Through the Ages - Part 1

Is it fact? Is it fiction? Does it matter?

I fell in love at Five.

I never quite decided what to name it. A couple of names crossed my mind but in actuality it could’ve been named all those things or nothing at all. I tend to do that; be indecisive on specifics while being absolutely certain on the general aspects of things ….. or people.

I was still deciding on what to name the ugly lone Rabbit in it’s cage when it began to do something I found oddly fascinating — It began to chase it’s tail in cycles of Three. I wanted to take it home with me.

My class teacher, who had been observing me subtly from where she stood with the other children on the excursion walked up to me.

“Why are you looking at that one? Look at these fine ones in the other cages” She said, almost as if I was blind and could not possibly have seen the fifty or more rabbits in cages right in front of me.

“Can I take it home?”

“No darling, you can’t. This one is sick. Can’t you see that it’s not like the other ones?” she answered with a slightly puzzled look on her face as though she could not understand why, of all the Rabbits in this area of the farm, I had decided to take interest in this one.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“I don’t know but it’s behavior scares the other rabbits so it has to be in a cage by itself”, she said as she walked away to pick up a classmate who had fallen.

I turned back to the Rabbit. All I could deduce from it’s situation was that because it was different, the others were not comfortable around it. This creature that would have been just another ugly Rabbit in the herd now had a stage of its own where it did not need to compete for attention. It could simply perform (either that or it had a mental problem but that’s irrelevant).

That day, I fell in Love with Oddity.

I fell in love at Eight.

She had hit me again, my beautiful mother, in that way that was supposed to say that she loved me. She had failed to break an arm or rib and so I sat on the porch steps wondering whether her love for me had begun to ebb. Maybe it was because I had sinned. “Of course, that must be it”, I thought. My mother did not love me anymore because of my sin.

As I sat, I spotted Sydney, the Help, sweeping the front yard. A day before, I had played a game with Sydney and my siblings which involved us jumping off a table and seeing how quickly Sydney could catch us and put us down. It had been a fun game until Sydney had held me tightly and given my buttocks a gentle squeeze.

When he put me down, I was hesitant to continue playing but still I got back on the table and this time, all restraint eluded Sydney as he squeezed my buttocks with a passion that seemed almost thankful as if he had been waiting to see my reaction and could not believe that I had been unfortunate enough in thought to get back on that Godforsaken table.

After that encounter, there was a nagging feeling in my chest — It felt like the continuous beep of an old alarm clock, signalling the beginning of the end. I was a rotten child, not just because I had gotten back on that table but because it had felt good to be touched like that.

Why did I get back on the table? Was it because I felt the urge to do the opposite of what I assumed a child in my position would do? The urge to be different? To be odd perhaps? Why did it feel good? What was this feeling? It was sin and so it was no wonder that I broke two of my mother’s China plates in hopes that she would beat my sin out of me.

It did not work.

Over the next few weeks I had given in to being touched by Sydney. At first it felt amazing. I on the edge of life, discovering big bad adult things that I assumed my mates did not dream were possible and Sydney, slowly leading this seemingly oblivious child towards a total obliteration of her innocence.

When we were not sneaking about the house, I hated Sydney. I saw him as an uncivilized dimwit who sought to destroy me and make me sin. I would haul objects at him like my mother did when she was angry, throw his property in the dustbin and tell him how he’d soon be sent packing.

He responded by forcibly plunging his fingers into my pre-pubescent vagina when I went to him at night and I would cry from the pain. He would then slap me about and attempt to put his phallus in my mouth. When he was done, he would leave me crying in a pool of my own fear and guilt. Come morning, the sequence would start again.

Mother did not notice, mother did not care. Years later, walking around, I often wondered if anyone could see how rotten I truly was. Could they see the mess my psyche had evolved into? Was I the only one who could see the maggots feasting on what was left of the normalcy of me, now a putrid mass of self-doubt and worthlessness?

One morning, I woke to find that Sydney had been sent packing. According to my beautiful mother, she did not like the negative influence he had on her children. He was making us daft. Mother inflicted the most pain so mother knew best. I did not care for Sydney’s absence but greatly missed the renewed feeling of guilt I no longer received daily. I went about doing whatever I could to re-create the feeling but nothing was the same.

And so it was that I fell so in love with the presence of guilt that in its absence, I did not know who I was.