The worst part of child abuse is not empathizing with your abuser, it’s holding on tight to him while he carries you to a secluded area for the first time and then wondering, while he engages in a routine act, whether he has planned some particular form of violence against you with, say, that wrench, or whether he is just going to a job later, whether he intends to kill you via blunt-force trauma to the head or whether he’s, like, a mechanic, and then, decades later, not knowing whether the fear you believe you recall was justified, or whether it’s just a tragic gloss that you are putting on
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