Things That Last

Sundays.
God, I hate them.
No real mystery here. Sunday was the day my stepfather would manage to creep his evil on me. Usually while my mother cooked breakfast. I was nine, he was her newly-wed groom. Tall, dark, handsome, smart as a whip. He married my mother whose sorrow had been clinical for years, he took her out of her darkness, briefly. He plunged me into mine, and so far, forty-something years later, it persists.
The touching, the breathing, the confusion and fear while Mother called out from the kitchen- How many eggs do you want?
Once, he called back from where he was holding me, A dozen, and she, not-knowing, maybe knowing something, grew angry and cooked him twelve eggs.
He ate them, too.
Then church, usually. And then a family outing to the beach, or out on the boat. Me and my little brother, my mother and her husband- ah, didn't we look happy? Didn't we look normal? The handsome, newly married couple, the cute dorky kids with their glasses and funny teeth? Didn't he look proud as he showed us how to fish (my brother and I almost laughed our asses off once when he get finned by a catfish- we'd known for years how not to let that happen), as he drove his boat through the briny waters of the river, a place which for me had been a sort of perfection, a twisting brown river with islands of jungle where I was certain Tarzan might still live, where pirates may have buried treasure, where I had played as an innocent child, learning about god from the sunsets, the trees, the wind, the river floating lazily beneath me as I laid on my belly on the sun-bleached wood of the dock, watching it flow from somewhere to the ocean and back again. Manatees slowly raising their giant heads and bodies, mullet jumping, the fins of sharks, the herons fishing patiently on one leg in the shallow low-tide.
All of that had been my savior and I had needed saving, my child-heart already bloodied from the loss of a father, the loss of a mother who, although physically present, had spent most of my life in some sort of nether world of such darkness that I knew, even then, I did not want to ever taste.
The river had been there, though. The jungle, too. And my great, open child-mind had risen like the egrets, flying high with the power of the water and the sky and the lovely, shadowy creatures above and below the water.
And then he came and tried to show me what I already knew and then he showed me things I should not have seen and my heart and soul plunged into a different reality, one that was a reality of lonely fear, of perfect panic.
Sundays. He ruined those, for sure.
But the jungle and the river- he didn't ruin those. He couldn't.
And here's the crazy thing- they're still there. Just as I remember and it is with something like religious fervor that I return to them when I can. Even crazier- I hardly think of him at all when I am there. The river was there before he came. It is still there and it is just as if he'd never even laid eyes on it, much less touched it in any way.
Oh, how I wish I could say the same about me.
Every day I wish that, but Sundays most of all.