FLOOD

this evening, my friend asked a few simple questions about my childhood and formative years and somewhere around the hour mark of my response i begin to watch myself from the outside and i heard my own voice in my head say THIS IS A LOT but i went on explaining how it was that my father put me in the care of the state for a week when i was 15 and put my sister there too so that i would stay put inside that weird building, and how our mother would not come get us out of there, how she said I'LL NEED TO TALK TO DAVE ABOUT THIS FIRST and i said WE'RE YOUR CHILDREN! WHAT DO YOU NEED TO TALK TO DAVE FOR? and my sister and i stayed there for a week regardless of whose children we were and at the end of the week when a woman i'd never seen before walked into the TV Room to tell us that our dad was there to pick us up, all the other little girls looked at us with tears in their eyes, asking in tiny squeaks of disbelief YOU GOT PARENTAL RECOVERY ALREADY? because some of them had been there for months and some of them had been there for years because some of their parents liked to hold their 4 year old daughters down and shoot heroin into them to see what a body that small would do on a drug that big but my sister and i were there because my our father wanted to show us who was boss. we weren't rescued from a terrible situation but we were sent back to one. throw-aways with no power and no words, no say-so, no voice at all except this one that came squeaking out tonight across a friend's kitchen table, sudden and unstoppable, the closely held truth flooding the meter of air between us as i explained how a 15 year old girl and her 12 year old sister came home from school one day to an angry father and ended up spending a week inside the California Youth Authority for no other reason than being unwanted.