Lets pretend each paragraph is an outline for a chapter.
This is very very very very rough, very. outlines aren't supposed to be anything but rough, to my understanding. In it's roughness I have come to discover I have a lot more work to do on my PTSD - insomnia and Independence. If people can be codependent or dependent and it's a fucking personal/social problem, then so can being independent. There aren't 12 setp programs for being independent. Hi my name is Qathi and I am independent. I've spent a summer without distractions and with that free time I've dredged up this old stuff all by myself. I'm not done dredging, there is alot of work to be done. Hopefully at the end of it I can sleep again, maybe even have a relationship like a normal person.
---
When I was little, my mom dropped me off at her twin sisters place in Spokane, while she and my brother took a road trip to Juneau Alaska. I bunked with my two cousins BJ and Tuter, they had a gang of friends we played with in the dry hot of summer. A couple of weeks turned into a whole summer. The best summer of my life! We ran wild and played free, ran naked in the woods, went to the pool as often as possible, went on epic long walks and got so totally and completely lost, we dug a HUGE hole in the back yard, played in the old pink car in the driveway, man that was fun! And then I started school, and started getting hives from stress and being sick and scared all the time. I didn;t know wht was happening. My mom totally just left me there. I was there long enough for it to be snowing regularly before my dad came to get me.
He and I lived in Spokane for a year I guess. We lived in an apartment with tennis courts, I loved playing tennis! It was so bright and sunny and clean. I went to school a few blocks away. I had one friend - we totally love Shaun and David Casidy. I remember in winter my skin would crack and bleed, at night my dad would cover me in Vaseline and I would put on tights and a leotard with socks on my hands to keep my skin moist enough that I wouldn't break open. Heaven help me if I had to pee. I think my time with him is where my enduring personal style developed. He worked at Eddie Bauer when it was an outdoor outfitter store, he worked in the fly fishing department. I wore jeans and tennies, t-shirts a hoodie and a down vest. Most people thought I was a boy, I was rough, played in garbage dumpsters - I found that's where the tooth fairy leaves your teeth after it visits. I barely remember having girly things - my dad was a man of modern tastes and was an artisan, girly shit did not infect his life.
The next summer he sent me to Juneau to visit. I spent all of my time with my brother mucking around in the funny frontier town built on hills. Squirt gun fights in a frozen fish storage barn. The fish were WAY bigger than me. Todd and I climbing around in the town dump looking at stuff. I don't remember seeing much of my mom. Obviously I did see her, I stayed in her house, which was a single wide trailer kind of out in the middle of nowhere on a large open, paved (maybe gravel) field. It was expansive and grey and rough and dirty.
When I was returned to my dad, we lived in a different place, an old apartment complex on Mercer island, the whole place was painted the same warm beige, but my dad had good taste in stuff so it wasn't a bad place to live. The kids there picked on me a lot - I looked a lot like a boy, and teased me to be more like a boy, dared me to do stuff I didn't want to do. I wasn't very old 7 or so I guess. I imagine my hair was a disaster - that was where I broke my front teeth on the playground at school. I was in second grade when that happened. It was also the first year in school I got as good a grade as a D in math. Of course I'd only been in school for a few years, second grade and all, but I'd been to a lot of them already.
When I was eight I switched parents again. My mom was back from Alaska. I went from living in an tasteful apartment in a tasteful neighborhood, to living in a bigger apartment complex with my mom, brother and my mom’s boyfriend 20 miles south in Kent. The new place was a ground floor unit in the kind of mega complex that allows rowdy kids. The kind of place that showed me a cross section of humanity my girl mind had never seen. Kittens in the laundry room dryer kind of stuff. A neighbor girl had scoliosis and had to wear a back brace that might have been imposed by the House of Harkonen. White people hurting brown people because they were brown kind of stuff.
Something evil was going on in our household too, I didn’t know it yet. I knew that my brother didn’t like my mom’s boyfriend because my brother was doing dumb stuff like wearing a football helmet and ramming his head through walls – which was probably why we lived in this mega complex in the first place. My girl mind saw that my mom was trying to pretend this wasn’t happening, she pulled it off pretty well. I learned that she was saving money to buy a house. That was important to her. Buying a house. When we all lived together in the apartment in the mega complex, I don’t remember seeing much of her beyond dinnertime, I know that I must have seen her more than that. Someone must have told me to vacuum the living room, I know I wouldn’t have dome that myself. The apartment was bright and filled with light, and holes from my brother’s helmet.
