Something that weighs on me in an undetermined way when looking back at the blank space where my memories of seventh grade should be is a sense of joy in spite of the awful things that were happening to me. In essence (and every story about childhood sexual abuse), the kid being abused ceased to exist as he had been. And that’s an unequivocally terrible thing. That thing has been hanging on my back and pulling me into a hell that has no real description. It just metaphysically exists as a collection of feelings, unconscious fears and threats, and adrenaline. It’s a cave at the bottom of a now-flooded mine, and there’s no way to know what’s there or how to get out.
Since no one else was being pulled down into the cave, it seemed like I was still there. I was, but I was changing. See, picture the cave as the mine we all dig into to find ourselves; our beliefs, passions, hates, fears, and all the other eccentricities that make us human. The abuse filled it with water and creatures who I hadn’t invited and couldn’t understand. And it drowned me.
In the midst of cutting into the rock, I’d been overcome with a tidal wave of pain. Nicholas died at the age of 12 when he took his pants off in front of his friends.
The old axiom of “funerals are for the living” was apt, in this case, despite no physical death occurring. No one attended Nicholas’ funeral, no one made programs or spread the news. But the mourner - the only one - was the self Nicholas had left behind. He needed to mourn, to sob, to heave, to pulse with anger and to live the life that had been robbed from the young boy lost in the caves.
If I could breathe life into myself when I died the first time, I want to say that I don’t know if I would. That I’ve grown in spite of what happened to me, and that I’m a complete person with and without those experiences. That being tested instilled a resilience in me that’s carried me to this point. There’s some truth there, sure. But if I could give myself up now, to save that little kid? I’d do it in a heartbeat. I want to save that boy, to rescue him and impart the knowledge that I have now. Even if it was just a pluck at the strings of reality, anything to try and keep him alive.
He didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t deserve to die. But I did.
—
Seventh grade sauntered by, and I can’t remember any of it. The classes did what they could to engage me, the projects were fun, and my classmates were jovial, but it didn’t do anything to fix the problems that were emerging. This was the year that we had to publish our own “books” in our GT Humanities class. I decided to try and write a small book of poetry, about the weather and about my home. I haven’t looked at it since writing it, because it hurts to hold. The weight of this handbound little book of bad poetry is immense, because it was the last thing I was able to write.
Moving past the abuse meant shedding parts of my departed self to lose emotional weight. Writing was one of those fatalities; all the worlds in my head that I sought to project onto the plain old physical world had suddenly shifted to be out of reach. Characters who went against every odd and end and overcame them were failing now. Stories got shorter and shorter, pages were blank in my notebooks, and the budding creative inside me succumbed.
It hasn’t been until now that I’ve been able to write so freely. Every school assignment was a chore to start, since it just isolated me further from those glittering lost cities, buried in the metaphysically aquatic tomb alongside Nicholas. Each word I slammed out on the keyboard just added a couple of inches from me and those places. And I didn’t know how to stop it. There was no map to get back to where those forces were; I was being pushed to move up and along.
For what it’s worth, I did that well. I’ve won a bunch of awards for writing, especially at the high school level. My junior year, I was actually voted as the best high school newspaper columnist in the state of Texas, and three of the years I was in school, I was a qualifier in writing contests to a regional level, and one year, I made it to the state level. All of my English teachers told me that I was an exceptional student. And I was the editor of a nationally-acclaimed newspaper and yearbook. Clearly, Nicholas was still a writer, but he was never telling the story within.
I was brought up in the school of journalistic writing, where fact and brevity are king, towering above the shimmery swamps of metaphor and sprawling Dickensian-planned streets to nowhere. For me, that meant I was able to cut my teeth writing about everything but myself. Even my high school columns were more often about things that I did, or things in the world on which I wanted to share some perspective. No one had ever told the story of Nicholas, and there was only one person who could. Too bad he was busy falling asleep with a shining laptop screen on his chest, sitting in bed after having read at least 50 Wikipedia articles.
