Good memories are weak little bastards.
They get slaughtered by trauma before they ever hit puberty.
I don’t remember the last time my father pulled me into his arms. Or the last time I pressed my face against his chest and felt safe. Same for my mother. We were a family of strangers sharing a roof, pretending it was a home.
When I was small, I followed my mother everywhere like a ghost with no place to haunt. My sister was away at boarding school, so I was the leftover child, nobody knew what to do with. I don’t have a single damn fond memory to hang on my wall and say, "Look, this was happiness."
But I do remember the belt. I remember the way the leather swooshed in the air before it split my skin, because I was too sick and too scared to take an injection. That memory burned into my brain like a crime scene photograph.
Does that mean my father didn’t love me? Hell no. He loved me so much that it turned into rage when he couldn’t fix me. I only understood this decades later, when I held my own son’s feverish body and felt that same lunatic helplessness clawing up my throat.
Then, when I fell in love, the equation shifted again. My mother believed I’d stopped loving her because I started loving someone else. She couldn’t see that love doesn’t divide... it just multiplies, spills over into every crack, every hour of the day, every generation that comes after. But you can’t measure that in a profit & loss statement. You can’t convince a heart that love hasn’t been stolen just because it looks different now.
And here we are, grown-ass people carrying our traumas like heirlooms, soaked in the acid of comparison metrics, measuring every bruise, every silence, every unmet need. Tallying up who got more and who got less, like it’s some cosmic daily essential.
People say love is patient, love is kind. That’s bullshit.
Sometimes love is a rage so big it crushes everything in its path. Sometimes love is a man beating his sick son because he doesn’t know what else to do with all the fear eating him alive.
I didn’t get it back then. I just thought I wasn’t enough. Not good enough to be loved gently. Not brave enough to be forgiven.
We don’t forget love. We just can’t see it through the blood on our hands. We remember the trauma because it’s louder, sharper, and more honest in its cruelty.
And maybe the worst part is knowing this too late. Realizing you spent half your life running from the very thing that made you. That love is a monster. That it comes snarling, swinging belts, slamming doors, refusing to say sorry.
But God help me, sometimes I think that’s the only kind of love any of us will ever really know.
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