“The swish of the soft leather of your intruder's coat--As you walk him step by step back to the door--Having talked him down off the ledge of a very bad idea.” Ani Difranco Parameters

How many of you have been raped, beaten, and tied to the forever haunt of an inappropriate sickness? How many of us have had that violation and pain stuck in us as adults?  Worse--probed and prodded as children to be left stuck in a dark room that we just can’t pull ourselves out of? How many of us have had that blood between or legs from being ripped open which still bleeds out periodically from the scar that stubbornly doesn’t heal? How many of us had our hands chopped off by a predator that keeps our grip on their mantle as a trophy of badly chosen power and intrusion? Leaving us barely hanging on to it all and scarcely trusting...

How many of us brush by someone walking down the street and the air surrounding them slices into us like a bolt of lightening; leaving us opened, insides exposed like a child, and our breath unwilling to breathe? It unwraps the wounds to the pain they will and have inflicted. You know this because someone gave you the gift of sniffing out predators in sheep's clothing.  You walk away knowing, that fucked up foresight, will be given to another “marked” little girl or boy. A boy or girl that one day they will join you at the nearest drug store, buying anything to make it  just fucking stop shaking.  It persistently rattles us from the roots. The seed of rape planted in us at each of our own unchosen moments.

 
“My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, casit into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppressed them, turn on other victims”  Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present pg 10

The Marked, as I call them, are the ones that easily trust and easily broken.  I have bore this mark since my birth and I can see it on the ones that bare the same distinction.  We don’t know we’re marked, at first, but we learn through time.  We are effortlessly manipulated and experience introduces us to our reality: that it’s “okay” to rape, beat, trick, hurt, reject and abandon us.  Some marked children, "The Innocent," as I call them, are sniffed out by the Fallen, the ones that turned their childhood cries into a fallen rebuttal. The Fallen fell to the other side of the fence and continue on their childhood offense by inflicting it on others. I can see them too. Others, like me, can see both sides of the fence, and want to protect The Marked/Innocent from those predators with every ounce of our being. We grieve for the ones that fell and tripped to create a list of victims for  themselves. How awful to feel that much pain that you have to violently give it to someone else in order to relieve that ache. How wrong it is to prey on children and be that person. 

How do you tell a parent of a marked child their child is in danger?  They are vulnerable everyday.  How do you tell them their son or daughter is being sniffed out and they MUST teach them about what’s out there preying upon them? They must teach these child to be safe so their trust for the world will stay mended? Not to make them afraid, but aware.  I usually just bend down and kiss the mark that rests on their forehead with hope that someday, they will help others like themselves. For me, it's hard to trust people with my child. The thought of him experiencing the things I did, makes my stomach turn and paralyze with fear. 

For us, that had our cores divided and fates carried out, there’s no statistic that really can tell you who we are, where we are, and how many of us are out there. We see each other, though.  We see each other at the bus stop. We touch elbows in between the bars and notice each other thumping the cantaloupes at the grocery store. We see each others dark branch shadow tattooed hard against our skin and see the pain echoing in the quick glances.

We see each others inner bleeding from the same wound that bleeds in us. We envision our hands reaching inside them frantically trying to stop the gushing and save them. We do it, because we wish that someone would reach inside us because no matter what we do, the bleeding will not stop until we can learn to forgive the unforgiveable—and accept it. Forgiving won’t define me, but neither will the forgetting.

There isn't any sarcastic humor to guard my wounds in this blog. It’s just me, opening up about a pain put in me long ago, and a mark on my forehead for the world and me to see. I see yours and you see mine…We are, as is, and have no childish illusions because we’ve earned our disillusions. We have struggled with forgiving of ourselves; wrestled with the shame and all the attempts mixed in with chemicals to numb it away. You don’t have to smile if you don’t want too, and I won’t smile to make you feel the need. I don’t want your pity for pity’s sake. Just thought maybe if you knew, we could make a deal…I’ll forgive what happened to you and you can forgive what happened to me.

That way our hands can grow back, inch by inch, and we can hold on to the “now’s”, and walk away from what’s behind those dark parameters in the past.