I loved it when he left home
I remember lying in my bed awake at night on Sundays, and I’d hear him take a bath around 20:00. I knew this meant he would be going to the pub. It made me so happy to know he would be leaving the house for the evening, even though it hardly made a difference to me since I was supposed to be asleep. It was so nice to have him away from us. I knew things would be automatically calmer, less stress for mum, and there would be no arguments until on he returned. I remembered this now and it makes me sad that I had to get joy from such moments. I spent each day in fear of what I’d have done wrong by the end of the day, and this was truly damaging to me on so many levels. I need to write about it to process it, become less scared of it and really accept the things that happened. It’s painful to think about, and to relive the feeling all over again. I imagine he never thinks about me, just as my real father likely doesn’t also. How could I have had such bad luck so early on? It’s hard to believe you don’t deserve it, especially when one of those supposed father figures kept drilling it into me that I was a gay piece of shit who deserved everything he got. I know I didn’t deserve it, but does that change the fact that it happened anyway? It still makes it hard to accept.