I have a lil down time this week. Betwixt & between. Tucked into a Lil writerhead studio, standing in the gap, praying for two clutches of friends Goin through it here in LA, where I rarely stay still.

I’m safe. Praying for others( I low-key have an Angelic gift in that department 😶‍🌫️🫣)…welcome. But in that …this…safe.. space I have faced the tactile residue of the truth that for all the middle class haus flair I never was safe at home …as it has risen up to be released.

Not “felt.” This isn’t an emotional errant thing to be logisticized out of or rationalized through. & i have felt thru parts of this. But this has been an…impersonal understanding registering.

I literally wasn’t. Safe.

My dad mainly worked 2nd & 3rd shift, the abuse stopped at 7 and I was stuck in a BiiiiiiG house( comparatively/peerwise) with the adult who’d arranged and orchestrated that shit, in the aftermath of them going to my teachers and painting me up as a tattle-teller Soon as all that “if something happens to you tell a trusted adult” shit dropped at school, trying to cut me telling off at the pass.

I became safe there by making sure my whole family knew I had no chill. By throwing knives. & it’s been funny-it still is hilarious, frankly- that instead of my Having guilt or shame over my body they had to suffer through defiantly buck naked flamboyance…but that it was There, as a kid… if I’m not safe nobody’s fn safe lolol- like my mother literally slept with her eyes open lol- and we used to- it’s the running jokes…bumped against the reality. My God given comprehension, my heaven sent demented dark assed humor literally saved all of us, definitely her.

Because if I Had taken what happened just a hair diff? She should have been sleeping with her eyes open. Her hatred and envy and jealousy towards me got me sexually assaulted and my siblings literally rape( kicking one onto the autistic spectrum in outraged reaction(whole nother post).

…She just happened to sleep like she knew what she actually deserved, anyway lol.

…But it’s being 50…and realizing “omg- that wasn’t ten, it-I was six-seven!”

(…then laughing because it was 6-7 lol. )

&God gave them No peace on the public front- all the straight 9s comprehension tests, the throwing minime in honors- it makes a different sense now. They were stupid 30 yr olds when I was six, seven. They were entrepreneurial borderline buppies building somethings and their middle child was a ticking time bomb due to their fucked in the head narc parental bullshit.

But the residue is up and being flushed out, the Timberline is making sense of the mountain, the timeline is shoring itself up so that I can get the true root & heal it. Or relinquish it, once and for all.

Because it’s not like it just got safer when I was big as her, or notorious for boxing my siblings in bathrooms throwing knives for having tried to jump me until mommy got home, when the narcs figged i’ d kill em all smiling- & get away with it-

… it’s that All that campy grabbing the fn bull of that shit by the horns…Still WASN’T SAFETY.

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I fn unearthed I’d always wanted to be an author. At the end of novnov.

No. Like…always.

But what was the gamechanger book? THE LITTLE PRINCESS. & again, when? 6-7.

When my Dad was on 2nd & 3rd shift, he may as well have been dead. My mother could give Minchkin a run for the purse, maaan. But what did it teach me? Don’t let monstrous bitches get ya down. You still be… the noble you are.

How am I eleven fiction books in ( 9 Grievechronics and now 2 Anthologies) only seeing I always wanted to write books at 6-7¿

I’ll tell you how: I used to keep a journal. With locks.

…my mother used to break into them. GET mad. So I started fucking with her- would get her sucked in, like she was getting the tea lol- then she couldn’t say shit because she was being nosy lolol- she’d dime herself out- lol.

fucking with her for invading my privacy- the delicate delightful delicious joy from that…was brighter.

I Still do that shit like 2nd nature to fucks, too. Who shouldn’t be spying lol. Very they deserve every lie that gets their panties in a bunch.

But it’s… seeing it’s from all that.

She didn’t win because it was never about competition …and God got me back To writing in his way…but popping her for that spying shit took precedence it apparently had to… but…it worldview-wise would’ve been nice to have had a bookish Jane Austen phase, gone and let some college faculty talk me out of my long held writing mores~

I probably wouldn’t have written naan a book yet, but lol.

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It wasn’t Safe to fully Be a kid writer though, not if you’re having to mindfuck a malignant narc mother off your back at all turns.

& yeah, the undeserved whuppings stopped when I was eye to eye(8-ish)… the deserved ones I stand by having deserved lol…& she stopped ripping my hair out at 9 when I stopped taking it and figured out my own hair [+my dad made her start taking us to get our hair done when she got hers done 2x a month]…but she murdered my wolf dogs with antifreeze at 12, was threatening to take my virgo assed door off the hinges to steal privacy from me in tenth grade, threw out my cat in 11th, and I was cooking the only non poisoned fn food in the house all high school-

That was home.

It was still my house. You know? & it was a gorgeous one. & i loved that house. She didn’t “get” to be that house. Her shit didn’t get to taint it. Even then. That house had been around since like 1896 or 1904. Had seen some things.& they had phenomenal taste. I have had several multi million dollar home clients all over California… only One is as finely tuned and esthetically sound as the home I grew up in for seventeen straight years.

But that word… it’s that it hasn’t gotten the chance to mean Safe to me that has been the grasped issue.

Why would I want that word 🤔 , a home of my own to societal specs…when it has had that unspoken connotation?

I could never beat myself up for not wanting that.

…because i wasn’t dealing with what the word had been imbued with.

My gig… has been reparenting that word for me this entire time and it’s wild to see.

-AB