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The Monsters

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 It is still fairly early morning on a day I hate, a day I never let my sons "celebrate" when they were little.

I had to block it out.

Quiet it.

October 31-November 1 are reminders of the reality of monsters, that they exist in presentable packages, buoyed by folks-who-know-but-refuse-to-act as they prey upon the innocent, the unprotected, the naive, the oppressed, the voiceless, the ones kicked-out.

I know.

Because that is how a monster found me.

Rather, how someone I know sent a monster my way.

And the world as I was trying to figure it out as a thrown-away-teenager, turned completely upside down.

That one morning, a crisp morning just like this one, I could barely breathe, a bit like now, asthma is an unrelenting thing at times, I was in the barely-able-to-walk stage of one who had literally just been released from a ten-day stint in the hospital.

Asthma makes you almost comatose with the way every heartbeat, every muscle, every blink is focused on trying to force air through squeezed lungs. It is an exhausting, incurable, debilitating disease.

So it leaves you vulnerable.

At the worse, I couldn't even bathe myself, couldn't stand up long enough in the shower or have the energy to soap up the towel, the nurses had to do it for me and then wrap me up in the dry towel, give me a breathing treatment so I could muster the energy to lift my arms for dressing.

That is how crippling it is.

And frightening.

Monsters strike in broad daylight.

Even on Sunday mornings.

They lurk and find just the moment when their prey is their weakest, and destroy what is most precious to them.

What angers me all these years later, is that the people who unleashed the monsters, the ones who quietly support them in hopes that their depravity won't find them, are the very ones who allow the monsters to exist.

And I have no grace for them.

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