life at war

I looked back at myself sitting underneath a giant oak tree in the darkness, alone and crying while my dad was looking for me and yelling my name out into the fields. Or how I was sitting on my bed with my PC in my arms, begging him not to take it. Growing up around violence, you become violent. I bullied people to feel strong. I was a person whom people mocked when I turned my back. I was far from whom I wanted to be. But the violence was keeping me from making new experiences. Nobody likes violence. Nobody likes being screamed at and accused and that was all that I knew. I replicated a behavior I never wanted to experience. And once you are like this, people will not have the patience to teach you better. I was badly socialized and always blew all my chances. “You know what she said about you? She said that you ruin people’s lives!” “He said he hates you.” I wanted nothing more than to belong. In G.R.R. Martin’s novels of Fire and Ice, he speaks of fallen kings whose graves are surrounded by noble friends, willing to follow each other into death. And I wanted to be such a friend. If all I knew was how to fight, I would fight for my friends. In this empty superficial societal circus, who would have the guts to do that? But how do you play when nobody ever taught you the rules of the game? I like video games. They tell you the rules. I lived at war, my father always screaming at me. Torturing me, bullying me. Bombs dropping all around. There were banging doors and I remember screaming at each other against the white wall of the hallway for hours. His head was red and the veins on his neck would pop out stark white. His mouth was wide open and his teeth showed primal rage and aggression. Simply uncivilized. You could feel the air thick and heavy before terror would be dropped on you like the Little Boy had been dropped on Hiroshima, leaving but a shadow against the wall of the child I had been. Stretching out his jaws, I could see eyes at the bottom of his throat looking at me. In unnatural forms his throat expanded, his skin curling backward along the surface of his skull. I could see fingers crawling up his throat and two black hands grabbing onto his teeth. The creature attacking him from within came roaring and screaming out of his throat. I remember crying and screaming on the floor begging for him to stop. “He screamed so much that it would look like his jaws opening backward and a monster crawling out of his mouth.” My mother’s face had sunk into terror as she listened, driving the car alongside the road. We were coming back from visiting my grandmother. It was the last time I got to talk to her. “I didn’t know that. We thought everything was all right with you all this time.” She whispered. I grew up alone with my dad. When I hit fourteen my mother came back from Spain to find work and I told her I needed to leave home. “Dad, please, I’m thinking about killing myself!” “It’s just puberty! You just want attention!” In my dreams, I dismembered him and spread his body parts in the forest. In my dreams, I drank the blood of my enemies. He was my enemy. Going to live with my mom, I did not talk to anyone for a year. I locked myself up in my room, always staring at the computer screen. I loved that screen. In that screen I had friends. In that screen, I played video games and the whole world disappeared. In my heart, I grew up without parents. It was me against the world. No matter the price, no matter the cost.