She sits in a corner, quietly trying to wipe away her tears. Mom and dad have left the house, after a particularly severe fight. She wonders what she did to set off this outburst. They pulled her out of bed at 5:30 in the morning and drug her into the kitchen. They told her she was lazy and stupid. They told her she would never amount to anything. They told her that she wastes their money at the school that they send her. They turned to the sink and found a glass that was left. They picked it up and threw it, missing her head by inches, shattering against the wall. What had she done? Was it that she had left the glass in the in the sink after her brother had finished his milk? Was it that she didn’t get that ‘A’ on that test? What could it have been? She pushes a wisp of hair off of her face, and in doing so she brushes across a patch of tender skin. What did she do to cause that pain? She looks into a mirror to reveal a patch of reddened skin, slightly swollen, and beginning to turn purple. “Great” she thinks, “how am I going to cover this up?”

She opens the door to her room and pauses, listening to see if there is anyone in the house. Just because she heard them leave doesn’t mean that they had. It never does. She hears no noises, so she tentatively steps out into the hall. As she silently steals down the corridor, staying close to the wall she is thinking. She isn’t sure of what exactly, because the thoughts are moving too quickly for her to grasp them, but she knows she is thinking of something. She peeks into the living room. She sees nothing. She feels a little better, but not much. She turns to her right to see the kitchen. There is broken glass everywhere. They screamed at her about how lazy she is. She knows she needs to clean up all the glass. When mom comes home, she will see the mess that they had caused, and yell. A lot. She doesn’t want to think about that right now. She walks past the glass into the dining room, allowing her hand to fall on the table. she remembers when they got that table. Everyone was happy. They got along. She proceeds on looking into the family room. She remembers the day that her mom was going to punish her for being bad. What had she done? She doesn’t remember but her mom was very angry and went to hit her. In a sudden act of bravery she had moved out of the way of the offensive blow to see her mom strike her hand on the post of the day bed. Mom had cried out when that happened. Mom had broken two fingers.. She shudders at the memory. Her dad had come after her with the belt after that had happened. The belt. That stirred up memories in itself. How her dad always had a sparkle in his eyes as he cracked it before he hit her. That sparkle has always terrified her. It wasn’t the sparkle of anger, nor was it the sparkle of enjoyment, but perhaps the combination of the two. She didn’t know.

She hears a noise. Startled, she is brought back to reality. She turns, terrified, to see that the noise was only from a cat. Poor cat had been hiding behind the washing machine during the outburst of anger. She sighs with relief, but realizes that she needs to be thinking of more practical things, like cleaning up the mess. She walks to the closet to pull out the broom. She sees it in the back and steps in to get it. She feels so safe in the closet. She wants to stay there and just forget, but she knows she cant. Maybe after the mess is cleaned she will go into her room and hide. Yes, that is what she will do. She removes the dust pan from the nail on the wall and gets to work. Work she shouldn’t have to do, but does anyway, for she knows worse will come about if she doesn’t do it. The mess is cleaned. Fearing the wrath that might occur if she throws away the glass in the indoor trash can, she walks outside to the big trash can. She chuckles to herself, thinking about how the recycling community must love her and her family. The glass is disposed of in the recycling bin and she turns back to the house. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her next door neighbor. Why doesn’t he ever do anything to help her? She knows he can hear her screams. He always try to avoid her after the outbursts. Doesn’t he know how much she is suffering? Oh well. It doesn’t matter. This is her life.

Walking back into her house, she surveys the kitchen. It appears clean, after all the kitchen should be the cleanest room in the house. She worries anyway. She checks the cupboards to see if there is anything at all that could be grounds for more fights. Dishes are stacked correctly, no leaning towers as her mom called them as she had grabbed her hair and shook her violently. Her head remembers the pain. Best not to think about that. She wonders how much longer it will be before they come home. She walks to her room, looks outside her window, grateful that her room faces the street. She doesn’t see anything. She is glad.

