This is part 2 of a 3-part series. Part 1 can be found here if you missed it.

Trigger warning for content related to child abuse and suicidal thoughts.

Heartbreak crashes into finality. You’re dying, so you say. Eaten alive by your own body’s demise. Withering to nothing. Alone in that bed. White, sterile walls. Alone with your thoughts. With yourself. You can’t go back. One last time. Goodbye.

Distant highway, dead heat of summer’s midnight. Cars pass by. A semi. I stand at my window. Detached. Waiting for your shadow to slink back somehow. Echoes of fists breaking doors. Years ago. Screaming. Shouting. Thuds. Crumpled figure at the bottom of the stairs. Your daughter and I, huddled in my basement bedroom. Refuge. For now.

I inherited my mother’s brown hair and earthy eyes. Is that why you preyed on me? Nightfall. Shadow slithering into my bedroom. She was at work. I was a child at the hands of your sadism. Wound up by silence and secrets. Soundlessly screaming. Empty house. Crippled by shame. Walls closing in, aflame, mocking, and suffocating. I was a child.

But I had her eyes. And no choices.

It cycles on replay. I keep going back.

A blackbird, singing a morose song in tenebrosity. I walk for hours. Waiting. Longing to dissipate into obscurity. I walk where no angel follows. Tansies standing tall, yellow and poised against barbed wire fences.

Torn up. Bleeding. Mangled from rusted metal. Climbing through one fence after another. Running from that house as fast as I can. This is it.

But you find me. You always do.

And you drag me back. You wreck me.

Again.

I was a child. You had no right. I had no choice. Only her look-alike eyes. Rooted in stone of the strong women before us. Crimson soaked sunsets. Smeared in the blood men like you shed. Staining petals. Leaving skeletal remains among wildflowers. Ravaged by your hands. Prickly metal meant to encage and rip and shred.

I didn’t have a choice. Sometimes, she did.

Die or leave.

She kept going back.

I keep questioning it. My silence. Now, at the end of your life, you escape unscathed. You die alone, but at least you get to. I’m still here. Tangled in bloodied flowers and barbed wire around my throat. The ever present suffocation and threat if I am to spill a word.

I stand out on that darkened road. I scream. I want to die. You get to fade into oblivion, obscurity, no one knowing what you truly were. Your true form.

It wrecks me.

Rage’s poison trickles through my veins. Obsidian drips. Subtle enough to remain hidden. Overt enough to drive me to madness.

Your death should mean it’s over. That eloquent flowers should emerge from pavement and withered, brown weeds. But there are others like me. The poison you forced down my throat, drip by acidic, scorching drip, strangles me. And them.

For that, you get my hatred. Overwhelming. Foreboding.

We were innocent. All of us. And you wrecked us.

You don’t deserve this ending. I long for one more chance to scream out the truth. For the reckoning that comes with honesty’s liberation. But you get to slither into death’s embrace the way you slipped out of our lives.

I long for one time to drip this poison into your alcohol-soaked throat and render you too tight-throated and terrified to speak of horrors done to you.

Instead, I remain in that speeding car on a desolate highway engulfed in darkness. Running from you. Still not brave enough to veer into that semi. Or to face the others. Or to say it out loud to those who can bring it to justice. I’m the wide eyes in the headlights I can’t bring myself to crash into.

It isn’t my fault, what you did to others. But I bear the crippling weight of their terror and agony like crumbling armor. Screaming in madness. You savor this game. Of coming back, taunting me with your peaceful ending. Leaving behind those who you tortured for so long. Leaving the path of trampled tansies, bloodied barbed wire, walls that became ashes, and human beings you turned to wreckages.

Nineteen years after burning the house down, you linger, a figure in a crowded place, searching for the face of the daughter who refuses to acknowledge your existence.

She carries the burden of your last name, your DNA, your horrific legacy. She doesn’t deserve this. She was as innocent as me. You didn’t lay a hand on her like you did me. She’s no longer a terrified child in my arms, listening to you beat our mother again. She’s 26-years-old. And she’s broken, living in silent suffering that has come to be this family’s norm.

