Pandora's Aquarium: That house - Pandora's Aquarium

I try to avoid my father's house as much as possible. When I do go there I do not go anywhere near the hallway. I can't even bare to look down it without being flooded with I don't even know what, not necessarily emotions, but more like memories of feelings that I had when I was a child. I stay as close to the front door as possible.

Yesterday my step-mom called me and said that a package had been dropped off for me. I was planning on going to pick it up, and use some excuse to get out of there as quick as possible, but like my mother she tends to make me feel guilty because I never visit. Well, she did yesterday. I didn't think that it would hurt to stay a little while, so I did. As I said I sit as close to the door as possible, but my kids were with me, and they went down that hallway. I had to go get them because there are guns everywhere.

I haven't been down that hallway in a very, very long time. It seemed a lot smaller than I remember. The rooms are closer together than I remember. When I have always looked back, the picture I had in my mind was a longer hallway, the rooms were separated more, it appeared as though that my room in the corner was more isolated from the rest of the house, that isn't so. I wasn't isolated physically so much from the rest of the family, but I was other ways.

I couldn't sleep last night, and when I finally did fall asleep my night was filled with memories, pain, and nightmares. I went to bed with a picture in my mind, I was an observer, I saw my sisters, my father, and my mother, I saw chaos, it was loud, violent, and obvious. In this picture, they were all on the other end of that very long hallway.

Then I saw myself, beside the doorway to that corner bedroom that I used to sleep in. There I was, far away, quiet, separated, and alone. My pain invisible, silent, and unknown. That is what I saw, a small girl in the corner of the hallway, alone, and scared. I saw my father and I, at night isolated from the rest of the family, dark, quiet, and hidden. A different picture, a different scene. Two completely different stories.

Everything was different with me. He was different with me, and I was different than the rest of them, the rest of my family. I isolated myself, I did that, and he was there. He took advantage of the isolation. I was not his daughter, I was an object, a means to an end, I was his property to use anyway that he chose to. That is all I was.

It is so difficult to look back at that time, why I try very hard not to. It is different to think on it, but to actually allow myself to go back, to get triggered as I did yesterday or as I do when my t says certain things, I get a sense of it all again. When not only my intellectual mind goes back, but when my whole self goes back to that time, I feel the pull of that horrible reality so strongly. The whole of it, everything, what my life was, the fact that I truly did not have a chance as a child. I can physically feel my heart ache with pain, I feel such a deep sadness, and can feel my eyes stinging with unshed tears, but yet it is all masked, hidden, and deep inside of me. Then once I am there, it is very hard to pull myself back, pull myself out of it, I can't seem to stop feeling the hopelessness of it all.

I want to forget and I wish that I could.