The Wall
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, laptop open, fingers trembling so much I can barely make them land where they’re supposed to. The Fox News commentary seeps through the wall like a subtle poison. I try not to hear it; my own TV is on, some pointless show murmuring into the room, my usual trick to drown her out. But tonight, the words slice through anyway.
“Sexual-abuse allegations…”
And suddenly I’m not working anymore. I’m listening.
A pastor accused of negligence. A youth leader accused of sexual abuse. Young boys. Promises made, promises broken. A familiar story that never loses its sting. Churches everywhere, no matter the denomination, are filled with secrets like these. If people don’t know it’s because they choose not to. Spotlight exists. The Boston Globe exists. Google exists. But denial is a more powerful scripture than any Bible verse.
On the other side of the wall, my mother responds the way she always does.
“I feel really sorry for him. I hope he has plenty of support.”
Him.
Not the boy.
Never the boy.
Then:
“I don’t know why this kid waited till now!”
He’s 21 now.
There are a thousand reasons he waited:
Because victims are often gaslit.
Because they are afraid.
Because they don’t want to cause trouble.
Because they feel ashamed.
Because they think what happened was their fault.
Because the burden of truth is heavier than any child should ever have to carry.
And then, when they finally speak, there are living-room jurists like my mother, parsing their timelines, questioning their motives, and offering empathy to the adult who failed to protect them.
I hear her breathing out one of those long sighs reserved only for men who hold power they never deserved.
And then:
“Well, maybe the pastor had his reasons. He probably thought he was doing the right thing at the time.”
I say nothing out loud, but inside, something detonates.
Because I understand those reasons, I recognize that logic. I know that specific kind of abandonment disguised as righteousness.
It’s the same explanation she gives when people ask why she stayed with the man who abused me. Why she didn’t do anything when I told her. Why she looked at me, a child, and chose him instead.
“My pastor told me to stay with him,” she always says. “He said it was important we show you we were a couple. That we were in love.”
The wall between us feels thinner than it ever has. A single piece of drywall separates her commentary from my memory. Her present from my past.
She’ll come to bed soon.
And I will say nothing.
I’ll lie still and listen to her breathe through her mouth, steady and oblivious, just like she did the night I told her what he did to me. The same rhythm, the same innocence claimed at my expense.
I’ll try to fall asleep as Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone” loops in my mind, a lullaby for the parts of me that learned too early how to disappear.
How to feel nothing.
How to slip out of the body into the thin air above it until the pain can’t reach me.
I will escape the now.
It’s the only way I know how to rest.
Writing from the Wreckage, Claws Out—The Lioness Archive