[Susanna help. Cannot write the English this so hard write it]
Father contacted me this week. He said he is sorry for the years he beat my mother and made me watch. He said he is sorry for beating me when I was small. He told me he is sorry mother now lives in that place for mad people. He told me he found peace and he has changed.
I told father “fuck you, never call me again you piece of shit.”
Maybe some of father is in me. This week I have been a bitch to friends. When they phoned I would hang up and when my closest friend knocked at my door I shouted some insulting words to her and slammed the door in her face. This week I have played with internet to try and escape myself. Even my special friend doesn’t know how I really am this week. Maybe she wonders but this week I don’t care.
This week I wish the world to fuck off and leave me to my bad dreams and echoes of my childhood, of father screaming in my head and his belt and that sound of it moving through the air before it bit into my flesh.
Every night this week I hear mother in my dreams. I am seven years old again and she is screaming for father to stop while I stand in the living room, ordered by my father to watch what a woman can expect when she disappoints her husband. It was always small things like forgetting his favorite sauce on the table or not switching on the radio for his favorite show. Every night I dream of this and every night I see the blood on our living room floor. And every night I see mother cleaning up her own blood, on her knees with a rag, while father has gone out to drink.
Every dream this week ends the same. In every dream mother sits in a small, almost perfectly round pool of her own blood after she has cut herself and it always ends with those men, all dressed in white, dragging my screaming mother out of our home and into a van. I am fourteen and I am afraid. Father stands by with no expression on his face. He does not try to hold me or offer any words. I am afraid because I know I will replace my mother.
Those final two years I studied so hard while taking care of the house and my father. In those two years I replaced my mother in every way, even in my father’s filthy bed. For two years I was preparing for life after I left my village even though I didn’t know it at the time. I became skilled with makeup to cover the marks of father’s beatings. I learned to cook very well and to clean the house.
At sixteen I happened to meet a woman who would become my first affair. She was a visiting anthropologist, studying my village for a project at her university in the city. We met in secret, she listened to my agonies, she soothed my pain, and I became her lover. It was nice and it was gentle. Then father uncovered my secret. He beat me and threw me into the street outside our home with only the clothes I was wearing.
I was sixteen when I was thrown out of home and I swore I would never see or speak to my father again.
I found my anthropologist and traveled to Tokyo with her.
—–
So, when father found me and phoned, all of the terror came back to my mind. I was drawn back ten years and more and my mind closed down. It is hard to feel fear when you know there is nothing to fear. There is no reality anymore.
And so this week I do not apologize. I have been a bitch to everyone and maybe I have lost a few friends. But this week I have looked into a deep, black hole full of fear and pain and it has scared me so much I feel that I may go mad.
This week, and I hope only for this week, all beauty has left me. I feel no love.
Don’t feel sorry for me, this shit is just life and I’m not the only one to have suffered in this way. I will find my way out of the black hole. I don’t need help. I just need to be left the fuck alone with it.
[Susanna thanks for the translation. Now walk away. I'll tell you when to come back. You understand.]
