Jesus... It’s startling how quickly feelings come flooding back. How... how so very evocative a single word, or a phrase, or tone can be. How immediate and hard and numbing it is when it happens. A word like... boy, or hide, or come can be... and in an instant my mouth is full of smoke and I see the chipped and peeling underside of the coffee table. My own hands, much smaller, covering my face while I pray to God to be invisible, for him to forget that I’m supposed to be home. For him to forget that I was ever here. Rough and gritty matted carpet leaves fragments of itself on hands and knees, and I know that when I finally crawl out from under the table, when the lights are out and it might be safe I’ll most likely bang my head on the edge of the table.
And if it is dark, and the house is too hot, with the heat of too many bodies, too little space, two rooms too crowded to breathe and I crawl into bed, I’ll be at the foot of it, because my brothers will have been in bed already. For a long time. Long enough to make the sheets sticky with sweat. Too hot to touch.
... Come here boy.
"Boy," isn't a word I react to very well, even still.