I couldn’t sleep last night, and for some reason it put me on memory lane. Or should I call it a rabbit hole? It’s been a long time since I went down this one, but for some reason, I sacrificed a few hours of my thoughts tonight. Partly because I’m excited that my grandbabies on our their way home from vacation, and I can’t wait to see them. I started thinking what a blessed life I live, and what a blessed life they live. I can’t say it was always that way, at least not for me it wasn’t. But I guess all’s well that ends well- or so they say.

One of my granddaughters is 5 1/2 years old. A blonde hair, blue eyed beauty so full of spunk. I was trying to picture myself that age, and it just got to me for a second, that the first time I ever saw a man naked, shoving a dick in my face with an awful smirk, I was her age, and deeply ashamed. Devastated. Almost destroyed.

What hurts more is that I’m not sure if my mother really believes me, or if she just finally gave me validation so I could move on. I can only hope her recent words were genuine when she finally acknowledged protecting me from the wrong man. Why the wrong man? Because she kept me away from my father, refused to let me spend weekends with him, while my step-father raped me before I was even done with first grade.

I remember the most brutal of the attacks as if it was yesterday. He called me in his room. My sisters were outside playing, but I had terrible allergies. I sneezed all through the spring. Usually, I was smart enough to take a book in my tiny coat closet, one built into my bunk beds, and I would hide in there when I was alone in our trailer house with him.

That day, I was dumb enough to be playing in my room when I could smell the house wreaking with marijuana. I don’t care what you think about smoking weed- days like this cemented in my brain to stay far away from the shit for the rest of my life. I knew when he called my name, I didn’t want to go in there, but I walked cautiously into the living room, and it sat empty. He called me again.

My stomach turned as I reluctantly shuffled my feet all the way to my mother’s bedroom. When I got in there, his dick was already in his hand. He told me it was my fault that my mother wasn’t home because she had to work so hard to feed me and my siters. Had we not needed food, I guess she’d be free to give him the blow job he was seeking. Instead, he wanted me to give it the old college try. I was mortified, and I gagged.

He wasn’t amused. He berated me for my failure. He had a gun. A revolver. At the time, I didn’t know it was called such, but I remember watching him put one bullet in it, and spin the chamber around. He then laughed a wicked laugh, held it to my head, and my stomach quaked uncontrollably until I heard a slow squealing sound followed by a hollow pop. No bang. I was confused, but I understood I had been spared in this evil game. He then did the same to his own temple, and the result left him equally amused. He warned me just how fragile my life was, and just how indebted I was to my young, hard-working mother who left his needs unattended that day.

His attention returned to his dick, and for some reason, I have never been able to erase the flat expression on his face as he spit in his own hand to lubricate himself. Then he pulled me closer to him, and took down my pants.

He turned me over on his bed, and proceeded to sodomize me. He couldn’t get it all the way into my small body before he ejaculated inside me. It made me feel disgusting. I felt like I was about to poop on myself. The shame welled up inside me as I ran to his small bathroom. He laughed. He spit on me, he violated me, and he laughed.

I’ve never been the same since. Maybe no one gets to be their six-year-old self forever, but I’ll never know what normal growing up is, because my growing up happened that day, in a little rickety trailer, while my mother was away at work.

We only lived with him for a few more years, but they felt like decades when we finally escaped him. I’ve told this story many times in my life, but it was often swept away, discounted, disbelieved. I’ll never really understand why, why he never paid.

Years later, his ex-wife from before my mother contacted me to tell me he died. Apparently, his run-down trailer was still in my mother’s name, and they needed to square away some paperwork. My mother signed it without a second thought. She wanted nothing to do with the property. Somehow, that was the rabbit hole I jumped down tonight, because I thought of the worst moment I’ve ever had.

It wasn’t the rape. It came many years later. Eighteen years old, finally free of my mother’s jurisdiction, I drove to my father’s house for the weekend. It was another of my many secrets visits. I couldn’t tell my mother that I was driving the two and a half hours to see him, because it was a car she gave me. It came with strings. I had to cut them without her knowledge.

For some reason, that weekend I asked my father for directions to my once-home. I drove there, thinking of the huge fire pit I watched my mother build out of the rocks we collected when we cleared the property years earlier for the installation of our mobile home. When I pulled up, the huge fire pit of my memory, the one I walked endless circles around, was shrunken and antiquated.

It was only about 6 feet in diameter. Suddenly, my plan to knock on the door and hit him with a tire iron melted away. I look at the lack-luster surroundings, and I could see karma had visited him already. There was no need to face my demon.

For the most part, I let it go that night. He never held as much power over me again. But there were moments. Moments I couldn’t connect with my husband. Moments I couldn’t trust anyone to watch my children. Moments I felt dirty and empty inside. And only this morning, in the wee hours of searching Google maps for an image of that old trailer, which no longer seems to exist, did I realize I wasn’t the dirty one. He was.

He’s dead and gone, a brain tumor I heard. Was it always eating at his mind? Were his actions a result of the cancer, or did the cancer come as a result of his wicked ways? I guess only God knows. All I know is that I should’ve never known that feeding me came at such a cost. That a naked man could be a weapon of destruction. That sex wasn’t always love. That a tiny little girl could be ripped apart by an evil man awkwardly pulling his own dick.

Maybe this is the last time I will ever feel my stomach churn at the thought, but I doubt it. However, I can at least take comfort in knowing the thoughts come less and less as the years pass by. I focus more on the wins, like the fact that my five year old granddaughter is still whole. She is still spunky and fearless. She is still protected and playful. Perhaps she will never know the evil that lurks inside some men. At least, not first hand, and if that’s the payment rendered by the past, then I would endure it all over again, just to secure such a carefree existence for the children I’ve devoted my life to.

#MeToo, yes, but #NotHer, and that’s the reason I can finally #LetItGo. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say it left a very lonely spot in my soul- a place I’ve never been able to let anyone see or know. A place where I once stood, tire iron in hand. It’s an abandoned place now, as empty as the lot where a trailer house once consumed my innocence. Sometimes, I still wish I could make him pay for that sin, but I have to be okay with knowing the ultimate justice has never lied in the hands of the people, and it never will.