She looks to her closet. She walks to it and opens the door. She steps inside and instantly feels the safety that the closet gives. she closes the door and sits down. The darkness feels so nice. Sitting in the corner, behind the dresses hanging in their spot, she closes her eyes. She hears her thoughts and she wants to run from them, but she knows she can’t. It takes her to a time that she had thought the closet was safe. She was a small child, 3 years old. She was being baby-sat by her mom’s cousin. She tried to make herself smaller in the darkness. She knows she was supposed to be afraid of the closet but she wasn’t. Maybe she was hoping that the sons of her mom’s cousin’s sons were afraid of the closet. They had been scaring her, and it was her birthday. she had wanted a nice birthday, after all, she was a big girl now, 3 was an important age. She didn’t feel so big, and she didn’t feel so important either. Her cousin (it was easier to call him her cousin, even though he really wasn’t) had told her she was going to have a special birthday present. She didn’t like how he had said that. It made her feel scared. She heard him looking for her. He opened up the closet door and saw her sitting there in the dark. He told her to get out of the closet. She did. He led her down the hall to his moms room. A dark room with heavy curtains and a big bed. He shut the door behind him. He told her to get undressed. She struggled with the snaps on her brown overalls that had a Goofy iron on put over the overall bib. He helped her. She was unclothed, wearing only underwear. He looked at her and became angry, she had not listened. He told her to take off all her clothes. He took off her underwear and placed her on the bed. She laid there quietly wondering what was coming next. He sat on the bed next to her. He began to touch her and she was frightened. He told her that she would like his surprise, and she hoped that it wouldn’t be a bad thing. He placed his hand on her privates, and with his hand he roughly put his finger in the opening. She stifled back a scream as he covered her mouth. She couldn’t breathe. When he had finished hurting her, he took her to the bathroom and washed her. There was blood and she was frightened. Tears started down her face. He got angry, telling her to stop or everyone would know that she was a bad girl. She tried to stop, wondering what she had done to deserve such an awful punishment.

Back in the closet at home, 16 again, she had a tear running down her face. She knew that she hadn’t done anything to deserve the bad thing that had happened to her with her cousin. But then, she thought, she was a bad person. She made her mom and dad mad with the cup. She decided she was born to be hurt. She leaves her spot in the closet and sits on her bed. She hears her mom and dad walking through the front door, and she begins to tremble. She wonders what is going to happen this time. They knock on her door. This is a good thing, when they are mad they just come in. She walks to the door and opens it. They ask her if she got her homework done and she says yes. They smile and say get ready for church, and to wash her face, and to start looking presentable. She chooses a nice dress and goes into the bathroom, takes a shower, and puts on makeup. She looks at her refection and sees that there is nothing that anyone can see that shows what had happened. She goes to church and no one suspects a thing. No questions, no comments. She is alone in her personal hell, she always will be.

This wasn’t the first time that she had realized that life was a game of covering up the pain. She had known this for years. There were always times of the pain of abuse. No one knew, of course, but it had always been there. There were always times of being slapped. Her mom once told her that only the problem would be hit. She would say something that mom would take wrong and she would be slapped. She learned that she was the problem.

Her brother was never the problem. He said what he wanted to, acted how he wanted to. He was good. Whenever there was a doubt on who the guilty party was, her brother would be cleared of all the wrong doing and she would be blamed. She remembers the way her mom decided she was an evil child when the kids were playing buried treasure. Her brother had given her his money to play treasure, and the money was buried. No one knows what had happened to the money, the place that it was buried wasn’t clearly marked, and it was never found. Her brother ran to her mom and said that she had stolen his money and buried it somewhere with out his knowledge. Her mom believed that she was a wicked person, and ordered her to give her brother all her money. She tried to hide the entire stash, and returned to her brother the amount of money that she had buried. Mom found out about this and was intensely irate. She grabbed the hidden money and gave it to her brother. She turned to her daughter and said you will never disobey me like that. She knew that this wasn’t the end of it, and she went to her room to await the rest of her punishment. Her dad came home a while later. He came into her room, and took off his belt. He cracked it in the way he always did before the punishment. She was frightened. He told her to remove her pants and to bend over the bed. She did. He hit her until the belt left welts into her skin. she cried, not out of pain, because she knew how to turn of the sense of pain, but because this was her beloved father, agreeing with mom, agreeing that she was evil.

