The writers of Breaking Bad or The Sopranos could not conjure as evil a man. Seven years a choke hold on my teen years. I went to school every day with my backpack full of books and my mind heavy with fear and secrets. The dread of the day ending, and having to go back home, hung heavy on my petite frame. I stepped off that school bus and into my nightmare every week day. The trailer park, Lincoln Place, the small farm. We moved more times than any family should and it was all because of him. His addictions consumed our lives, emotions, and especially our finances. The countless times I would run to check on my hard earned money, only for it to be gone up into his busted veins. Didn’t matter where I hid it, he would find it. Could not care less if we ate. If he could cut the corneas out of my eye and sell them for a fix he would. But that wasn’t the worst of him. No. The drugs only eased him into the most egregious aspect of his nature. It was the night that scared me the most. It was hearing him crawling around in the dark, finding his way into my bedroom, his heavy breathing, pulling my blankets off and pulling at my pajama bottoms. I would rustle around pretending to wake so that he would leave and make enough noise so that he would quietly crawl away. It was the most terrifying thing. I always wondered about what happened when I didn’t wake up. I only remember feeling like something had been in “there”. There was the drilled holes in the bathroom wall so he could watch me undress. There was hearing him breath outside of my room door when I was changing. But because I was so tough and strong he moved on to my sisters. Seven years of oppression. And mixed in all of that terror and abuse were the guns and drugs and my mom’s broken teeth, and the blood, and my brother laying on the floor taking the blows for all of us. And as suddenly as he came into our lives, just like that, he was gone leaving behind so much pain and destruction. The only good coming from him, my two beautiful sisters. He taught me to distrust. He taught me to manipulate. He taught me how to read liars. He taught me to guard my heart. He taught me to break a man’s heart before he broke mine. He taught me to be ruthless. And I think I am just now, twenty something years later, learning to be tender. Learning to let my guard down. Learning to trust. Learning to allow myself to be vulnerable.