Paths to Memories Flooded by Many Other Storms

The Greasy Gary game got shoved under years of eating disorders, first binging, then anorexia, then purging, chronic dieting, then binging again. It got shoved under years of failed intimacies. Therapy sessions were taken up talking about how to quit obsessing over food and my weight and how to be less ashamed of my body to have a healthy sexual relationship with someone I love and who treats me well.

By my thirties, I found myself in a pretty good place. After years of therapy and reading Harriet Lerner and Linda Bacon books, I found a man who loves me and makes me feel like I can be myself around him. We got married. We had a daughter despite fertility problems. I have a good job I think is interesting and important as a paraprofessional librarian at the public library. Life is good.

Sure, family gatherings are always a time of anxiety. Someone at some point will mention off-handedly some sex abuse case in the news. Since the only person in my family I’ve talked to about my sexual experiences with Murray is my mother, no one else would know I might get prickly around such talk. Murray wasn’t usually around family gatherings anyway. When he was, I was ok, surrounded by everyone else, cushioned by time. Most of the time.

On more than one occasion throughout the years, usually when we were alone in the car together as I was driving his license-revoked ass somewhere, Murray creeped me out when he mentioned that whoever his current girlfriend at the time was “sometimes acts likes a crazy bitch because she has issues since her older brother sexually abused her when she was little. Isn’t that sick! If I got my hands on that sick fuck I’d rip his balls off.” I wasn’t ever sure if that was Murray’s weird way of letting me know he felt bad for what he did to me, or if he really had blocked our experiences out so much they simply did not exist to him. Either way, I said nothing. I ignored him. I returned to my basically happy life.

Until one day I opened the email from Walt, which opened paths to memories that had been flooded by many other storms.