What Forgiveness Does for Me

Let's see:

Two of my mother's lovers sexually assaulted me. One was Beaky, who decided to rape me after I came home from a party with John. 

Hats off Tassoni. I hand it to you with admirable sarcasm, and some knowledge of your misogyny. You made it. A department head, only a year and a half my senior, needed to reach for a safety valve when I pitched an error by writing to you in 2002, always looking back over my shoulder. Shake me off by finding a classification with which to label me, and  never knowing. I could not tell you. Never did. How could I, when I at least wanted to be your lover. How could I tell you. I did not. Beaky, and then my much more dangerous stepfather.

Linda did not know, and I could not tell you about her either. Somehow there is a disconnect between Chester and Philadelphia, more related to survival perhaps, that education would protect me, desire for you, worship for Jerry. Safe harbor with Michael, while a heroin addict named Stuart tried to torture my family to death. Independent living off side Temple's campus just more of the same molestation I used to receive at home. I want the nigger woman dead more than the addict grandson who assaulted me before her. He was simply going to kill me to get high. Miss Eddie hit on me, and I have to live with this John, that I no longer have compassion enough to see her as anything more than a non-viable deviant with minimal human characteristics; I picture her with a bloodied scalp. I'd enjoy seeing her hurt, and cannot forgive the world John, for creating lesbianistic abusers whom by necessity make me regurgitate, corrosive and monstrous in return. Forgive her for being a pig with the inability to control her lewd touching. Forgive Linda and Josie and Erik and Jimmi and Cassie for a zealotry which cannot acknowledge how many lives it destroys in tandem with a case management system designed to imply I am less human than you.

Forgive you for how you negotiated your interaction with me. Forgive Josie for rupturing a hope, an anticipation of a seasoned romance. Peevish clit sucking Christian published my departure from the fine world of mental health integration. She then let me be on team Mobility for five minutes. A heterosexual flirtation was too much to witness, however.

Never mind. Vituperation has turned me sour, right? I'm appalling, you never felt that way, and I can never hope to feel with another Linda's bravaccio with her divorced, Jewish husband. My neighbors and classmates from Folsom, before you knew me, and from Ridley Park, where yes, you visited, my father none too happy about that, these suburbanites disparaging me, at a disability center where a blind Mexican American cannot cajole state politicians to engage. This is social services intake in the city of brotherly love.

I don't want to die like this Tassoni. I wanted to bear your children, earn some degree of acclaim in my own right, and I cannot even hope to relocate without miraculous intervention. This is what forgiveness does for me.