By 15, I ran away. Just vanished into the night like the last of my nerve endings had finally frayed out. The abuse had carved too deep. Years later, professionals would call it what it was—torture—but back then, it was just my normal.
At 22, after years of swallowing that particular brand of poison, I finally picked up the phone and called the cops on my dad. He’d beaten my sister, and something inside me snapped.. He got arrested. Then, in a move straight out of the narcissist’s playbook, he packed up that same sister, plus the rest of the kids, and disappeared to California.
By 33, somehow, all the bruises and broken bones and emotional landmines didn’t feel like enough reason to keep the door shut. I wanted reconciliation—mostly for him and my older sister, the one he’d disowned like she was just some chapter he didn’t like in his own biography.
So me and my trusty sidekick Stockholm syndrome boarded a plane to California to reconnect with a man who hadn’t earned a single inch of that grace.
We had martinis—my first ever—me, my dad, and my uncle. Felt like a weird rite of passage into some twisted club. Then they took me to Mexico, where my dad bought me a prostitute like it was some bonding experience. Father-son moment, I guess?
The next morning was a montage of regret—hangover, food poisoning, shame layered like a cheap breakfast buffet—but I still kept talking to him. He promised he’d talk to my sister again. And I held onto that. It was enough.
I flew back to Connecticut and kept the conversations going for a week, maybe a little longer.
Then came the text messages—one from my dad, one from my uncle. Practically synchronized. My dad had been arrested, they said. Needed $5,000 for bail. But something in the details didn’t add up. So I started asking questions, started digging.
Turns out they were at the casino, gambling, and my dad—once again—was trying to con me. His own kid.
I remember getting in the car and just driving. No destination. Just sobbing like the tears might somehow pay my tolls.
Spoiler: they didn’t.
But that was the moment. That was when I finally stepped into a psychologist’s office in Glastonbury. Sat down and tried to untangle all the barbed wire in my head.
Trauma’s weird, man. It wasn’t the fists, the gropes, or the gaslighting that finally took me down. It wasn’t even the filthy underwear he forced me to hold in my mouth as a kid, from accidents that came from his abuse. It was the betrayal. The lie. The smile wrapped around a dagger. Deceit. Da Seat.
See, I can take a punch right to my head—I took plenty in my lifetime.
But deception? That cuts different.
Deception wrecks me in ways that no bruise or broken bone could ever touch. Maybe because I’ve spent my whole life trying to separate truth from fiction, while two people who were supposed to love us, kept calling the pain “love.”
In the end, it was da seat that set me free. That man’s gone to me now. Dead in the way someone’s memory starts to rot before their body ever does. And for that, yeah, I’m grateful.
