(deep breath)

...ok...here we go again.

crap, now I feel like I'm gonna paraphrase everything I just wrote and it will lose it's sincerity and it's within the sincerity and shame I feel when I tell this story that I am empowered to forgive myself for having wronged another. This is the first time I've ever told this story. You see I've always believed no matter how good a person you strive to be or become - you should never forget your wrongs, sear your mental flesh with the pain inflicted on another. I've had this misguided belief that this keeps you from ever committing the wrong again. This behavior is limited and is restraining me from becoming a better person.

I realize now though - you can't slay the dragons (i borrow from mr 8LDJ here) if you see yourself as the dragon.

So, in an effort to let go of this I push my internal dragon down on the hardened ground - fire licking and spewing from it's mouth - kicking and screaming, and I slay it with my written word.

One hopes.

The cursor calls out to me - blinking, flashing, warning - to put this down on this vacant, pulsing, white screen is to jeopardize what others may think or feel about me. I make permanent and public a memory I've never shared with a loved one or friend. I do this though to show I'm honest when I say - this blog is about my personal growth - NOT - winning any popularity contests (nod and thanks to Jer here). You may not like the "me" in this story, but then neither do I.

So this is a story from history. My personal history.

A "me" I hardly know now - but maybe see an occassional glimpse of in a rash moment, or heated exchange. For all intensive purposes though - who I was then, maybe just for a few minutes, or a few collective days - I could, I would, never be again.

In my early 20's I was possessed by a streak of anger and self-hatred that was as wide as the blacktop of the autobahn and as dangerous as crossing it on foot. I was burning bright with a blazing red hot anger - fueled by booze and drugs. I had no sense of direction except a spiralling pattern downwards. I honestly never thought I would be alive in my 30's to be writing this - questioning wrong moves and worse mistakes.

I want to evoke the whole evening from that night - a sultry, summer night or a crisp autumn evening - but I honestly couldn't tell you. I've shut it away for so long, not wanting to remember - that I have successfully forgotten all but what haunts me about that night.

Have you ever wronged someone ? Truly - wronged ?

The wrongs that others have visited upon us live in us - until one day we visit those wrongs on another.

I often savor these words, pulling my tongue, scraping my teeth, across them - unable to swallow them, uneasy with their taste. I am not saying this is a mandate, or others aren't strong enough to not subcumb to this theory. But violence is known to beget violence, hate to be beget hate and so on. The biggest error within these words is that it transfers it's life on to others as we wrong them. It does transfer, but it never leaves you - it just grows stronger trying to take it's hold with each wrong you do.

I ran into "D" at Nutowne on a Sunday night. Sunday's were beer bust and by 9pm there were only two conclusions to make about the bars inhabitants - they were inebriated or out to get laid.

I was on that particular night - both.

"D" and I hadn't spoken in years.

He had been the first boy to break my heart. An early and first example of why they call them crushes. It had been a summer romance after graduating high school, when I was 17. He was my first "lover". Though I had already been dating and sleeping with boys since I was 12, this was the first that someone made me feel lost in them - that I wanted to live and breathe alongside their every breath. He was the first boy I fucked and once that started I couldn't get enough. I fucked him every chance we would get. Less knowledgable - more naive. We swallowed, we barebacked - all this in the bedroom next to my sleeping parents. After a few months he got a fake ID and was getting into bars. I probably seemed less exciting than the opportunity to feel grown up. He gave me Chlamydia and then when confronted broke up with me and told me he was going straight. I crashed emotionally - every car on that autobahn left treads across my ripped-open chest.

So here we were - was it 4 years later, 6 years - I've shut that out.

He was hammered and he wanted me. I had filled out, tight, beautiful muscles, evenly tanned. I wore my hair in a hassle free buzz cut. I had matured physically from the wirey 17 year old I had been. I was strong and I had lost any resemblance to the sweet, naive kid I had been. There was an edge to me now - an animal agressiveness. I supposed this all just made him more attracted - he had always been more attracted to the 'bad boy' cliche. He was a career bus-boy, a perpetually-stoned pretty boy, trapped in a high school hey day that had left him behind. He had failed to move on in any way from who he was 4 years prior. The eyes though were still so blue, the lethal combination of surfer blond and high school jock - but the years were passing and "care-free" had given way to "aimless".

I wanted him too.
I wanted to fuck him.
I wanted to hurt him.

We went back to his place - the whole way he was gushing compliments and praise. How together I looked, how hot I had become, how much he had regreted not staying with me - what shit, what fucking - absolute-I'm gonna fuck the shit out of you then spit in your face-bullshit. The anger was welling up in my chest - screaming like a tribal warrior - "let me out" - LET ME OUT!

We were all over each other the second we entered his small one roomed attic apartment. When he shoved his tongue in my mouth - I bit down - drawing blood. He let out a scream and pushed me off:

"Fuck - what did you go and do that for asshole??", he said.

I calmed him down - apologized - said the moment had gotten away from me. I kissed his forehead, his neck, lifting his shirt over his head. I pushed down his jeans and feverishly began to rim his ass. He was past the tongue-biting, moaning, pushing my face into his ass. I shoved him down - hard. He toppled over.

"Take it easy - your being rough.", he said.

Something inside me had clicked - someone had unlocked a door - the chants of "Let Me Out" had been silenced. I was drunk. I was full of hate. I was going to hurt him.

There are times in your life that you are pushed out of your own body - by fear, by anger, by pain. This was one of them. I watched from above - disengaged from my body - unable to find my way back inside.

I grabbed his arms and pinned him down. He started fussing, telling me to stop - I started spewing hateful things. What a fucking pathetic loser he was - that he would die a no one, die alone, what a pathetic whore he was, he wasn't good enough to deserve me. I became rougher - punching him, wrestling him and then fucking him. Pounding my dick into him - never releasing his arms - pinning the weight of my body against him. He started to cry. I was hurting him - He was hurt. Sometime during it - it blurred from consensual - to nonconsensual - and back again. I hadn't even considered a condom - I hadn't seen him as worth it. I blew my load inside his ass. I pulled out, released him. He screamed a wave of obscenities at me. I told him I had waited years to hurt him. I was all the way home before I felt like I was back inside my body again.

This is the worst thing I have ever done to another person. What had been done to me at 16 - I had now done to another man. Did I rape him - I can't say. He gave me his number afterwards - would you give your number to a guy who just knocked you around and forcibly fucked you ? It took years for me to see beyond that moment and see it not for vengeance - but something so indescribably wrong - that I shut it away.

I never called him. I never apologized for what I did or how far I had gone. He approached me a couple of weeks later and showed me the bruises, called me an asshole and walked off. He died a few years later. AIDS. I can't apologize to him now. Let him know the shame I've felt, the disgust I feel for treating him that way.

So a decade has past and it haunts me that even once I could have been that person, so angry, so cruel to have acted this way to another person - no matter how much I felt they had wronged me.

I am not that person - not now.

I never want to be that person again - not ever.

I try everyday - to not ever be again.

We say we want people to know us - to understand us, but then we only tell them the good things about ourselves.

We hide from people the things we've done wrong, the things we have to live with in the dark of night.