From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 5

Content Warning: Candid reflections on childhood sexual abuse, trauma, dissociation, sexuality, and complicated attachment.

I loved him like I loved my father. A man who could know me. A man who saw me, cared for me, and protected me from becoming someone I’m not, too worldly. And for him I became carnal, falling fast down to earth.

I woke up from the deepest sleep. I was never supposed to, and somehow I did. Miracle one. He loved to talk with me and loved my influence. No one knew of me but he and my father. I kept inside, and he drew me out. My child heart said he saved me like my father did. He told me his name meant savior. He had a heavy darkness like my father, that I could bear because I could shine for him bright enough to balance it. Only later do I understand it is not my purpose to balance men’s darkness in that way.

I have dark too, I learned in my time with him. My dark is Lilith. We were kept separate. I could not know her and love my father. She could not come close to me and continue to hold back the truth from my awareness.

He desired I become carnal for him, and so I did, just like I would listen to my father as a small child and his needs. I don’t naturally feel a desire for it and neither a disgust. To me, all things exist and they just exist. Possibility does. Variety does. Sex does, and how that need is met is important, and the rest is personal religion.

I don’t regret, and I do not pity us. I feel deep gratitude for all of my life. The dark and the light. The interplay, the constraint, the restraint, the beauty and the chaos.

I am named Star.

-Star