Writing became my thing around seventh grade, and to that effect, I can’t remember a single fucking thing about anything that happened in school that year. Except maybe that I had a gay orchestra director that year, which was the first time I’d noticed queerness in an adult. But he was unremarkable, at the time; just a demure guy, teaching middle schoolers how to not kill each other with unrosined bows.
The summer between seventh and eighth grades was when my relationship with Michael N. started to hit the skids. Once again, my parents invited him to travel with us on a vacation. They sprung for his plane ticket to accompany myself, my little brother, and my father to San Diego.
Before I started to reconcile my relationship with my home town of El Paso, I considered San Diego a second home town: a kind of recessive home town, where the only memories I had there were irreverent, funny, saccharine, or sandy. It freed me of the pressure that existed in El Paso of being isolated in most every context. I guess I inherited a love of the place from my father, for which San Diego was also his escape.
Now, there was Michael N.
We did a lot on that trip; amusement parks, trips up to Los Angeles, restaurants, and a bunch of other stuff I’m sure my father endured with at least half a smile. But - and say it with me now - I don’t remember any of it. It was all snuffed out with a quick interaction in our hotel room.
My dad got us a two queen room; he and my brother shared one bed, Michael N. and I the other. At one point, a few days into the trip, my dad had left the three of us alone while he ran to get something. I can’t remember what it was, probably ice or something from the front desk, but while he was gone, Michael N. told me that I was too chicken to show him my dick. I told him that I wasn’t, but that I didn’t want to do that, especially not with my brother there. He kept insisting, and when I saw that my brother was too wrapped up in a video game or something, I flashed myself to Michael N. like he’d asked.
He was sitting on the bed and I was standing up. He looked up at me and said “That was really fucking small.” and then got up and went to the bathroom. All I remember next is feeling like a complete idiot, and hoping and praying that my brother didn’t see anything that happened. I don’t remember anything else from that trip, nor do I remember anything that happened in the days after returning to El Paso.
For whatever reason, that’s the last incident I remember. It’s possible nothing else ever happened after that. It’s possible a lot more happened then, before that, and after that. Probably, I’ll never know. What I do know is that, after enduring this nonsense for a whole year, as we had gone to San Diego the summer after seventh grade, I was pretty much wholly broken as a person. I didn’t have any positivity left. Nothing brought me joy. Nothing engaged me. Nothing pulled me back towards my life with any real force. I’d fallen into a black hole that severed all life support cables from my little space suit, and was floating God knows where.
Around this same time, I’d stopped showing interest in sports. Baseball practices were skipped, violin teachers chastised me for not working hard enough, my grades started slipping, fights with my family members were less exceptional and more expected; it was far from the end of life as it had been, but it was the beginning for the hell we were about to try and endure. Thankfully, somehow, I managed to make one final effort to mitigate the pain. I wound up and aimed for the event horizon, and threw a fastball with all my might out to the world that’d forgotten me.
Sometime before school started again, Michael N. was over at our house again. We’d been arguing about something on TV, and he, for what must’ve been at least the hundredth time, tried to call me out for caring about it too much, saying that I was an “overzealous person” who needed to relax. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t remember what that word meant in the moment, and losing the last bit of myself that could’ve made me feel successful tipped me over the edge; maybe it was just a bad day for me in other regards; maybe it was just time for it to happen. Regardless, I shot up off the ground we’d been sitting on, and told Michael N. “Fuck you. Get out of my house.”
I’m pretty sure he laughed at first. But I repeated myself, words and tiny stretched middle finger shaking, and pointed toward the door.
He smirked, walked out the door, and never came back to my house again. Would’ve never talked to me again, had it not been for a quirk of our pre-calculus class’ seating chart three years later. But somehow, just like that, David had slain Goliath. Or so it seemed.
David, in this case, was just a shell, running on fumes. When I realized that my closest friend in the world had left, that I’d just dropped an atomic bomb on the little friend group we had, and that I was truly and utterly alone and broken, I couldn’t face the new reality. There truly felt like nothing in the world left for me. And so, I waited for the next thing to happen.