letter to mom and dad, letter from Cloud

Mom, Dad - I hope sincerely and from the bottom of my heart that you are well & in good health.

I miss you both terribly, I spend a lot of time reminiscing about going to petco & yard sales, or sewing clothes for my toys in the sewing school. I am writing to explain myself, the reasons I keep changing my phone number, keep moving from place to place etc. I’ve done my best to withhold and move on, but it seems I simply must express much to you before my time ends. I’ve always felt I’m not long for this world after all and for reasons beyond my understanding, I feel Im running out of that time.

I don’t by any means think of you as bad people, I believe you were always doing your bests and I am not oblivious to your sacrifices & accomplishments. With that being acknowledged, I must admit that for several reasons, I find myself unable to maintain a relationship with you. 

 I . Again, I do believe you were doing the best with what you knew, being young, being first time parents, how your own parents raised you, the climate and culture were from, all of it. There are many factors I consider and acknowledge on your behalf, but with that being said and acknowledged - for reasons you’re aware of and not, for reasons you were responsible for or innocent of, and for factors outside of your control, my childhood was brutal and I can not seem to recover from it. I believe deeply in forgiveness, as I myself am so often in desperate need of it. I believe strongly also in forward momentum, moving ahead from the past, I despise stagnancy most, yet try as I may, no matter how many years of therapy I go to, no matter what medications I’m on, no matter what sort of substances I use, I can’t seem to quell the pain. Every day is a battle, and to be conscious is to be exasperated. The frequency and severity with which you punished, beat and berated me still to this day has devastating effects on my being.  When I’ve tried speaking with you in the past of these things, you would often say you didn’t remember the instances in which I was referring to. This was always particularly frustrating. You may not remember but unfortunately I do, when I am sober, and lucid I seem to remember everything perfectly. They call it a photographic memory yknow, I was so proud of it growing up, but I lost it quickly as I grew up and my mind grew addled from traumatic events, drugs, etc. I’ve been sober for a while now, so my memory is returning to me, meaning  I could spend the next few years writing about specific instances with perfect detail. Like the time when you dad, were hitting my palms with my belt. I pulled one hand away, and offered the other. You demanded I return the palm I pulled away and continued hitting it. It wasn’t about discipline or punishment in that instance, it was about inflicting as much pain as possible. Mom, I doubt you remember all the times you would beat me, dig your nails into my flesh, tell me that you’d pour boiling water or pepper into my eyelids. “By the time I’m done with you, you wont believe I’m your mother”. These are relatively light instances of your wrath if I’m being honest. 

You used to tell this story often, that you walked in on me doing something I shouldn’t have been as a baby, and when I saw you, I grabbed something and started hitting myself as I knew that would be my punishment. It was always told as a funny story but when I told it to someone else for the first time, the looked at me in horror. It wasn’t until then that I thought “why would I as a baby, who couldn’t have been more than a year or two old, already know that I would be beaten as punishment. What could I have possibly done as a baby, to deserve that.” Yes, I was always smart, I was always aware and conscious, I was always mischievous, but I didn’t deserve that. You have a picture of me as a toddler playing with some fridge magnets. I remember looking up at them and moving them around. I remember that far back, I remember everything, I remember exactly how each and every single time you hurt me felt, and it still hurts today. 

Once when I tried to bring this all up to you, you pretended to apologize, and then a few days later I heard you, dad on the phone with mom telling her to be careful with her approach to a topic because as you said “these kids are quick to call anything abuse.” You had only pretended to be remorseful, but I don’t believe you truly understood or even cared to, and from the moment I heard you say that on the phone, my anger and resentment seemed to become fixed permanently in my heart. 

Despite all this and more, I always loved you and sought your approval, it wasn’t long ago that I was sending pictures of fancy plates I was making at my restaurant big 5 star restaurant because I wanted you to see what I was doing and extend some kindness towards me. I have always so desperately wanted to be friends with you that I would have been more than happy to accept your behaviors and punishments if I felt truly in my heart that you even liked me. I understand why you or anyone else wouldn’t, I was a troublesome son to have, I caused a lot of stress and pain,I know, but if I knew you liked me I would have done anything to make you happy. 