Silent terror is your legacy. I want to wreck it. To wreck you.

We don’t talk about you. Sometimes I drive down that street, where a new house stands. Like nothing ever happened there. No residual ashes, no smoke-stained glass, no destroyed toys or photos left strewn to the prairie winds. I stare at that hill where you sat, laughing while the house burned.

I wish I could set you afire. Listen to you scream in sheer agony instead of laugh. It still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy this poisonous indignation.

I wish I drove into that semi to end me. The sudden blackness that would have engulfed me into death’s arms. No more madness. No more pain. Just a remaining torn-up soul that, someday, would also be a distant memory.

I wish I swallowed that poison one last time and spoke. Despite the way the words would have wrung their hands around my neck the way you did to hers. That I snapped those wrists in half and screamed it for all to hear. That you were a predator. A monster.

And I wasn’t the only one you wrecked with bare hands.

I never left that darkened highway Mom took us down. Seeking the neon lights of that blue roadside motel. Gaudy carpets and stench of stale cigarettes, somehow a refuge. Street signs. Towns that all look the same as years go on. A weary vagabond. Always running from something. From you.

I just want to go home.

But that doesn’t exist. You made sure nothing would ever feel enough. No walls feel sturdy enough to withstand the flames. No floor feels steady enough to rest my suitcase and aching feet on. No ground feels strong enough to plant seeds and let flowers take permanent root.

So, I keep driving.

Straight through red lights. Stop signs. Warning flags. Speeding down the pitch-black road without headlights, pedal to the floor. Cigarette smoke beckoning me forward. Another gas station coffee. No clue where I am. I know nothing else. Only running. Screaming. Leaving.

Only echoes.

I don’t know how long I’ll remain here. Lingering between yearning for death and stepping ahead into the golden hints of daybreak. I got up off my knees, yet my legs remained shaky, my feet unsure. Flashbacks, detached, disconnected, yet vivid.

Will I always feel wrecked?

I try to love despite you. He’s my shelter, my sanity, my safe place. Still, sometimes he looks at me as though I shift from a calmed wildflower into an onyx figure crumbling into dust.

I’m terrified I’ll wreck him.

He might be a dream come true. The angel that finally walks with me in the darkness until I stumble into the light. Covered in dried blood, ashes, dirt, pieces of tansies, and plucking barbed wire from my skin.

He speaks of a future together. Happiness. Peace. Simplicity. I see the gentleness in his eyes. The looseness of his soothing hands. His soft smile. There are no raised voices here, no clenched fists, no crumpled bodies thrown down flights of stairs. No wielded guns, broken bottles, or glints of knives. No slamming doors.

And still, it feels unsteady.

Love supposedly conquers all. Does all the rain someday wash poison from these roots to allow more a more nurturing nature to take over?

I watch the healing that’s patched up his family. It’s not complete, he tells me, nor was it the same as mine, but it’s something. As good as it will get, he says. I go quiet, knowing I’ll never be able to say the same.

But you see, maybe healing isn’t ever complete. Even total wreckages leave behind imprints on time. Rust on barbed wire, tangled in newly-grown tansies. The car parked across from the current house where an old home of terrors once stood, shrouded in secrets and agony. Seeing someone I used to know, and they merely nod, then look down in stark remembrance of what I endured.

No words. They look the other way, as they always did. But I can’t.

I guess I never will. You will die. Cancer will pull you into some sort of abyss where you can forget. Cease to exist. Rest. (But I hope your path to death’s release is excruciatingly torturous.)

I will live. Continue putting to pages words explaining what you did to me, never forgetting. Maybe in the aftermath of your death can I raise my voice. You will never face justice, nor know the unfathomable damage you have done.

And this family may never heal. Never come together. Never patch things into one tapestry of caring and moving on. But I can shatter the glass house of isolation I built, instead of breaking hearts and glasses. I can let your death be my rebirth, so that nothing may ever break me again.

I’ll never go back.