Her father was a shifting type of person. He would love her with all his being, as she loved him, and then turn, violently to the belt wielding hurtful man. She played with her father. He taught her how to develop pictures, he was very proud of her love for photography. He thought she was good at it, and often asked her to help. In the studio she could do no wrong. She sensed that it was because her mom wasn’t there. Sometimes she was though. Mom was angry one day. Her daughter was spending a lot of time in the studio. Mom wasn’t needed to help anymore. She had stormed into the studio, yelling. She took her daughter into the house, pushing her to the kitchen. The lunch dishes were there in the sink. She screamed that the kitchen should be the cleanest place in the house, after all that was where food was made. She began to do the dishes, after all that was what mom had asked of her. The mom tested the water. It wasn’t warm enough for her liking. Draining out the colder water and replacing it with hotter water, she told her child to do the job. It was too hot for her hands, but mom didn’t think it was. She grabbed her hands put them in the scalding water and said “If you want to be a child and not act like the person that you are then we will pretend that you are a baby that needs help.” Her hands were put in the water and forced by mom’s hands to clean all the dishes. Her hands, raw and reddened by the scalding water, her arms slightly bruised from the force of mom’s hands guiding her every move, were aching. She yelled at the child to clean her room. She went to her room and began to work on cleaning the room. Her dad came in to her room and asked why she wasn’t listening to her mom, why wasn’t she doing her job???? He tells her to stay in her room and think about what she had done. She didn’t understand what she had done. She had been doing what she had been told with her dad. She had to go to the bathroom.

She was scared, creeping out of the bedroom to the bathroom. Why did it have to be so far away? She started down the hall and got to the bathroom. She quietly closed the door. When she had finished, she opened the door and began to creep down the hallway. She was spotted. Her dad was angry. He picked her up and carried her to her room. He told her to take off her pants, and the welts came again.

School was never a safe place either. Her mom and dad were involved with the school, mom was friends with all the teachers and the director, her dad was chairman of the board. When she was bad at school, everyone got involved. It was a small private school, and they got away with a lot of abnormal punishments. The director had a paddle in her office, and she had seen many days in the directors office, seen many days with the paddle. They said that she was difficult to control, that she wandered off into her daydream world. One day the use of the paddle was found to be a bad idea, that abuse charges could be filed. Hot peppers were then used instead. She doesn’t like hot peppers anymore.

She was a picky eater, always on the thin side. Her mom, a nurse knew that it was a bad thing to have such a thin child. She was ordered to eat everything on her plate, every night. She didn’t like spaghetti, and that was dinner for one night. They forced her to eat, and she got sick. They told her to stop being so dramatic. She tried to force down her tears and eat, but the food and the sadness wouldn’t mix. she threw up. When she got out of the bathroom, sitting in her plate was another dish of spaghetti.

Her mom was always right, about everything. When her mom didn’t know the answer, she made it up. Sometimes, not often, she knew the answer for the subject at hand. When she would voice what she had learned in regards to the subject, she would get slapped, sometimes for talking back, sometimes for being a smart-mouthed teenager, and sometimes for embarrassing who ever was talking, most often her brother.

It hurt her a lot knowing that she was always wrong. Sometimes she wanted to become the bad person everyone said she was. She didn’t act on it often because the beatings got worse. She knew that there was something horribly wrong with her, after all, this wouldn’t happen if there wasn’t.

I suppose as my memories return more i will write more, but right now, i dont remember much.....
UPDATE I recieved an email from my parents. They really didnt like what i had to say about the TRUTH. Here it is, wit some modifications, I removed names and replaced them with aliases.