The house she got us was way out of town. It was across the road from the woods and train tracks. We had neighbors on all sides of us through our own mini woods. There were a lot of kids my age that lived on our road I eventually met them on the school bus and tried to make friends with the kids next door. They were cool I guess. We’d go play in the woods across the road, there were train tracks over there, I’d place coins on the tracks and wait. Sometimes I’d cross the tracks to investigate the woods on the other side, but not very often, that seemed too far to go. I’d been seriously lost a few times already in my young life, I wasn’t up for getting lost in the land of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer.
The new house was dark inside. It was a four-bedroom rambler, all of the rooms had windows kind of high on the walls and dark multi-brown shag carpet and, the place had a long driveway all of the space between the road and our little front yard was big old woods. The northwest is already kind of dark to begin with, living deep in the woods made it seem downright dreary all the time.
My brother and I each had our own rooms, the houseplants and books had a room with a sliding glass door to the back yard and my mom and her boyfriend had the room next to mine. Our house had a wood stove in the living room, up on bricks; it seemed to take up a lot of space for being a decorative item that we couldn’t touch. Although I remember chopping wood for it – an eight-year-old chopping wood, builds character! I also remember burning my hand pretty badly when I had been tripped, as I fell, I put my hand out and touched the stovepipe resulting in a HUGE blister over the entire heal of my right thumb for what seemed like ages, I got in trouble for that.
After we lived in the house for a while my mom’s boyfriend was around the place a lot. He’d be home when my brother and I got home from school. I was in the music program, and played the flute, but because he was home I couldn’t practice because he’d get mad and yell at me to stop making noise when I tried to play. When he was around I tried to stay away from the house or hide out in the plant room reading or writing stories or playing with a deck of tarot cards I found in there. I found pot and a bong in there too. I didn’t know what to do with them, but I knew enough about what they were to know that that stuff made people happy.
My mom’s boyfriend was man sized. He had very dark brown hair and a full nearly black beard and mustache. He wore very tight jeans without underwear, his jeans were tight enough that my girl mind could work that out. He seemed to always be mad about something or alternately ecstatically happy, but still somehow annoyed with us. One time I remember him being ecstatically happy, I was on the roof. I can’t recall how I got there or why I was there, but there I was on the roof. The only way down from the roof was to step down on to his shoulders he said would set me down from there, when I was able to make the connection to him he turned around so that when I landed on his shoulders my crotch was on his face. I thought it was icky, and my mom yelled at him. Later while I was being scolded by my mom for being on the roof he pulled his cut off shorts aside and showed me his private parts. I looked away from him and blanked out my mom. I was in some special hell.
The more he was around the more annoyed he was with my brother and me. He wouldn’t let us watch TV after school. Ever. He would hide the remote control for the TV so we couldn’t even try. Couldn’t practice our instruments, couldn’t watch TV. I have absolutely no recollection of why but one day he grabbed me by the hair and threw me across a room, or down a hallway. I went to my room to get away from him and to pull out the wads of hair he ripped from my head. I saved them in a sandwich baggie in my flute case. I was going to show someone proof that he really hurt me. I remember my brother taking it out – I felt so violated, that he ratted me out somehow that he took my proof so I couldn’t show someone evidence of what was happening in our house.
My moms boyfriend would get in the shower with me or bath me. I was far too old to be bathed by a grown up. He wanted to wash my hair. He’d make me get on my knees in front of him so he could lather my hair. I’d be on my knees shivering trying not to look at his penis directly in front of my face. I did know this was wrong and protested by refusing to take baths or showers anymore – he couldn’t “help” me if I didn’t give him an opportunity. My mom was getting mad at me for not bathing and having dirty hair – remember she was pretending nothing peculiar was happening in her house. Her boyfriend actually kicked my ass down the hall and threw me into the shower. To this day I’m pretty proud for standing up for myself. Even if my mom didn’t believe me.
