Content note: this piece references sexual harm, emotional manipulation, trauma memory, family privacy, and healing.
There are a few truths I know.
I love myself.
I love L.
And L has no idea about any of this.
Or at least, that is how it seems.
I asked him if he viewed my socials, and he got upset at the “accusation.” But the truth is, I never accused him. It never bothered me if he had seen my work. What panicked me after I realized everything, was the idea that maybe it was J reading my entries, then telling me L had been reading and seeing my work to mess with me.
So I privatized everything.
I took myself out as a creator for a couple of weeks.
Then I asked a question only L would know the answer to. Not because I wanted to trap him. Not because I wanted to accuse him. Because if he answered, I could know where the information was coming from, and I could leave him alone.
J would not have known how to respond.
But when L got upset, I realized something.
He might have absolutely no idea what has been happening for the past couple of years.
Maybe not even the past seven.
Maybe that is good. Maybe it makes his living situation easier. Maybe it is better for him not to know what kind of person his cousin has been to me.
But then there were the things he said.
The insinuations that I was mentally off. That I was lying. That the question itself meant there was something wrong with me.
And that felt familiar.
Whether someone says it calmly or screams it, using my mental well-being as a weapon still cuts the same way.
I knew he was defending himself. I knew he was hitting where it hurt. Whether he looked or not did not matter at that point.
So I took him at face value.
I expected J to lie more than I expected L to lie at this point, so maybe L truly did not know. Maybe he still does not know. And unless he asks, he will not find out from me. Because if he already believes I am lying, then I am not here to beg anyone to believe me.
What I wanted him to understand more than anything was that I had not accused him of anything. I wanted him to know that I cared about him. That I loved him. That I wanted to be with him, but not in the broken, tangled, wounded way all of this had become.
But I still spoke to him broken and tangled.
My knees still shook every time I spoke. I was still nervous. I still could not meet him where he was. I couldn’t tell if it was him, or if it was because I was standing in front of the door anymore.
I realized what I had been trying to say: that I wanted to support him, that I wanted to be there for him, and that I loved him — but not like this.
So, I did my best, in stoned words, to say what I had been trying to say in that doorway.
That I loved him.
That I wanted to be with him.
But not like this.
Not fucked up.
His response was, well, he did what he needed to do to get me away. He knew me well enough. He knew what to say.
And my mental floodgates started opening.
Because maybe that was the real question underneath the question.
I wanted to know if J had ever told the truth.
I wanted to know if anything he said had been real, or if it had all been another way to keep me confused.
I wanted to ask L because he was the only person who could answer.
And in a way, he did.
Not by telling me what J had or had not said.
But by showing me what happened when I brought things straight to him. I may have not asked outright, do you have feelings for me, but it was there. And his response, that was an answer too.
Maybe not the answer I was looking for.
But enough of one.
And then came another question:
“Why haven’t you blocked each other?”
Because when I do not want someone to speak to me, especially after they have disrespected or hurt me, I block them. Sometimes I tell them. Sometimes I do not. If someone tells me they have feelings for me and I do not feel the same, I tell them. I do not try to humiliate them.
But he has hurt me.
A lot.
And regardless of what the entire truth is, I know this: I was manipulated by J for years. I loved someone and felt safe enough to be near him, and I was treated like crap.
Then I was harmed by him.
And after that, everything folded in on itself.
Another truth is that I love L.
Romantically, yes.
But also in a way that feels ruptured by what happened with J.
For years, I thought L did not give a fuck about me.
And I lived.
I existed.
I moved through life.
I dated. I was with people. And sure, I cared about L as a person. I worried about him. I loved him as a person, but not in the way everything later became.
After the harm, I started looking back at years of confusion, distance, silence, manipulation, and unanswered questions. I started wondering what had been true and what had been twisted. I started wondering how much of what I believed had been handed to me by someone who was never really trying to be my friend.
Because with J, I understand now, it was not about friendship.
