretends. She stands at the edge. There is a borderline that separates one from accountability and she is safely on the side of the innocent.


We know this too. But we will never say we know. She will never say she knows. She will say that she was there. She will say that he is good. That he was the sweetest most loving man she ever knew. And I will want to die. More than ever before. Because they both hate me. And they are the ones who will love me when no one else will and who will be there when everyone else lets me down. They are my family. They are my blood.


I am thirty two years old. I am trapped. I want to die. I am the one who must save myself but I am stuck watching this tormented being suffer more than she can take and I stand silent and trapped at the borderline refusing accountability. I watch myself dying. And I am afraid.


I want my mother. I want here to come and stop this. I want her to unparalyze herself. I want her to love me enough to break through her entrapment and to at last carry me to safety. And she will not. She does not even answer my plea. She does not even acknowledge that I am real.


And I have become her. I relive this every day. While she reclines in her new mansion three thousand miles away and sips wine and enjoys the good life. I awaken each morning paralyzed. I look through my eyes and I am unable to grasp a way to reach my screaming self who lies crying at the mercy of some huge ugly force towering over me satisfying his quenchless thirst. Drooling with pleasure as I wince in pain floundering helpless. I have become him.


I am all three. And I am spinning in a circle of torment. Of guilt and shame and compulsion. And I want to stab open my flesh to spill out the fuel that feeds this hideous machine of madness.