There was one day though. The first time we were in the house alone in the house together. My brother went to live with our dad so he wasn’t around anymore. I thought I was in the house by myself. I was snooping in my mom’s room a little, I liked to look at the jewelry she kept on top of her dresser, I liked to smell her perfumes and brush my hair with her big brush. I was anything but pretty at nine years old, my hair was unruly, I had broken teeth and a crooked jaw. Being in her room with her lady stuff I could pretend to be pretty. My mom’s bedroom had a waterbed, the big old curly, sloshy 70’s kind with shelves and engraved mirrors. The light in the room was high through the windows, diffused by overcast sky but bright. The heavy furniture and the dark shag carpet made the room itself kind of contrasty without actual shadow and contrast. My mom’s boyfriend caught me looking at my moms stuff on the dresser and he was really mad. He grabbed me and threw me down onto the waterbed which slorped and sloshed under me. I think he must have yanked off my pants, I don’t think I would have been wearing a dress and I don’t think I would have willingly removed them. He extracted his penis from his own pants with one hand while holding me down to the bed as I tried to get away from him with his other hand. While the bed rocked and sloshed, and I struggled to get away, he worked really hard to put his penis inside of me. I did not get away. As he was holding me down forcing himself on me he put his face really close to mine and told me that if I ever told anyone he would kill my mom. Memory works in funny ways. The rest of this experience is still tucked away. It’ll work itself out when it needs to. For now it’s a black spot. This man terrorized me. I couldn’t directly tell anybody about what was happening. My mom was convinced that if you ignore something it’ll go awayIf she had any clues as to what was going on she was doing a good job ignoring it all. She maintains that “If you ignore it it will go away” while I was learning that ignoring it make it worse.
I went away. She ignored me quite long enough. I tried running away. Her boyfriend caught me before I got off the property. I looked to my friend’s for guidance. I distinctly recall telling a girl-friend something about my experiences, I do not know what happened on her end, but I wasn’t permitted to hang out with her anymore. Big wide eyes, head shaking “You’re not allowed to come over anymore.” We couldn’t be friends, permission revoked. The boys next door tried to touch me in the same ways my mom’s boyfriend did. I hid in my room, coming out for school, dinnertime and chores. But I couldn’t even hide in my room correctly. My mom would find something wrong with what I was doing in there almost every day. I had both of them yelling at me. I was nine. Nine.
I was in this household for a while. He must have began to hurt her too because we moved out of the house to some rooms in my moms friend Ted’s house when I was 10. Ted was a runner. Learned that you lose most of your heat through your head from Ted. Ted had a Bang and Olufson Beomaster stereo it was brushed metal with no visible buttons, it has slices in its surface where you’d press to make it do things. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I didn’t, I’d air touch it, getting as close to it as I could without actually touching its surface. I got my face so up in that stereo I could see the height of the printed letters on it’s surface. Oh man that thing intrigued me. Ted also had a hot tub. I think it was the first hot tub I ever got to be in by myself.
---
When I was little, my mom dropped me off at her twin sisters place in Spokane, while she and my brother took a road trip to Juneau Alaska. I bunked with my two cousins BJ and Tuter, they had a gang of friends we played with in the dry hot of summer. A couple of weeks turned into a whole summer. The best summer of my life! We ran wild and played free, ran naked in the woods, went to the pool as often as possible, went on epic long walks and got so totally and completely lost, we dug a HUGE hole in the back yard, played in the old pink car in the driveway, man that was fun! And then I started school, and started getting hives from stress and being sick and scared all the time. I didn;t know wht was happening. My mom totally just left me there. I was there long enough for it to be snowing regularly before my dad came to get me.
He and I lived in Spokane for a year I guess. We lived in an apartment with tennis courts, I loved playing tennis! It was so bright and sunny and clean. I went to school a few blocks away. I had one friend - we totally love Shaun and David Casidy. I remember in winter my skin would crack and bleed, at night my dad would cover me in Vaseline and I would put on tights and a leotard with socks on my hands to keep my skin moist enough that I wouldn't break open. Heaven help me if I had to pee. I think my time with him is where my enduring personal style developed. He worked at Eddie Bauer when it was an outdoor outfitter store, he worked in the fly fishing department. I wore jeans and tennies, t-shirts a hoodie and a down vest. Most people thought I was a boy, I was rough, played in garbage dumpsters - I found that's where the tooth fairy leaves your teeth after it visits. I barely remember having girly things - my dad was a man of modern tastes and was an artisan, girly shit did not infect his life.
The next summer he sent me to Juneau to visit. I spent all of my time with my brother mucking around in the funny frontier town built on hills. Squirt gun fights in a frozen fish storage barn. The fish were WAY bigger than me. Todd and I climbing around in the town dump looking at stuff. I don't remember seeing much of my mom. Obviously I did see her, I stayed in her house, which was a single wide trailer kind of out in the middle of nowhere on a large open, paved (maybe gravel) field. It was expansive and grey and rough and dirty.