It was about sex.
It was about access.
I remember J asking me once, years ago, when I was freshly out of the hospital:
“Why him and not me?”
I never fully answered him.
Maybe I did not know how.
Maybe I did not understand yet what my spirit already knew.
But I remember the question.
And looking back now, I cannot pretend it meant nothing.
I cannot say exactly what lived underneath it. I cannot solve him. I do not want to.
But I know the question stayed.
And after everything that happened, it feels like one of the keys left behind in the room.
I understand parts of J.
Or at least, I thought I did.
He gave me pieces of his childhood. His history. His story. And I hold them with care because that is what I do when someone hands me their pain.
But after everything, I still ask myself what was real and what was not.
I do not know what was the truth.
I do not know what was intimacy.
I do not know what was confession.
I do not know what was another way to gain access to me.
And that hurts in a way I am still learning how to name.
Because I cared.
Because I listened.
Because I made room for his pain.
And now I am left wondering how much of what I was holding was ever offered to me honestly.
What I know is that I kept trying to repair a relationship with the wrong person, while avoiding the person I was actually afraid to face.
After I was hospitalized, I had started getting better.
I was finding myself again.
Listening to myself.
Loving myself.
Learning how to hear my own wants and needs.
But instead of talking to L, I talked to J.
I tried to make peace in the wrong room.
And I ended up here.
That is not me blaming myself for what happened.
I know better than that now.
It is me seeing the pattern.
It is me seeing how badly I wanted clarity, how badly I wanted safety, how badly I wanted one person in that house to tell me the truth.
And L will never fully know how all of this affected me unless he asks.
He will never know what it did to have someone lie to me, manipulate me, violate me, and leave me questioning the shape of my own reality.
Maybe he cannot understand.
Maybe he does not need to.
But I know.
I know what happened.
I know what I felt.
I know what I survived in my own life.
And I know what L has said out loud.
I know what he has kept silent.
I know how he has looked at me.
I know how he has walked away.
I know the distance.
I know those things too.
And what I know now is that I love myself enough not to accept that anymore.
Because that kind of response comes from a wounded place.
And if we are going to come to each other at any point now, we have to come correct.
Not like this.
So I wanted to see if he did the thing.
The healthy thing.
The good thing.
He said he did not want me to contact him again, but for years, the door was always left a crack open. I wasn’t blocked. And maybe that should not have mattered, but it did.
Because it felt like a dare.
Like an invitation to come back into the same loop and be punished for entering it.
And I wanted him to close it.
I wanted to close it.
Because I understood I was not well.
He told me he had people. He had friends. He had support. He had his job. He has things going for him.
And I didn’t want to keep doing this.
We needed to be clean.
Because the way he was treating me was not something I could keep carrying. He was making me question myself. I was angry. I wanted to yell. I wanted to explain. I wanted to make myself smaller and smaller. Or run down there, but to what? To freeze and panic?
But I also wanted to walk away and say nothing. Say, “That’s it. I’m done with him.”
But I wasn’t.
Not him.
Because I do love him, and it wasn’t that I was giving up. It wasn’t L that I was done with.
I have always swallowed the thing. I have always left with the wound still in my mouth. I left before. I walked away before. I wasn’t walking away from him. That’s what it may have looked like from the other end. But this time…I was walking away from this toxicity.
I had tried to before.
I had blocked him when I felt hurt, then unblocked him when the guilt came in. When I started wondering if maybe it was my fault. If maybe I had overreacted. If maybe I had made something bigger than it was.
Then I convinced myself he must have blocked me too.
But he had not.
He had me open.
And maybe that should have meant nothing.
But to me, it meant the door was still there.
Not wide open.
Not inviting.
Not safe.
Just unlocked enough for the loop to begin again.
Because we had left the door open for each other.
That was part of the problem.
The door stayed cracked just enough for one of us to come back. Just enough for something unsaid to breathe. Just enough for hurt to find its way through again.
