Trauma: The Most Powerful Lecture                                                                          By: Matthew Luz

 

I’m not going to get up here and try to make you feel funny, but this life that I’ve lived is pretty ugly. I’ve had it rough, but listen to me, trust me, you will learn something out of it; I hope so anyways...

Tormented and tortured is how I lived my days, finding ways, finding needles in haystacks is how I grew up; as if growing up this way was an option, as if this life were a choice.

Born of a mother who broke me, choked me, smashed me like a piggy bank as my cold, soft outer shell met the ground for the very first-fiftieth time. Snatching everything she could cash, from what little was left of me.

Grabbing every last penny from the glass that has slashed me, this time, bloodier and more devastating than the time before;

I was a support check, and nothing more.

 

Monetary value and unsensible reason, denying her obvious acts of treason until her face changed from someone who thought, someone who knew that I hadn’t even the slightest clue, to a melancholic shade of blue;

This is why she kept me.

A thief, from both the government and my father’s child support payment. She spent it all on herself, only to nourish completely the essentials and keep hidden the credentials of her addiction which then began to flourish and grow hungrier as the days proceeded.

Deleted, banished, ravished, treated as if I were savage to her land.

Standing at the roots looking up high at the plant that “flowers” and “blossoms” above her; a venus fly trap, a monster.

Praying to a God who some may call cocaine.

 

When I moved on, she just got up and left me, expecting me to come around because I made the mistake of leaving a place which made me feel that I was being judged every second of every day; this to me back when I didn’t understand firmly; I thought it was okay.

Living in a household dismantled, drowning in my own sorrows and her sea of sympathetic, apathetic energies; eventually this led a path to me.

Contradicting my home life, inflicting unnecessary pain onto myself because I didn’t know how to say one word and one word only;

“Help!”

 

Subtracting fear and then adding it back into my life somehow to recalculate my predetermined fate already too late to change; predestined, no morals invested; a decision without altercations.

I learned that I was nothing more to her than a numerical equation, a statistic; nothing beyond simplistic.

Who was the one to juggle her mentality? Normality? A duality between the boy who tries to stay at ease and prays to one day succeed, and the woman whom no one can please, the woman who enjoys nothing more than tease;

As if my astrological horoscope really did prove that my life was a balancing act.

 

Fat ass, fa**et, a f***ing pu**y, a stupid pr**k; I’ve heard them all. I’ve been called them all.

Multiple superficial personalities it seems, struggling to find positive attributes and positive qualities in me; all she cared about was herself.

As if names couldn’t hurt us and words couldn’t cling; they don’t sting like they say in that metaphor about butterflies and bees. Words powerful and strong can never bring us down on all fours and force us to crawl on our limbered, crippling knees; Some go away, some choose to stay.

 

Coming home every night, a rising suspicion as to how many violent fists and bruised knuckles I would arrive home to; not knowing how many of those same words would finally break through my eardrum.

Keeping me on my toes are those who rely on resorting to the irrelevant distorted power of abuse. The only question I could ask was “Why”? Why was I given so little then taunted? Scolded? She belittled the skin on my body for the very last fiftieth time as my hopes, dreams, and aspirations turn brittle.

Lifted up to fall back down again, making an attempt to stand taller than when I first began. As an eight year old child, I was talking my own mother out of suicide, a word that makes a persons’ blood run cold when brought into conversation; almost as if it was something that made her proud.

I viewed myself as more of a boyfriend figure to her than a child; as if I was wrapped around her finger. The things she would say to me, as if I made her feel like she was still young and still wild as I should have been; I was supposed to be the child.

On my thirteenth birthday, I turned thirty...

 

I stood alone on the playground, no one there to help me gain my ground; standing half-dead and half-alive, bound to a world where I begged and prayed for nothing else but to one day be found.

I would watch those kids play, and all I could think about is which way I should lay and face in my coffin when I died later on that day and into that night.

My spirits in handcuffs, my heart hampered in shackle, trapped; lurking somewhere inside of me, a search without rescue. My thoughts growing louder, beginning to hackle, my voice starting to crackle; he turned himself around, and continued to laugh at me as I would start to cry and wonder why I had to turn to something I did not believe in;

“Hope”.

 

He had a name and he had a voice just like everyone else I know, constantly reminding me that I’m not safe, even in my own head. Sounding out remorse with my voice growing hoarse, sounding a shade darker than turquoise; riding on the dark horse, whom we all know as death himself.

Repeating apologies and sympathy, I had belief in something that didn’t believe in me;

My mother.

 

I learned how to be me through the holy word of Jesus, not to preach about how he sees us or believes in us; a lecture Trauma dismissed me from years early.

I lived in grief over having a belief that couldn’t decide right then and there if it could let me slip through its’ teeth.

My secrecy, privacy life; finding intimacy, drugging myself pleasantly with my own synthetic brand of narcotic ecstasy. I didn’t know how to love myself or anyone else but her; I hadn’t ever thought if I did like women for sure or not...

I’m not saying that she turned me gay, but she definitely did clear up most of my confusion.

I fell in love with guy after guy, most of them small, innocent, shy, I wanted to give affection a try. It wasn’t something I was allowed to show, every boy I had ever liked and developed feelings for was yet another lie I had to tell myself to believe as truth; it wasn’t right to allow my mom’s only child to fall in love with a guy, something else I had to hide.

I had to keep it sealed and shut to block out the hatred from not only my mother, but from school kids as well.

I had to shadow my secret wishes and desires, or else I would be told that I would burn in a fire; not one of desire and with a singing choir, but one of hatred and lust, an evil empire.

 

Never did I pursue my truest instincts, because it was a thought and mental process that needed to be extinct; she imprinted in my head that “gay” meant “bad”, gay meant “awful”, being gay was being “a disgrace”; it made me fear not only for my life but for my promised everlasting grace in the face of the Lord our God.

 

I found this boy one day back in high school that was very close to me and I loved him like a brother and loved him more like you love a lover; he was a terrific kid, beautiful, cute, adorable; he always did have his little smile on; he hadn’t a clue about my “boy crush”, because I knew if I told him, I would be crushed.

A secretive lust some would say it was, but he was the one boy, one person, one man out of anyone else I could fully and completely trust.

He found out and it actually made me feel warmer inside, that I didn’t dig girls; still, he stood there partially blind.

He didn’t believe me as I had suspected, but when he found out about my “crush”, my life literally f***ing ended.

 

The one “true” person who showed me love as I had shown them, my heart still to this day aches for him and only him.

He fell after we stop “hanging out”; he took on bad habits from those who hated me in my decision to come out.

The one man I had said told that I wanted to die in his arms, he still lives in this town today; when I see his car, I can’t help but to cry because he was the first, the one, who I thought was the only; my whole-hearted, sweet, handsome gentleman of a guy;

He ended up like the rest, a relentless bully; who enabled me to take "killing myself" to the next level and continue to try... 

 

Trauma are the lessons in which we cannot control the speed of how fast he talks, which way he walks, or whom he chooses to stalk; trauma is the professor of this lecture we call life.

The better notes you take, the better you will do on his tests.

Many commonalities do I share with my mother, but many I wish I did not possess; the power to love, the power to crawl, the lessons trauma has taught me through my mother took me a whole lifetime to comprehend.

For years, I often tried to pretend that I had gotten sick for days, and several class sessions I couldn’t attend; days intended to study reality which had no reality.

Fatality was detention after too many absences.

My mother in a way taught me nothing, but taught me everything all at the same time; teaching me how to fear, how to feel, how to love, and how to think...

The End