When I was returned to my dad, we lived in a different place, an old apartment complex on Mercer island, the whole place was painted the same warm beige, but my dad had good taste in stuff so it wasn't a bad place to live. The kids there picked on me a lot - I looked a lot like a boy, and teased me to be more like a boy, dared me to do stuff I didn't want to do. I wasn't very old 7 or so I guess. I imagine my hair was a disaster - that was where I broke my front teeth on the playground at school. I was in second grade when that happened. It was also the first year in school I got as good a grade as a D in math. Of course I'd only been in school for a few years, second grade and all, but I'd been to a lot of them already.
When I was eight I switched parents again. My mom was back from Alaska. I went from living in an tasteful apartment in a tasteful neighborhood, to living in a bigger apartment complex with my mom, brother and my mom’s boyfriend 20 miles south in Kent. The new place was a ground floor unit in the kind of mega complex that allows rowdy kids. The kind of place that showed me a cross section of humanity my girl mind had never seen. Kittens in the laundry room dryer kind of stuff. A neighbor girl had scoliosis and had to wear a back brace that might have been imposed by the House of Harkonen. White people hurting brown people because they were brown kind of stuff.
Something evil was going on in our household too, I didn’t know it yet. I knew that my brother didn’t like my mom’s boyfriend because my brother was doing dumb stuff like wearing a football helmet and ramming his head through walls – which was probably why we lived in this mega complex in the first place. My girl mind saw that my mom was trying to pretend this wasn’t happening, she pulled it off pretty well. I learned that she was saving money to buy a house. That was important to her. Buying a house. When we all lived together in the apartment in the mega complex, I don’t remember seeing much of her beyond dinnertime, I know that I must have seen her more than that. Someone must have told me to vacuum the living room, I know I wouldn’t have dome that myself. The apartment was bright and filled with light, and holes from my brother’s helmet.
The house she got us was way out of town. It was across the road from the woods and train tracks. We had neighbors on all sides of us through our own mini woods. There were a lot of kids my age that lived on our road I eventually met them on the school bus and tried to make friends with the kids next door. They were cool I guess. We’d go play in the woods across the road, there were train tracks over there, I’d place coins on the tracks and wait. Sometimes I’d cross the tracks to investigate the woods on the other side, but not very often, that seemed too far to go. I’d been seriously lost a few times already in my young life, I wasn’t up for getting lost in the land of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer.
The new house was dark inside. It was a four-bedroom rambler, all of the rooms had windows kind of high on the walls and dark multi-brown shag carpet and, the place had a long driveway all of the space between the road and our little front yard was big old woods. The northwest is already kind of dark to begin with, living deep in the woods made it seem downright dreary all the time.
My brother and I each had our own rooms, the houseplants and books had a room with a sliding glass door to the back yard and my mom and her boyfriend had the room next to mine. Our house had a wood stove in the living room, up on bricks; it seemed to take up a lot of space for being a decorative item that we couldn’t touch. Although I remember chopping wood for it – an eight-year-old chopping wood, builds character! I also remember burning my hand pretty badly when I had been tripped, as I fell, I put my hand out and touched the stovepipe resulting in a HUGE blister over the entire heal of my right thumb for what seemed like ages, I got in trouble for that.
After we lived in the house for a while my mom’s boyfriend was around the place a lot. He’d be home when my brother and I got home from school. I was in the music program, and played the flute, but because he was home I couldn’t practice because he’d get mad and yell at me to stop making noise when I tried to play. When he was around I tried to stay away from the house or hide out in the plant room reading or writing stories or playing with a deck of tarot cards I found in there. I found pot and a bong in there too. I didn’t know what to do with them, but I knew enough about what they were to know that that stuff made people happy.
My mom’s boyfriend was man sized. He had very dark brown hair and a full nearly black beard and mustache. He wore very tight jeans without underwear, his jeans were tight enough that my girl mind could work that out. He seemed to always be mad about something or alternately ecstatically happy, but still somehow annoyed with us. One time I remember him being ecstatically happy, I was on the roof. I can’t recall how I got there or why I was there, but there I was on the roof. The only way down from the roof was to step down on to his shoulders he said would set me down from there, when I was able to make the connection to him he turned around so that when I landed on his shoulders my crotch was on his face. I thought it was icky, and my mom yelled at him. Later while I was being scolded by my mom for being on the roof he pulled his cut off shorts aside and showed me his private parts. I looked away from him and blanked out my mom. I was in some special hell.