And every time the door stayed open, the same loop found us.
Confusion.
Longing.
Anger.
Silence.
A return.
Another wound.
So when he said he wanted me to leave him alone, but did not block me, I felt the pattern asking me to step back inside.
And I could not do it anymore.
If he would not close the door cleanly, I had to.
Not because I stopped caring.
Because I finally cared about myself enough to stop standing in the doorway.
And because I loved him enough to see that I could not keep asking him to meet me in a place where we were both getting hurt.
I could not stand in the doorway anymore. I literally could not speak to him anymore. And I knew this wasn’t the relationship I could hold with this person anymore.
So this time, I told him the truth that I saw from the door.
“Clearly you have more wounds left to give.”
And then I closed the door.
I blocked him.
It was not a gotcha moment.
It was me finally just saying something, albeit quietly, because I felt the words catch in my throat as I wrote them almost as if they were trying to reach him. attempting to name the thing that was with us in the room.
The wounds were still here.
I was still explaining.
He was still dragging me.
This was still unhealthy.
We were doing what we knew.
He knew how to push with thurt.
I knew where to push with feeling.
I pushed, and he pushed back harder.
And it needed to stop.
Because maybe to me, I was coming from love. Maybe I believed if I could explain it clearly enough, he would understand.
But I was making myself smaller and smaller.
And that is what always happens when I explain myself to someone who will never respond to the feeling, only to the pressure the feeling brings.
Because maybe the way I am can feel like pressure.
A person of feeling.
A person of sensitivity.
A person of reactivity.
Because that’s all my life and relationships have given me, it’s what I have learned, and have been unlearning; I have never genuinely felt safe. More recently that did happen. I did start to feel safe within myself and with others and then I lost it, when I lost my sense of self, when I was harmed by the very person I felt safe with. To pick up the pieces again is so fucking hard and this is an incredible understatement.
So I get it. I get how a person like me can become heavy in someone else’s hands.
Especially in the hands of someone who moves away when things get too close.
Maybe all of that has been too much pressure.
It does not make my love wrong.
It does not make my feelings wrong.
But it does mean I have to learn where to place them.
It was pressure.
It was weight.
And it was weight he did not deserve to carry.
His emotions were absolutely valid.
Just like mine are.
His reaction was not.
Just like mine was not.
And we cannot keep allowing this.
Especially now.
He has his own life, and I have no idea what he has going on. Just like he has no idea what is going on in my life. He tells me he is exhausted with work, and I believe him. He has his own shiit to deal with. He has his own things. He also has his own friends. His own people he could count on.
And I have mine, and they are ones I am looking toward right now.
I think I just needed to know some sort of truth.
And maybe, in a way, I got my answer.
However, I was not going to leave quietly.
Not for L.
I know my voice now, and he needed to hear it, too. I think, I owed him that much.
Stating the wound was probably the clearest thing I’ve said to him before closing the door.
And maybe that is the kindest thing I could have done for both of us.
Because the only way we can ever come into each other’s lives again is if we come correctly.
Not through a wound.
Not through the dare.
Not through silence, cruelty, guilt, or the same old cracked-open door.
Correctly.
Cleanly.
With truth.
With care.
With both of us whole enough not to turn each other into somewhere to bleed.
And maybe this is where I stop asking the reader to stay inside this haunted house with me.
At least for now.
This entire journey has been extremely taxing.
I have gotten to a point where I stopped panicking about who is reading this page. Tú sabes bien lo que hiciste. I don’t need to translate the pain for someone who understood the harm.
This body, this haunted house, is mine. I am not leaving it. I live here. This is my history. This is the mind that carried everything when there was nowhere else safe to put it.
But I can let the reader leave.
They can stop reading.
They can continue their lives.
I live in this body.
This is the house I am learning to make a home again.
I can open a window.
I can turn the lights back on.
Which is why I can say: this is what happened here, and now you, my darling readers, can go.
