Demon #1

I think this will be the most hurtful thing I'll ever write.

It's about child abuse, sexual abuse.

The reason why I never talked about it before was the definition I had for the word "abuse". I always thought that abuse meant something violent, that there something had to be forced, it had to be done against one's will. Only today I checked the dictionary and saw:

1. to use wrongly or improperly; misuse: to abuse one's authority.

2. to treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way: to abuse a horse; to abuse one's eyesight.

3. to speak insultingly, harshly, and unjustly to or about; revile; malign.

4. to commit sexual assault upon.

I don’t know why I thought that abuse had to have resistance from one part. I guess that’s what made me quiet for all this time.

When I was a kid, my parents worked a lot. And I was basically raised by neighbors. Every day I was in their houses and they would take care of me, play with me, give me all the love I needed while my parents were trying to make our lives easier, and that was incredible of them.

But, just as other people’s parents can be very nice and try to educate you well, the kids were not that nice. As they worked a lot, my parents managed to get every best thing for us. When everyone was buying a 21’ television, there we were getting one too. We couldn’t afford those items, but it made us feel we had a special home, a special family.

Certainly, my house was empty for long periods of time, but it also had great stuff in it to play with, so I started to stay home for longer periods of time and take friends over. Eventually, everyone wanted to be my friend. We started to have big parties in my house, and my requests were never ignored by my mother. I don’t know, maybe she allowed all those parties because she felt guilty, but the point is that I knew that if I couldn’t throw parties for my friends, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anymore.

And that was the relationship. Lots of parties in my house, lots of people that left without helping to clean, never gave one buck to help with the expenses. But I had a lot of friends.

I was younger than most kids, so they started developing their sexuality faster than me, but I was there, hanging around with them every day. In our group, there was Fernando. Fernando was my best friend. I wanted to be with him all the time, because we talked so naturally and he was so cool and it seemed that he could like me even if I didn’t have all of those things.

One day, Fernando and I were laying down on a relaxing net in his garage, and I don’t know how, but I ended up giving him a blow job. I thought it was something special, something that showed that friends really liked each other. And in a very naïve thought, I shared that information, right after it happened, to one of Fernando’s friends.

I will never forget how his expression changed from surprise to absurd. And how he started yelling that I was a fag. And I was crying at his gate, begging him to stop, because from what I had learned, being a fag was something that would make your parents angry and disappointed. There were a lot of people on the street at that time, everyone was surprised and I don’t remember what happened after that.

The next memory I have after that is my father sitting on the carpet, working. He’s not even looking at me, and I’m standing there and I am so afraid. My dad said that what I had done was wrong. And that I shouldn’t do that again.

So I kept quiet, because if it was something I did wrong, I think I should have missed the right information. Because how can you do something wrong if you don’t know what is right? I only had that feeling. Those butterflies in my stomach that made me want me and Fernando to be closer and closer.

At some point, everyone knew about the whole blow job thing. And while others took their time to mock me and call me a fag and really humiliate me in very public situations, others - I believe – thought they could get lucky. And they did.

Another day I went to a house of some guys – they were very poor, these 3 brothers, and they were really bad people. On that day, they were jerking off looking at naked woman’s magazines. Once again, I don’t know how it happened. I remember seeing them moving their beds, but I wasn’t quite getting it. They told me to go under the bed which was in the horizontal position, so my legs wouldn’t be under the bed, but only my upper body part. Then they went under the bed, but on the opposite way. Only their lower body parts were under the bed. And I gave them a blow job.

On that day, I pre cummed for the first time, and they told me that I had peed on my pants. They mocked me with that joke for days, and I forgot about the blow job thing. My dad had said it was wrong, but I wouldn’t have friends if I refused to do that. I actually didn’t know I could say no to that. What could I have known at that age?

So I didn’t say anything, and I started eating a lot and that was when I got extremely fat. But I kept throwing parties, and being humiliated for other people’s amusement. I was the jester of the group.