The more he was around the more annoyed he was with my brother and me. He wouldn’t let us watch TV after school. Ever. He would hide the remote control for the TV so we couldn’t even try. Couldn’t practice our instruments, couldn’t watch TV. I have absolutely no recollection of why but one day he grabbed me by the hair and threw me across a room, or down a hallway. I went to my room to get away from him and to pull out the wads of hair he ripped from my head. I saved them in a sandwich baggie in my flute case. I was going to show someone proof that he really hurt me. I remember my brother taking it out – I felt so violated, that he ratted me out somehow that he took my proof so I couldn’t show someone evidence of what was happening in our house.
My moms boyfriend would get in the shower with me or bath me. I was far too old to be bathed by a grown up. He wanted to wash my hair. He’d make me get on my knees in front of him so he could lather my hair. I’d be on my knees shivering trying not to look at his penis directly in front of my face. I did know this was wrong and protested by refusing to take baths or showers anymore – he couldn’t “help” me if I didn’t give him an opportunity. My mom was getting mad at me for not bathing and having dirty hair – remember she was pretending nothing peculiar was happening in her house. Her boyfriend actually kicked my ass down the hall and threw me into the shower. To this day I’m pretty proud for standing up for myself. Even if my mom didn’t believe me.
There was one day though. The first time we were in the house alone in the house together. My brother went to live with our dad so he wasn’t around anymore. I thought I was in the house by myself. I was snooping in my mom’s room a little, I liked to look at the jewelry she kept on top of her dresser, I liked to smell her perfumes and brush my hair with her big brush. I was anything but pretty at nine years old, my hair was unruly, I had broken teeth and a crooked jaw. Being in her room with her lady stuff I could pretend to be pretty. My mom’s bedroom had a waterbed, the big old curly, sloshy 70’s kind with shelves and engraved mirrors. The light in the room was high through the windows, diffused by overcast sky but bright. The heavy furniture and the dark shag carpet made the room itself kind of contrasty without actual shadow and contrast. My mom’s boyfriend caught me looking at my moms stuff on the dresser and he was really mad. He grabbed me and threw me down onto the waterbed which slorped and sloshed under me. I think he must have yanked off my pants, I don’t think I would have been wearing a dress and I don’t think I would have willingly removed them. He extracted his penis from his own pants with one hand while holding me down to the bed as I tried to get away from him with his other hand. While the bed rocked and sloshed, and I struggled to get away, he worked really hard to put his penis inside of me. I did not get away. As he was holding me down forcing himself on me he put his face really close to mine and told me that if I ever told anyone he would kill my mom. Memory works in funny ways. The rest of this experience is still tucked away. It’ll work itself out when it needs to. For now it’s a black spot. This man terrorized me. I couldn’t directly tell anybody about what was happening. My mom was convinced that if you ignore something it’ll go awayIf she had any clues as to what was going on she was doing a good job ignoring it all. She maintains that “If you ignore it it will go away” while I was learning that ignoring it make it worse.
I went away. She ignored me quite long enough. I tried running away. Her boyfriend caught me before I got off the property. I looked to my friend’s for guidance. I distinctly recall telling a girl-friend something about my experiences, I do not know what happened on her end, but I wasn’t permitted to hang out with her anymore. Big wide eyes, head shaking “You’re not allowed to come over anymore.” We couldn’t be friends, permission revoked. The boys next door tried to touch me in the same ways my mom’s boyfriend did. I hid in my room, coming out for school, dinnertime and chores. But I couldn’t even hide in my room correctly. My mom would find something wrong with what I was doing in there almost every day. I had both of them yelling at me. I was nine. Nine.
I was in this household for a while. He must have began to hurt her too because we moved out of the house to some rooms in my moms friend Ted’s house when I was 10. Ted was a runner. Learned that you lose most of your heat through your head from Ted. Ted had a Bang and Olufson Beomaster stereo it was brushed metal with no visible buttons, it has slices in its surface where you’d press to make it do things. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I didn’t, I’d air touch it, getting as close to it as I could without actually touching its surface. I got my face so up in that stereo I could see the height of the printed letters on it’s surface. Oh man that thing intrigued me. Ted also had a hot tub. I think it was the first hot tub I ever got to be in by myself.
-----
Dallas cowboy chearleader Halloween costume, wrecked by having to wear a warm jacket
Learning that I was clairvoyant or at least psychically connected to my brother
The Knife Incident
The trial that amounted to nothing
Moving to my dads in Seattle.
Learning that I was clairvoyant or at least psychically connected to my brother
The Knife Incident
The trial that amounted to nothing
Moving to my dads in Seattle.
Comments
Post a Comment