Imagine if you are remembering over 35 years ago, imagine if you are curled up in a tight ball, shaking in fear. Lying half on a bean bag yet half off. Imagine if someone safe is with you,  stroking your hair and touching your face and gently telling you this isn’t then it is now.

Now imagine if you are a child and your job is to be beaten and used like a whore.  Imagine if when your body is bleeding and aching you go into a special place, a place where no pain can reach you…a place where the grass is green, the sky is blue, the sun is always shining & the ground is covered in beautiful flowers.  Imagine if each time you take yourself to this safe, beautiful, land far away, someone else comes to take the pain.  But she has no blue sky or green grace or sunlight…imagine she feels only the fear and the pain, and the feeling of her body ripping from the inside out from searing pain that never ends.  Imagine looking into her hollow eyes and seeing the haunted sadness that lives there.  Imagine if she has no voice and cannot speak of her pain, but can only stare away, silently crying, lost, and far away from all human contact.   Imagine if 35 years later that little girl is bigger but the same thing occurs.  Imagine if she is still regularly beaten like a piñata and raped over and over again.

Imagine if you are lying on a beanbag chair and your body feels beaten up all over again. Imagine if you have someone who gently touches your face and strokes your hair and holds you in your pain. Imagine if the tears you cry are shared by someone who cares, someone who now shows you the dignity you deserved then.  Imagine if she did what should have been done then, but she does it many years later.

But imagine if the people who treated you like this originally were your own parents, Imagine if they had left you all beaten and bloodied and bruised.  Imagine if now all these years later you rise from that beanbag chair and slowly take your sick, tired, heavy, aching, sad, body outside and into car where you sit for a long while, trying to soothe yourself and become the responsible adult you know you should be.  Imagine you drive aimlessly toward your home, and stop along an old county road.  Imagine you step out of your car and stand there, in the late afternoon wind, wondering if there is a chance that this will get better or if its really too late. Imagine if you toss around the thoughts of what it would like to be happy, and what it would be like to be dead.  Imagine if you don’t want to go home.  And imagine if you feel more broken now then you did 35 years ago. And now there’s a ticking time bomb in your body and you don’t have the drive to survive you once did.

Imagine if someone had heard your tears then, or now. Imagine of someone had taken you away and cried tears with you, then, or now.  Imagine if someone safe gently wiped away the blood and the dirt and held you and told you that you would be okay.  Imagine if you had parents who loved you. You never did. You never will have any of this…so it’s hard to imagine…you try, but you’ll never get it. So you know it’s probably best not to imagine…