It’s dangerous for me to remember what I want to talk about.  On Friday I lost time during therapy.  I spent an hour there and I only remember about ten minutes.

What I “knew” when I was seventeen was wrong:

I didn’t think there was anything sexual going on when we met C.  What he’d done was to play chess and teach us his own peculiar brand of psychology.  He used it to predict what we’d do.  He’d taught us we were in danger without him. He’d taught us we were dangerous without him.  We were the one’s who’d done things in front of him.  He’d taught us we were Evil.

It was my mum that got me out.  It doesn’t matter what you see first: a tooth, a claw or a tail.  When you see it’s a wolf dressed as a sheep, you know it’s a wolf.  No amount of bleating will change it back.  What my mum said didn’t change a single thing except I couldn’t deny that C had made me strip naked while he watched.  I still believed he was trying to help and I still believed I was dangerous.  But you can’t change a wolf into a sheep.

I knew I couldn’t convince V.  I knew that like me she believed we were dangerous together.  I knew that C wouldn’t allow me to get out without retribution and I knew I’d lose her.  I had no choice.  I failed.  I lost her.

How did I feel to be Seventeen?

Alone.  I became locked in for months trying to find any way I could protect her, looking for any way to get her out.  It was obsessive but I couldn’t abandon her.  I feel like my subconscious is still trying to solve that problem even now; looking for any way to save her.  Yet at seventeen all of this was in conflict with the fact I thought I was evil.

How did I feel to be Seventeen?

Struck dumb.  I wanted to talk about what had happened but couldn’t speak a word.  I tried over and over.  I tried to talk to the police and couldn’t find a single thing to tell them.  I tried to talk to a therapist for over six months.  I tried to write it down but could barely get to the second sentence.  I could talk about C’s own brand of psychology, but I couldn’t speak of the evil things it predicted we’d do.  I could talk about C’s dislike of religion, but I couldn’t talk about what we did in front of him.  This is the heart of The Confusion I’ve spoken about before.  This was the silence that overwhelmed me.

Last week I remembered what this silence felt like and it overwhelmed me again.  There’s a link in everything I couldn’t speak of and in everything I couldn’t remember.  Whenever I tried to talk about what C did it came out as “I am evil”.  I was so afraid these three words would escape my lips that I couldn’t speak at all.

And even here now, posting on AS, it’s the same phrase that threatens to creep out from my subconscious.