Life went by, and there was a cousin of mine, who I jerked a couple of times, and I thought we were best friends but he acted as if he didn’t know me afterwards to avoid the subject. Then there was this other cousin, but at this time, I tried to suck his dick. I pretended to be asleep and “accidently” sucked his toe, trying to suggest him to put his dick in my mouth. He suggested it out loud and I confirmed, pretending to be talking on my sleep, and he hit me because I think someone had told him that that kind of thing was bad.

In my love life, after Fernando, I felt crazy about some guys. All of them were older, all of them showed extreme kindness and I didn’t even have to suck their dicks for them to be nice. I wanted to be more and more with them because I thought they could teach me, or take care of me. I felt so anxious about these guys that I would behave like a crazy person. Expecting them to put me at the center of their lives. Demanding talks, calls, “dates”… and all I told myself was that I wanted to be friends.

About my sex life, let’s start saying that I was a bottom for the first time in a night club’s dark room. Because all that people had told me was that it was going to hurt, it wasn’t going to be good, and gay guys have sex all the time. So I felt that it didn’t matter. I also thought I didn’t matter, so what the fuck. My sex life was marked with wreckless moments and that is because 1 – I don’t like sex 2 – I didn’t think anyone that really liked me would have sex with me 3 – the only way to make people like me was having sex with them.

This situation just kept on going. People that I liked, my friends, would take me for this person that knew better but I always felt like a kid that had a good pose. I would trust them with something and then there were two options: they would disappear, because they would get a boyfriend or other friends or eventually we would fight and they would bring my secrets to public audience.

I kept on being fat, nerd and quiet about everything that was inside, and I started living as this kid that knew better. But every time someone would look at me as if they were seeing me for what I was, I would go crazy because I would want to be with them all the time. And then these people would be scared and leave me too.

Everyone I loved would leave. Everyone I fucked would haunt me. I felt like nobody knew me. I felt like no one would ever want to. So I got bitter, angry and I told myself that I would never trust anyone in my life. I wouldn’t open myself to anyone. And I didn’t. And people were always pretty satisfied with what I gave and told them it was me. I’d learned how to be a likable person, but no one really knew me. Eventually there was an episode in which I’d fall in love and I’d make everything fall apart, but that was that.

I even remember this day at a barbecue with guys from my University. In the beginning of my college course, I was this flammy gay guy everyone liked. After my second year, in which I got a serious job and went through some hard times, I started to see that I was changing, and I had no business in being flammy. But nobody could forget the title “Leo the gay guy”. It pissed me off so much that one day I told one of my best friends from class: I don’t want to be just the fag of the group anymore, I’m sick of it. She laughed.

I don’t know if she realized I was being extremely serious. I don’t know if she was drunk. Or me, for that matter.

That was when I stopped talking to people from University and met a group of people with which I would be whoever I wanted to. And I carried a lot of anger in me. So I started drinking, doing drugs, drunk driving and all things that could kill me accidentally. I really had no problems in dying.

People didn’t really care, they would always disappear and become strangers, guys just wanted to fuck before getting to know you and there were no such thing as good men.

So it was like living a version of me at a time.

Then there was the car crash, Leandro and etc.

I don’t think the rest is important right now.

For me, the important part is about the fact that I was sexually abused when I was young and I thought it was normal. I thought it hadn’t influenced who I was at all. But it did. It affected the way I see people, act with them, trust them… it affected how I see myself, how important I think I am for the others and myself.

I think I still carry the filters with which I see people. The ones I got from all of this experience. And it has been fucking me up. Now, I don’t know if it’s important to think more about the fact that I was indeed abused, or if I just move on.

All I know, is that I needed someone here right now, just to say they understand. I don’t know the result of going through this discovery moment alone. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about people. But I do feel different.

I feel like I didn’t exist anymore. And I don’t know if it’s good or bad. And I’m scared… I keep questioning “Really? Aren’t you being dramatic? Was that really abuse?”

And if it was, what does it say about me? Who I am, what I do, can I fix the damage, can I be somebody else? Is it sad? Is it normal? Aren’t people used to this kind of thing? It’s like I needed someone to tell me what is it that happened because I just can’t believe it. Just can’t.