It’s silly to be at my grown age and have sibling envy, but the difference in how you acted with Jessie broke my heart. I’m truly so glad and happy she has things a bit better, despite knowing how rough its been for her and how hurt she feels, you have been better towards her and I applaud you for that, but also, I resent you all. I’ve always been the black sheep and that would be fine with me if I had a place to go home to at least, but even now, sitting here writing this, I really and truly believe, just as a person, that you don’t like me. I don’t know if you resented me for how your lives changed and how your youth was robbed, I know I got in trouble a lot as a kid, but I don’t know if anything I did was so bad as to deserve the contempt and scorn with which you have shown me.  Dad you would so frequently beg and plead with my little sister to just spend time with you, meanwhile you wouldn’t say a single word to me outside of a flat greeting every day, for years. I asked you about this once, and you said after the episode where you called the police on me for dropping out of school, you figured it’d be best if you just left me alone. But dad, you’ve been leaving me my whole life, be it physically or emotionally, and I appreciate your reasons, I truly do, but you’re my father, and we truly don’t know anything non superficial about each other. You have always just left me behind. It’s incredibly silly but small things like when you’d get subway for everyone and I’d have to ask to have some of everyone else’s, how you’d frequently go shopping for Jessie, the phones, the watches, I always had to beg to get the same treatment everyone else was getting. I wasn’t allowed to go to any sleep overs, I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies, I wasn’t allowed to join any school clubs, anything. I STILL don’t know how to be friends or interact with people because I wasn’t allowed to socialize once we came to America! I have to study how people act, and PRETEND I’m the same as them because basically, you locked me away whether it be at home, the library every day, or church. You locked me away and you punished me for acting out because of it. The second time I was being sent into a psych ward, I told you that I was molested severely. You both brushed it off and made excuses for him. Mom, you told me “oh when I was a girl we used to play house in that way” you were hurt in the same way but still you brushed it aside and never spoke of it again. I learned then that there was no point coming to you with things because you’d just brush it off or tell me to pray about it. I heard someone get murdered in the Stratton hills apartment. I heard the fight and I heard the screams, the police came and knocked at our door for what felt like 10 minutes straight but I sit behind the door and covered my mouth so my breathing couldn’t be heard because I didn’t want to get you guys caught up in any way with the law, the hallway and carpets smelled like a mixture of blood and the sickly sweet cleaner they used for WEEKS but I kept my mouth shut because I knew I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. 

My Perspectives and paradigms are obviously biased I know, but they do inform my reality.  The facts of my reality are that my parents were vicious with me, simply didn’t like me very much, and just did not actually care.

II. On top of, and partly because of all that, my mind is splintered, troubled, damaged, ill. I feel so crazy and out of touch with reality some days.  Though I accept all responsibility for it, I am simply just often not in control of the things I do, say, think, and of course feel. Every time I brought this up to you both, dad you would simply deny it. Mom, you would just tell me to pray. I had no one to talk to honestly about any of it because of the isolation, the gaslighting, the punishments, and the horror stories about CPS taking me away. It simply is true though that the life I’ve had thus far simply drove me crazy a long time ago for lack of a better term. I truly believe that the last good and noble thing I can do for the world is to continue to isolate myself and not inflict myself on people because I am so far gone that I cannot even truly consider myself a human being. Most of the time, I have to pretend to care, I have to pretend to have feelings, I have notebooks on how people talk and act and move their eyebrows and rest their hands, because it has to be a system, math. Just relating or being like other people is math. The doctors and therapists say that at some point growing up, the trauma became too much to handle so those parts of my mind shut themselves off, and splintered. The worst part of it is that I’m bad at the act! The amount of times I do or say things that are so wildly strange and crazy, you would not believe. I was in school cutting parts off of dead birds because I thought it would be cool jewelry, I walked around parading and showing off how cool I thought it was, meanwhile it’s only in hindsight that I realize they were all looking at me in horror. I’ve always been strange, I’ve always been the odd one out, I’ve always never counted as a real person because you didn’t treat me as one, and neither did most people. I was brutalized, isolated, and molested to the point of becoming less than human. I hear and converse with voices, I become other people, I go into fits of divine religious mania stemming from the cult we called a church. I mean, a pastor told me once that I could commandeer life and death over animals, so I spent my time in the playground touching lizards, watching them freeze and seemingly come back to life at my behest. I mean what sort of crazy shit is that? I was too young to know any better, I was too young to have ever had a chance, and instead of helping me, you punished me. So now, for YOUR benefit, for the benefit of my sister, and the family, I can’t be around any of the people who should be closest to me because who knows what I may do or say to cause you all even more strife.  When I was in the hospital in Germany, they locked me in an isolated quarantine, when covid started up and they made all of us quarantine at home, many people had a difficult time, but I was fine, elated even, I thoroughly enjoyed the pandemic because being locked away where I couldn’t hurt anyone was exactly how I’ve lived this entire time. I am completely alone but for the entities my mind creates to keep me company.

