Always at the same time, the green van with yellow letters. A man, tall and dark, hair parted like a curtain. A cigarette in his hand. I can’t recall if he is handsome, or just rugged. He walks through the door of my memory like it’s his house. He smiles with stained teeth, and he never speaks to me. I don’t want to look. I don’t want him looking at me. 

Because when he looks at me, I feel like an object. Or an animal. Or a plant. To him, I am just another noun in the shape of a child. He breezes past me into my parents’ bedroom. The babysitter is already there, waiting for him on the edge of the mattress. I remember her name and the curl of her hair even on nights when I don’t want to. 

I don’t want to name her. I’m afraid I’ll conjure what I’m not ready to remember. 

But often, like now, I remember without preamble. She unzips his fly and takes him in her hands. She threads him through the hole of his boxers and gathers him in her mouth, his whole root and stem. I watch it happen all from a distance, outside of myself. 

But the distance to the bedroom isn’t as far as I remember. Even a trailer home can be a castle to a toddler. The TV is a portal into another realm, and I lock myself in the tower of my father’s armchair. I don’t hear the man’s breathing like an off-beat metronome. In this place there are no noises that can’t be named, that aren’t understood. 

But still I look, even if I don’t understand. I hold my breath while watching her take him. I don’t realize it’s a blowjob until I’m sexually uneducated late in my teens. I don’t give my first until the cusp of twenty-one, throat-deep in my cups. 

The first time I have something that can be categorized as sex, I don’t know that what I’m doing is sex. Just two girls in the guest room of my tio’s empty apartment. A late-night pizza, drunken kisses stolen from a bottle on the mantle, my hands beneath the covers. She gasps, and I gasp, because I never realized I was bold. 

And as a child, when I’m bold enough to ask the babysitter what they were doing, I’m dragged by my arm in front of the fridge. Never ask, she tells me, and then there’s hot sauce down my throat, or maybe soap, or maybe both because I must have asked her more than once. Never ask, she tells me, and washes this punishment down with a smack, and obediently, I swallow. 

“You never asked,” I tell my mother as she’s crying in the pastor’s office. “I thought you knew,” I say, and she cries harder. All at once, I realize that there’s power in this struggle. Although I don’t mean it, I say something like I thought you wanted this and twist the knife deeper if only because I can. 

And years later, it’s a hot knife in my throat when my mother tells me what she really thinks: don’t all gay people have some sort of sexual trauma? I swallow pinpricks and wonder if I am broken, or capital T Traumatized. But it’s not trauma, not really. In the wormhole of my memory, nothing but his eyes ever touch me. 

I can’t even remember the color of his eyes. So I write myself a different story. 

And in this story, I tell myself I’m not the victim.