The Neighbor

I really shouldn’t post this, but I’m going to anyway.

I was just a child. You too, you were just a child living a child’s life in a place barren of meaning, in an environment that reduced us all to mechanical reproductions of the people we once were. It was honestly terrible growing up in the suburbs in the 80s. Not terrible in that urban way in which your life is constantly threatened by the world that shows its teeth all around you. No, this was a sort of danger that is more insidious, this was a sort of viral affliction that grabbed hold of all who came before it and bastardized its host towards its own ends (nasty thing, that).

Being shy, shy in the way that I was, and being a stranger to the entire scene (the latchkey life, the extreme summer weather, the power struggles of adolescence) meant that I was in a position to be easily manipulated and ultimately pushed around.

And so I was, by you.

Boredom is a powerful motivator for poor judgment, and so too is immorality. You were both unbearably bored and irretrievably immoral.

I met you the day we moved there to that suburban purgatory. Born in Ohio, raised quite briefly in New England, and then quickly hopping the Atlantic to Europe, mine was a life of never staying in one place for too long. But moving us here, to this toilet of a state, to this genuinely terrible, terrible city, Houston, insured (at least for me) a life of confusion and often-monumental anxiety.

We drove to Texas, drove here in an orange Volkswagen Rabbit. May parents, my brother, and I, all tucked in to that tiny little car.

And I will never forget the day we arrived in Texas, stepping out of the car and into the Texas summer heat for the very first time. I had never felt anything like it. The air was thick like a soup, and tactile in a way that I had never known previous. And the heat was absolutely cloying, hanging on to you like a wet blanket, seeping into the very fabric of your clothing before you had time to register what was happening.

The day we moved into our suburban house, the one directly across the street from a bayou, you headed the welcome committee to come to my door.

Naturally, being the coward that you are, you assigned the next oldest kid to do all the talking because you were afraid to do it yourself.

I now know in retrospect that you were simply coming over to size me up and to see what threat I might pose to your dominance over the kids on the block.

You were then, and remain today, a fat fuck. Excuse my colloquialism, but you are a fat-ass. No need to get coy about it. You ate too much and your body let it show. That was a side effect of your being completely spoiled by your parents who also were unable to have the fortitude to raise you as something other than a little hillbilly king, set to inherit dad’s hard-earned business, and with almost certainty, run it into the ground.

Aside from the kid you charged with the introductions, I was the only other kid on the block who was basically your age. I was also the kid you decided to hang out with since I lived two doors down from you. This meant that it was our job to tease the kid down the street so that he never forgot who owned our little corner of the world. Fortunately, that kid had the sense to develop actual interests and escape the bottomless pit of your company. Me, being the way I was, spent four years under your asinine tutelage.

Those years left me feeling very unsure of whom I was and if I even had any reason to be in a world like this one at all.

I think about the litany of indignities that I suffered while in your company and of the endless string of selfish actions you undertook in the name of your amusement.

You stood by and watched me get beat up by a kid much older than me just because I rode my bike past him and his friends while they were drunk. You even laughed as he hit me in the face and knocked me off my bike.

You allowed me to introduce myself to the girl that moved in down the street, getting us both in the door, so you wouldn’t have to worry about it. Then, once we were on friendly terms, you made your move when I wasn’t around. Then you invited me over and tried to get me to watch you fucking her, peeking through a crack in the door, just so you could bust me and make me look bad in front of her. Sorry that one didn’t work out for you, buddy.

And best of all, you coaxed me into performing sexual favors for you, and always with the threat of physical violence if I ever told anyone. And I will never live down actually doing them. I would rather have been beaten within an inch of my life than to have done what I did back then. For every day I that have left, I will never live down the stupidity of my actions in light of my fear. I despise myself, even more than you, for ever allowing myself to be in that position. The events of those days have crystallized my anger to the point of shooting forth from me, like bullets, like arrows dipped in poison, shot in every direction. No one will ever take advantage of me that way again, and if they do, I will make them regret it.

So now, here I am and I’m telling everyone. The entire world will now know what you did. Anyone who reads this will know you and know you for what you really are. So, I’ve told now, the cat is out of the bag, faggot, so come and get me whenever you’re ready, because I’ll be waiting on baited breath.

Yes, you are a faggot, the one thing you feared the most. You are a closet fag. You dream of the company of men but will never have the strength to admit it to yourself. You will never be able to out yourself because you foster this dream of masculine fantasy, with yourself at the helm, the women of the world swinging from your pathetic cock like little monkeys. Your fevered ego could never handle the blow from exposing yourself for what you really are.

Of course, in truth, what you really are, is trash. You are a piece of human shit and you have no place walking the same streets as me. Your cowardice and your animalistic urge to ignore your pea-sized brain and hone directly in to the reptilian desire to control will guide you forever and leave you a withered hull of a man as you age and shrink into obsolescent decay. Fuck you. You are less than human.

Finally I grew to the point where I was not afraid of you anymore. No more would I allow you to tell me anything, no more could you con me into anything so defiling and so degrading ever again, and from that moment on, we never hung out again, not once.

When you lay your head down at night, when it’s time to go to sleep and to refresh yourself to return to the world you own once again, do you ever give pause? At night, as you lay next to whoever it is that sucks your cock now, does it ever dawn on you that at least one man out there could kill you with a reason so good it burns him sometimes?

It's dawned on me.

But even better that that, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why it is that I am so crippled when it comes to functioning on a normal level. You know, the way others seem so comfortable doing. Getting by, for me, is quite honestly a sort of ordeal, and it is because of people like you that I have become the way I am today.

This is the only time any of you will hear me say this, but for the record, I was defined in part by my experiences all those years back. I was damaged in a way that seems to have handicapped me from being able to live a life that thrives healthily and doesn’t hinge so heavily on the effects of the past.

I am living proof that abuse of any kind while growing up (or at all for that matter) is something that takes an entire lifetime to deal with and only goes away when we go away.

I shouldn’t have posted this, but I did it anyway.

It’s good to have that out there and to finally let it go, at least in a sense.

I am moving on.

You should too.