The only story I know how to tell.

[Trigger warning for explicit descriptions of child sexual abuse, discussion of mental illness and an eating disorder, and mentions of suicidality. Please take care.]

Once upon a time, I was seven years old. Like most kids but not all, I had a mom and a dad. We lived in a house in a nice neighborhood of a town that was somehow both rural and suburban at the same time, in the shadow of a mountain. There were kids down the street who I hated, kids down the other side of the street who were okay but younger than me. My best friend Chase lived the next street over and we would spend our afternoons at the park, play-acting like we were warriors in our favorite Redwall books. We were also Jedi, wizards from Harry Potter, and astronauts. 

I also had a brother. 

Injustice is not always in the streets, visible, to be acknowledged or ignored. Injustice is sometimes hidden in TV rooms and bedrooms, in the darkened hallway between the landing and a parent's bedroom. It is an open secret in the house, guarded fiercely from the outside world. 

Injustice, for me, began in the cardboard box that my parents' treadmill came in. My brother and I were ostensibly playing in it, hiding from the sun. I was in my play clothes, a matching outfit of orange tie-dye, and my brother was touching me. He told me you could measure my pulse from that the place below the waistband of my shorts. He touched me to demonstrate. 

Injustice continued in the bathtub. He was Jabba the Hutt, and I was Princess Leia. He showed me his penis and pissed into an empty shampoo bottle. He sat me on his belly. Maybe the real injustice is that I remember the feel of his skin, slick with water and bubble bath. I couldn't tell you for certain.

He was gentle, then he was violent. He held me down in the back room of our house as our mother mowed the lawn outside, masking my screams. He pushed my head under the water in the pool as I thrashed and choked. He wielded a kitchen knife and screamed at me for some offense I'd done that only he knew.  

I traded kisses for reprieve from his greater violence.

Anger, like a demon, exploded in my chest, making my small fists fly, trying to hurt him, trying to bruise his organs and rip out his ribcage. He punched me in the stomach, he was always bigger than me, and laughed as my mother dragged me away by my arms and berated me for hitting my brother. Later, my brother would sneer, call me fat, call me stupid, and slam his fists on my back.

My parents rolled their eyes and told him to stop, as though they had caught him making a mess in the kitchen or leaving his room in disarray. 

He watched me in the shower and visited my room late at night. He brought me with him to tend to our neighbors' dogs while they were out of town so he could be free of our parents' supervision and make use of my body in the vacated house. 

I learned to negotiate as the years went on. He could touch my growing breasts but not below my waist. I would rub myself against his dick but he wouldn't take my pants off. The wires and synapses in my brain got confused and all tangled. Once puberty began to rain down hell on me, I would masturbate in his room, surrounded by his unwashed scent, when he was away.

Injustice followed me to court when I reported him. As punishment for the years of terror he inflicted on me, the crime of making a thing out of his sibling, he received two hundred and forty hours of community service. Working out and going to counseling counted for those hours. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about this.

Injustice was in the eating disorder, as I starved myself all day and then guiltily ceded to my hunger and ate a Lean Cuisine at eleven at night. Injustice was the heart-stopping anxiety that was passed off as normal stress. Injustice was the depression. Injustice was the way I fantasized about taking my own life.

I went to college. I tried to take my life twice.

Injustice and the suffering that follows in its shadows are most of what I know. I am no stranger to the cold and loneliness. Panic attacks and choking waves of depression are the most real friends I have. The way he lurks in my dreams and under my skin has not ceased though I have not seen him in almost six years. 

This isn't much of a story, but it's all I have. I'm sorry.