Unfortunately, Oblivion
When he was 13 he was raped for the first time. It was uncomfortable, wet, awkward. It wasn’t scary like people had always talked about it. It was sort of like getting on a rollercoaster. He knew what was coming, he knew what he signed up for, and that stemmed the fear. But maybe that was because he felt like he let it happen, there was control in the choice. Maybe because he wanted it to happen. Years later he still couldn’t figure it out, why he continued to let it happen. Maybe it was because everything around it, everything leading up to it, was the only time he ever felt loved. The only explanation he really had was that letting someone else take gratification from him without compensation took away the guilt of pleasure that came with sex. The same way that years later he forced himself to turn to alcohol when it came to sex. To separate himself from the guilt. It wasn’t him who was getting pleasure, it was someone else. He was gone, obliterated. Sex was a dirty, horrible, uncomfortable thing. For him to grant others satisfaction from sex, was a terrible crime. But it wasn’t him. It could never be him. For others to want to grant him satisfaction was an even greater sin, to offer him something he didn’t deserve. “I want you to feel good.” They’d say, people who said they loved him, a decade later. “Just let me help. I want to heal you.”
But it was a trap. He had never done anything to earn that love, that pleasure, that kindness. Therefore, anything good, any gift, kindness, was a lure to invite him into more sin and guilt.
He was a very, very bad and unforgivable man. Now he used alcohol to hide from all his sins, including his own alcoholism. He used it to cover his failings as well as ensuring them. He used it to forget when he wasn’t himself. When his 9 year old mind was trapped in his fully developed adult body. When he knew it was coming, he knew he was going to shift, he drugged himself, or rather the mind of the child that he knew was close to emerging. First he justified it as protecting them. But really it was managing them. He was separating them from themselves. In a way, it was like he was raping himself, as alcohol and drugs played a large part sometimes when he was raped. He drank to try and forget he was doing that to himself too. He cried as he tried to remember who he was, where he was, why he was feeling the way he was. He could barely remember anything, it was like he was back in his own teenage body, but his adult self had never gone anywhere. He was Peter Pan. He had never grown up. He was 2 people, no, 3, or maybe 4. He didn’t know anymore. He didn’t know anything. But he knew that if he stopped drinking, things would become real, for every single one of him. So he downs can after bottle after glass.
Now there’s no guilt. Just oblivion.