tell me what you want me to say...

It was always dark when she came out, when I needed rescuing the most. She could do anything. She could leave any party way too smashed to stand and still make it home intact. She could drive anywhere any time in any circumstance (i.e. cigarette rolling into the seat under our butt in a stick shift in the middle of 3rd street ((6 lanes)) during rush hour without getting a single burn or causing an accident). But boy was she stupid.

She couldn't seem to make priority decisions, like not bringing a child along to a drunken sign stealing road trip, or leaving her behind for 3 months to 'get a job' in another state and winding up (actually keeping the job, kudos) hanging out with a new underground crime lord hellbent on taking over a territory.

Ok, she's saying she never got caught and sent to prison. I'm adding in buying for minors, stealing signs, and fortunately not criminal negligence for involuntary manslaughter (the kid lived). I'm also adding never lost custody of the child due to very poor prioritizing. I'm sure I could make quite the list of things I've never been caught and formerly charged for. Not something I'm proud of.

BUT, she loves to add, we never wound up gang raped (there's a horror story behind that) or dead in a ditch, either. (Actually, dead in a desert...) I always made it home. Always. She always got me home no matter how stupid the decisions were leading up to needing to make it home in such dire circumstances so many times.

How did I not have control over that?

It all started a long, long time ago. I can look back and see now that every time I was around my dad, I got stupid. She counters with Fearless. Numb. Capable to the point of miracles. If he told me to do something, I was able to do it, even when it meant getting back onto my feet and walking out of an emergency room after I'd been ejected from a violently flipping vehicle and was still internally bleeding and God knows what else. It was like I didn't have a voice when my dad was in charge. Like he willed it, and I did it.

Some of the times were back and forth, though. Like when he started pushing me to argue with him. I was young, maybe ten, and he was already pushing me to debate him on bible, to prove him wrong, to find holes in his beliefs. I can't think right when I'm numb, so I had to unnumb and learn to argue with him, to stand up against him under a very strange kind of pressure that he called devil's advocate. And then he dragged me into playing chess. I had to think then, too. When I was the thinker, I learned I could be brilliant. It took awhile, but I could eventually outfox him, out think him. And then he demanded that we argue even harder. It was easier just to numb out and not have to think, but unless I was tasked to an odious chore, I wasn't allowed to opt out without being made to feel weak. And after the young childhood I'd spent with him, there was no way I would never again let him think I was weak.

By 13 I was easily switching back and forth from numb workaholic to natural debater. I handled a foster sister earning bags of dope from boys at school with ease, telling her flat out she would do what I say on my parents' property or I'd out her and get her removed. She burned a fat sandwich bag stuffed full of marijuana out in a hole on my command. By 14 she was setting me up to get hurt very badly by a Spanish girl gang at our school. I outran them to my bus and got the last laugh as it was the last day before Christmas vacation, and my family moved to another state that very week, leaving her behind.

There is soooo much more...

And all the good story stuff is her, go figure. Well, except me kicking back out and rescuing my child and then fighting for control and losing for years until Scott finally anchored me.

And it's not all my dad's fault. My friend's murderer definitely triggered quite a lot of that losing myself in the dark thing, but it took my dad creating my numbness in the first place to wind up as far in the dark as I did.

Someday this is all coming out.