Remembrances

I am nothing. I always have been. Can’t you see it in the ways I am? Certainly you look at me often enough.

When you look, what do you see? Not the broken boy I once was. It has been years since that has shown itself upon me. Can you really see it anyway? Or do you see something else? I wonder.

When I was but a small child, my sister used to molest me. I don’t know if you can call it rape, what she did, but close enough. She would touch me. She would yell at me. She would hit me. Sometimes throw things at me. It didn’t matter. Not to her. It was all her pleasure, though I don’t see where any of it could have been her gain.

Over the years she never changed. Not really. Unless you count that she got worse. Her touches more bold and less forgiving. Her shrieking more painful to the ears. Many bruises have I suffered at her hands, but none of it mattered. She kept me friendless. In the barren waste of the island we called home.

Father never knew. He was never home enough to know. I never told him. Is that so bad? Wrong, perhaps..? I don’t know. It was so long ago. My sister was bad, but her lover was worse. He got worse with every title and every year. Some seemingly important event to him but it was all useless really. Maybe I was the only one who saw it. Would you have?

She might have touched me and scratched at my skin, but he was like a devil monster. Maybe I didn’t pray enough. Leviathan’s cool waters never came to save me. Never in time. The gods don’t hear our pleas and our prayers, so I suppose it mattered little anyhow. Or maybe it is simply because I am nothing and a God needs little to do with a Nothing of this place.

His hands were more brutal. They never forgave. His sight was scorching. It burned and seared to my soul. He left scars upon me, if only with his eyes. They lived on my heart for years. He wanted so much from a young boy’s body. And there was little to do to stop him. My sister merely encouraged it. That was the least forgiving of all.

I still remember what it felt like. Not just him, pinning me to a wall in my own room. Towering over me. So close, so angry. Violating every part of me there was. But the apprehension in going near them. What it was like to be there, so alone, with only my sister and her lover; my sister and her boyfriend; my sister and her fiancé.

To give the frightened child a means to protect himself, that is perhaps the most terrifying thing of all. And I remember when Father did just that, unbeknownst to him. He gave me a gun on my fifteenth birthday. I am sure sister dearest thought I was going to kill her.

I never did.

Would you have? Could you have? As much as I hate her, I would rather she met fate at her own devices. Every good child knows that. Every bad one, as well.

She committed suicide. Years later. I think it had something to do with her lover turned boyfriend turned fiancé. But she got what she was coming to her. Every good citizen knows that the gods do not look favorably upon suicide. Not for petty reasons. And she was a petty woman through and through. I could see that, even with the eyes of a child, nothing though I was, nothing though I am.

None of it has been visible upon me for years. Not on my look, not in my eyes, not in the way I act. It might have shaped a lot about me, but it is not reflected there any longer. But still I have to wonder, do you see it anyway, if just somehow?

Or do you see something else? Perhaps the loneliness that always lingers. Nothing can take it away. Not even the anger that mars it can obliterate the sorrow that likes to hide in my eyes. Nothing has ever truly been able to take it away. For that which has is why I am here. Dead, lost, unknown, forgotten, taken away.

So here I stand, with all I have left to give. Nothing to my name but what I have on me. Expressionless hides so much, but you look like you see through it all. Can you truly see through these eyes of the world or have you been looking through me this whole time? I would be mistaken, and it would not be the first time. I am only a nothing.