III. 

I wish at least that I could count on my mom and dad, I wish I could come home, but even if none of everything so far was a factor, there’s still the reality that you couldn’t accept me as I am. The way I choose to identify & present myself, the people I date or sleep with, the things I do to/with my body, the transition Im undergoing, I know these are all foreign, blasphemous, and disgraceful to you. You’ve always known the way I am and punished me for it. I doubt you remember the time you accosted me so severely because I trimmed my eyebrows that I needed to walk around the neighborhood crying because I was afraid to cry at home, then oddly chose to reveal afterwards that you’d hidden the acceptance letter I’d been sick and anxious over not receiving that entire summer, but again I do. Just one of many instances. In middle school when I made a lesbian pride shirt even jokingly, do you remember the way you punished me for that too? 

I truly do wish I could be different, my life is much more difficult because of the way I am. The fact of the matter though is that I was born and would always have been this way no matter what. It’s not because of America or any media I consumed. Do you remember talking about how cousin Paul would cross dress and go to market? Hell my molester was male also. Runs in the family I suppose! I find that very funny. 

I don’t blame you however, I understand how much your culture and religion mean to you. I tried to change your minds a lot growing up but eventually I realized, “if I convinced mom and dad the things they believe are wrong, then they would have to grapple with the fact, and consider whether they’d wasted all these years of their lives living in a way they wouldn’t have chosen if thy knew better.” 

I can also appreciate the benefits of your faith and culture, so actually, I don’t have much anger towards you in this regard. I only wish that I could be myself and be loved unconditionally be the only two people in the world perhaps required to show me that love, but that was never your way, and I accept you for who you are. 

I want to come home, I want to call you both every day, I want to talk about jazz and fashion with you dad, I want to tell you all the amazing science facts I learn, all the things I’ve seen. I just want to talk to you and be your friend, but it’s hard to do any of that when I know you would hate me if you knew who I really was. 

There’s a lot more I wish I could say to you, but as always, Im running out of time. I just want you to understand why I disappeared, and why you shouldn’t pay any more sunrise visits showing up at my door without warning. 

I love you, I appreciate you, and may your god be my witness I will honor you so long as I live, but the way I see things, I am no longer your son, in more ways than one. And am no longer part of your family, if I ever even was. 

Goodbye, please keep in good health.

Truly, and sincerely, and with all my love I have forgiven you, and will continue to do so.

I love and appreciate you more than words can articulate. 

I truly do believe I don’t have much time left but despite everything, I am grateful for the life you gave me. 

Thank you Sally, Thank you Leeford. 

P.s. for what it’s worth, I always thought you were both very cool people, I wish I inherited your charisma ,Lee.  I wish I inherited your temperance,Sally.

- post script

Hi Sinclair, I’m writing to tell you to remember - please be calm, and remain still if you can. I get it, we all get it yknow? We get it, and i love you.

i love you for everyone else.