Hold Hands and Make It Through

      I was raised by wolves. My older brother, Charlie, was a psychopath, and my parents, with the support of a lot of alcohol, went to some trouble not to notice that. So, for my entire childhood I was at the mercy of a soul-less monster who liked to control and hurt and rape more vulnerable people. Particularly his two little sisters.

      Our parents, who should have protected us, instead turned their faces away. I understood this as permission. We learned very early that there was no use in complaining. Our parents would just laugh at us, would deny that anything was happening. “Go ahead,” they were telling him. That’s what their denial meant. “Go for it. Just do it where no one can see.”

      And he did.

      Charlie would kill us, eventually, if we didn’t get away from him. I knew this. I also—didn’t know. My sister and I both inhabited two realities, dark and light, one where we were abused in every way including some we couldn’t have named, and the other where we led an enviable life in an intellectual, loving family with interesting parents and a very protective big brother.

      We could remember only one of these realities at a time, and the dark one had no words, so we couldn’t talk about it, not with each other or anyone else, not even to ourselves. The very worst thing was that I failed to protect my sister, who was so much smaller, more vulnerable.

      We did get away from Charlie finally, as teenagers. Because I had turned 18, I got out first, and gradually came to feel what it was like, felt it deeply after a year or so, what it was like for home not to be a place of dread and pain. I went back to get my sister but it wasn’t that simple. She was still in those two realities.

      I found her lying on her bed in the semi-darkness at sunset, smelling of clothes that hadn’t been laundered, with greasy unbrushed hair, her skin gray. Her room was bare—no posters on the dingy off-white walls, no toys once loved by a child and kept for sentiment, no musical instruments though she had been musical—nothing but the metal bed and battered thrift-store dresser. When she spoke it was with no expression in her face or voice.

      “I’m fine. Everything’s OK. Nothing’s wrong.” Is that how I was, too, before I came away? It made my skin crawl.

      Getting my sister out was much harder than I expected, but after some months she did pack herself a bag and walk out of there.

      Our lives were shaped by this. I am who I am because of what my brother was and because my sister and I, together, survived.

      It was a long road for both of us. Years of talking, years of remembering what had been walled in behind false memories, a lot of therapy. A promise we both understood without saying, that we would never let anyone have that kind of power over us. Never again.

      Except in my sleep. As an adult, for decades after leaving home I had nightmares in which something monstrous, in my room, at night, sat on my chest, its hands over my nose and mouth until I suffocated. Hands like snakes darted at my crotch, wounded me there, threw me to the ground, tore off my clothes, tore hair from my head.

      It chased and caught me, over and over and over. It burst into my bedroom, it cut off pieces of my body, it burned me, threw me from a cliff. It came to destroy my sister and I couldn’t stop it, and I screamed and screamed but no sound came from my mouth and there was no one to help us and we died, again and again, in my sleep.

      Over the years the nightmares happened less often, and about 20 years ago, finally, they stopped. But then there was this last November, and the election.

      Now, ruling our country, is a soul-less monster who likes to control and hurt and rape more vulnerable people. It is not just another memory. It is immensely powerful and as of January 20, I am at its mercy. We, the queers and disabled and people of color. The poor, the women, migrants, children, the oceans and forests and animals, at his mercy. No protection.

      The man has promised us that he will take everything from us, starve us, deprive us of medical care, erase our marriages, put us in concentration camps, deport us, put a target on us to be killed with no consequences. This is what he has said he will do.

      And this last November, our fellow citizens, the very people who should have protected us from him, instead said, “Go for it. We’re fine with that.”

      So, now the nightmares are back.

      My sister and I survived, all those years ago, because we stayed together, and took care of each other. Together we said “no” to the hollow facade of our family. We told the truth, first to each other, then to others. I do not think I would have survived, alone.

      You and I can hold hands and make it through these dark times. All of us, each of us, can keep telling the truth no matter what lies are told. We can watch out for each other, we can take care of each other. We can fight back. It will be a hard time, and it won’t be pretty. But we can look for the hope. We can keep going back and trying again, and again, and again.

      We will make it through. We did it before. We will survive.

Sylvia Allen is old, queer, Jewish and disabled. She spent most of her working life as a technical writer, editor and ghost writer. Now she writes fiction and memoir.