Cave of pain

The pain of having to realize how a much older trusted adult, an adult who knows how badly one has been traumatized by CSA, was simply acting caring and concerned just to get off on that past abuse, is awful pain.  When one has to realize that such a trusted older adult has been doing this for decades and knows well how it leaves suicidal broken victims much worse off, yet chose to do it once again anyway, that realization is soul killing.  The final abandonment that older adult knew all along was coming, creates mental torture beyond description in the mind of such a victim.  The crisis building inside one of Marc Maron's most recent victims is an emotional pain I know well.  Those who don't understand that pain, who can brush it aside and diminish it and even laugh about how such pain manifests itself through that victim, are taking part in a cruelty that leaves such a victim longing for death.  I can't brush such pain aside, or blame the victim who is experiencing such anguish.  I know that pain too well to ever diminish or deny it.

When I was 17, I had to realize something so painful, 40 years later it is making my chest ache to write about it. I still have not fully processed what happened inside my mind that day.  

The adventist principal, who met and started grooming me for sexual re-exploitation at 13, had moved on to other sexually abused children under his care. Another girl he had abused before me had just tried to kill herself while away at an sda boarding academy, and I had just found out about her suicide attempt. I decided to confront the adventist principal, because he told me all along he had never done anything sexual with any other student in all his years of teaching. When I confronted him, he didn't know I was questioning him because I heard about the suicidal girl away at academy. Another older victim had, unbeknownst to me, recently started talking about being SA'd by this principal, so the principal's response to my question was, "Have you been talking to -redacted name-?" As his question sank in, as I realized what his words meant, my mind flashed back on moments I had seen him interact with both of these older girls over the last 4 years. It was like a huge giant swung a massive club down onto my head, in extremely slow motion. I felt the truth enter the top of my skull, and start to sink into and through the many layers of my abusively malformed brain, a millimeter at a time.  

I regained awareness of space and time to discover I was walking through the desert area outside of Pasco city limits. The sun was to my left, hovering around mid-afternoon. Interstate 182 was in early development, then, and the desert area I found myself wandering was littered with sections of giant concrete pipe, waiting to become part of the planned sewer system that today lies under that Interstate. I was numb. My chest was tight, constricted and aching, as it is right now as I type.  I couldn't feel my legs, I couldn't think linearly at all. I walked up to one of those huge concrete structures, entered it, and dropped down in the blown sand and grit gathered along the bottom of that pipe. My mind experienced some of the most disjointed and painful veiled glimpses of reality that I had ever gone through. I could not conceive what all had happened. It was far beyond my grasp. The principal of the school I had attended, an adult loved and trusted by everyone in my church, had lied to me. For 4 years, he lied to me. And fucked me. I had trusted his words. My mind kept replaying his silken, comforting whispers, his compassionate reassurances, always followed by him using me in some fashion to get off. My father and pam and the men pam handed me to, the principal had been doing the same thing to me. That was what was always going to happen. That was it, my life. All of it, everything, for that gluey substance that once smelled a bit like ajax to me as a child, when it suffocated and clogged up my throat, or burned bubbling into my nasal passages, or dried on my cheeks and neck and hands and chest and stomach, and the inside of my legs, where it occasionally took on the added smell of pennies because blood dried with it. That was it. That was all. That was everything. 

My shadow tried to crawl away from me along the wall of that concrete cave, as the sun sank toward Rattlesnake Mountain. Orange flaming streaks painted the concrete walls, as wind stirred the dirt on that concrete floor. It was getting colder. I slowly stood up, and my feet and legs surprised me by moving, carrying me out of that cave of horrors. 

I made my way home. No one was there.