Because I have been working on short stories. Poetry. Artwork. Other rooms. Other worlds. Other ways of speaking. And with everything that has happened, I do not want this to become the only focus of my work.
But know this:
What I write comes from this haunted house.
My life is the reason I write.
When I was a child, I was given diaries and journals, but I never wrote in them.
I was too afraid.
My parents did not respect my privacy, so nothing felt safe enough to keep on paper. I was terrified they would look into whatever I wrote privately.
But the strange thing is, I didn’t even know what I was afraid of them finding.
I just knew there was something in me that needed to stay hidden.
Something unnamed.
Something I could not risk having taken, questioned, mocked, punished, or exposed before I even understood it myself.
So everything stayed in my head.
I wrote stories at school. I wrote for competitions. I told stories with friends. But the real things, the private things, the things that needed a place to live, stayed locked inside me.
Until one day, a friend asked a question.
And things started spilling out.
Like a nosebleed through fingers.
And that blood had been splattering about since my late teen years.
I started writing again when I went back to college in my late twenties. Then I was harmed again in my thirties, and I stopped going to college for a while. My writer’s block was heavy, and I struggled with putting words anywhere.
Later, in my late thirties, I began again, with difficulty, but I tried. I graduated. I made my website.
Then sometime between the end of the year and the beginning of January, everything folded in onto itself.
And now I am here.
I am here with the thing my mind finally remembered.
Because that is what I have learned about myself: when I keep things hidden, when I do not put them into words, they disappear. They go away into the rooms of my mind where I cannot reach them anymore. I forget. And for a long time, forgetting felt safer. Better, even.
But when I write, it stays alive.
It does not vanish.
It exists.
That is why what happened this year mattered so much. It was the first time my mind remembered. I begged myself not to forget, and it stuck. It stuck so hard I was unwell for months. I did not understand what was happening to me, but my mind remembered.
The body remembered.
The house remembered.
And when I finally wrote everything down, I was able to name it.
I was able to call it what it was.
I was able to see the whole thing.
The whole fucking thing.
I saw what happened to me. I saw the patterns. I saw my upbringing, my past, my family’s past, my mental health, my self-worth, and all the things that brought me to this point.
All of it has been scary.
Awful.
Painful.
But also, somehow, beautiful.
Because I grieved.
Because I talked to my friends, my family, my therapists.
Because I sat with my guides and my ancestors.
Because I began to trust myself again.
And that is something I have not been able to do properly in years.
Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I had written in those journals as a child.
If I had made the full attempt.
Would I have remembered then?
Would I be better off now?
More healed?
Would I still be dealing with the same things?
Would I be worse off?
Would I not be here at all?
Would my parents have known because they were nosy fucks?
Does it even matter?
It does not.
Because I know now.
And now I need to keep doing the work.
Not every ghost needs to be dragged into the light every day.
Not every room needs to stay open for viewing.
This is still horror.
It has always been horror.
Not because of monsters in the dark, but because of what happens when the truth has nowhere safe to go. Because of the things that rot in silence. Because of the body that remembers what the mind tried to bury. Because of the girl with the journal she could not use, growing into a woman who finally writes the thing down and realizes the house still has monsters in it.
But horror is not only the haunting.
Sometimes horror is the remembering.
Sometimes horror is the naming.
Sometimes horror is surviving long enough to become the person who opens the door and says:
Thank you for making your presence known.
I appreciate everyone who has been here with me during their stay. And if this experience has resonated with you in any way, know that I am with you, and there are ways to get help (links are below).
Resonance doesn't mean you have to stay here.
You can go now.
I will take it from here.
G O O D B Y E.
support/assistance/help if you ever need it ( they will be posted on the other content heavy blogs/ essays as well):
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988
Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788
https://pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines/
Call or text 1-844-7NATIVE / 1-844-762-8483. StrongHearts offers 24/7 confidential and anonymous support
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/
Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860 in the U.S. / 877-330-6366 in Canada
If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.