Unfinished Business: Untitled 6

From time to time I’ll send my mom/family a blog post of mine to read. The other day I sent her Why so Serious and said “remember this?” She replied, two hours later, with “yes haha sorry I didn’t get back to you right away, I was looking at more of your blog”. Later that night on the phone she asked me about Me Too (which apparently both of us had somewhat suppressed), and questioned why I would be so cautious and concerned about my family reading my blog posts. My reply was something along the lines of “I only send you guys one here and there kinda sorta expecting you to read those and that’s it.” She pressed me with “why?” And I told her “so that I can avoid conversations like this where I have to explain questionable and embarrassing posts of mine, like Me Too lol.” This is a conversation that we’ve had a couple of times before, but I guess I’ve never worded it that way before because it seemed like after I said that she immediately understood, and agreed.

That conversation happened Thursday. Saturday, I was going through my blog to see which post was up next for Flashback Friday and wouldn’t you know it, my Me Too follow-up was the next scheduled post. This. This post, that you’re reading right now… Er… About to read*. What an incredibly unsettling coincidence!? I’m not sure what kind of warning to put here, but there most definitely should be some sort of warning for this post. I’m not going to keep wasting space/time with the blah blah blah, read at your own risk.

~

I’m not sure how good or bad it really is that there’s parts of this story that are somehow blocked from my memory. But I can tell you that I’m not gonna strain myself with trying to piece together the broken fragments. I’ll just give you what I can immediately recall and leave it at that.

I only remember sleeping over J’s house twice, but I know that it happened a lot more than that. The two times that come to mind are (luckily) the only two instances that I can remember anything like this happening. The first, was with his older sister, or aunt, I don’t know… She was a female that was related to him, that shared a bedroom with him whenever she was there. I remember it being weird when I asked him if I could stay in the bed with him. There were two beds in the room. She wasn’t home, so the other bed was empty, but I remember being overwhelmed with fear when I walked in and saw her bed. I guess we must have talked about it earlier that day, because I remember knowing that she would be there later that night. It’s odd, I can’t remember anything before this, but I remember the “it’s about to happen again” feeling that I had as I heard her keys in the door. Even now, after not even thinking about it for the last 20 something years it gives me the chills. I remember pretending to be asleep. Hoping that she wouldn’t notice that I was there, squeezed between J and the wall. And continuing to pretend as she poked me and whispered my name. Finally I gave in and spoke, she immediately asked “why are you over there”, I didn’t have an answer. She told me to come to bed with her, not forcefully, I knew what was about to happen, but I did it anyway. I crawled into her bed, she started touching me, asking me to touch her. I’m not going to give a ton of detail here, we didn’t have sex… At least, not that I can recall. Honestly, even if I wanted to go into detail it would be really hard. I just remember bits And pieces. It’s like in a movie, where they flash images of body parts during sex scenes while they’re trying to toe the line between tasteful and full blown porn. And thinking about it now, I’m surprised that I can even remember this much. I couldn’t have been more than 6 at the time. I don’t know how old she was, but I know that she was older, mid to late teens maybe, I’m leaning more towards the latter. I’m not sure how this is going to come across, maybe you’ll be able to understand if you’ve been in a similar position, but as frightening as this was I still remember slightly wanting it to happen. I mean, at that age I didn’t exactly know what I wanted. I just know that I was curious. I guess I could describe it as one of those things that you’re curious about but never curios or adventurous (Horrible. Horrible choice of words… But I’m not sure what to replace it with, so it stays… Stick with me) enough to actually try? I don’t remember the conversation with my mom afterwards. I just remember her storming out of the house to confront J’s mom, and me feeling every emotion a person could possibly feel all at once. They lived less than a block away from us, on the corner. I can almost picture watching my mom walking back from their house as neighbors started to make their way into the street. By now I was on the sidewalk. I guess there was a good bit of commotion. How have I gone so long without thinking about this?

I guess the fact that I was so young coupled with my complete ingorance when it comes to anything sex or sexuality related could have a thing or two to do with it. Which, kinda sorta in a very weird roundabout way, brings us to the other occasion that I remember.

I’m not sure if it was before or after the first incident that I told you about and to be honest, as I try to put the pieces together in my head, neither makes sense. Either one of these should have been enough of a warning for me to stay away from that house and avoid having another incident. But, that’s adult Alphonso, thinking rationally, not 5ish year old Alphonso who… Well, I’m not really sure what I was thinking or feeling at the time… Let’s move on.

J and I were at his house, in that other bed (the one that his sister or aunt or whatever would call me to), talking about sex. I had recently had my first kiss (a HILARIOUS story, which I will tell at a later date), and he had just walked in on his mom and some man. The conversation lead to us questioning how and why adults do what adults do in the bedroom and… I apologize if for some reason you’re expecting a lot of detail here. But, also, I don’t apologize. As I said before, a lot of this is conveniently blocked from my memory, and the parts that aren’t are what I would consider too embarrassing for me to publicly admit but probably not as extreme as what you are currently thinking.

So, J and I had a weird moment either before or after his older female family member and I also had a weird moment, both of which I’m like 90% sure I’ve shed too much light on. Don’t expect an edited and polished version of this post to come out later. If anything, I might add a picture of myself from around that time. Maybe not. That might be a little too weird. I don’t know. Either way, I’m not about to go back and reread/relive this.

~

Until next time, trust me, I cringed more while writing this than you did reading it.

P.S. I have no idea where this picture is or why the only copy of it that I have is in the form of a gif, but yeah… Here it is. That’s my First Grade class photo. Seeing as how J and I only lived in the same neighborhood while we were in kindergarten, I’d say that everything in this post occurred about a year, maybe two, before this picture was taken. With that said, not to make this weird or anything, but… If at any point in time while reading this post you found yourself hoping for more and/or disappointed in the lack of detail, please do yourself and those around you a favor and seek help. Seriously.