Like a coal miner, I'm covered in black and filled with the same blackness breathed into me as I toil inside the tunnels of the mountain of memories buried deep inside me since the beginning of my remembering to forget. All of this triggered by that darkest hand hovering over me by that overseerer, that devil, that evil-doer, who buried me under his secret manipulations of my innocence until I disappeared beneath the weight of him and transformed, then transported myself away, into and unto my own freedom found inside a cavern of space and boxes, floating in time. I am a coal miner's daughter who had an uncle who sucked the richness of his brother's blood through a straw of perversion.

Every chip inside that mine, as I tunnel through, happens not by choice but by chance. Every opening, thinning between past and present, known and unknown, is dangerous but necessary. The truth is always worth the danger. Light is always better than darkness. Air is life and without holes in those tunnels there is no light and no air. I cannot allow myself to smother to death any longer. It is often ugly and the taste of what I must see is putrid and vile for I look from the outside in at the child who is I and I am she. I want to protect her as her mother but I am only myself at every age. It is insanity and it echoes through the canyons across these mountains, through the hollows, and deep, inside the tunnels verging on collasp. 

Why do I even dwell here? I do not choose it. I try to bury it over and over again. Mountain after Moutain. Flashes of lightening, storms of crackling fire, burst synapses, now showing inside the theatre in a tunneled vein newly formed by a blast of dynamite brought to you by PNT (Past Neuro Transmittors?). Shall I try to explain the unexplainable? It is the supernatural in a natural or unnatural world-- dreams while awake or is it awake in dreamland? Somehow I as I am right now, an adult, looking on myself, watching myself being abused by the abuser. It is more than we can take--my little girl-self and my mothering, grown- up-self. I am stuck in both worlds and smothered neath mounds of earth upon my grave. 

So here I am writing out this piece puzzle of my life made perhaps at age 5? or was it 3? I only know the picture of where it was, the feelings of fear, the loneliness, and the darkness, with only that porch light and the comparison of how I fit on that couch: One cushion. I fit on one cushion. But lately there's more revealed that I cannot even bear to write. I cry for her, my poor baby self and how I want to calm her and save her. 

I find it hard to tell family at age 65. Some just do not know how to respond. How do you respond? Do you respond? Why should a person respond? Even as new revelations, new "films are being shown inside the threatre of my mind," I alone must view them. The uncle is long dead. There's nothing to be done. I do know that this uncle hurt others. He is dead. He is dead. He is dead. I cannot cry out to my mommy and daddy, "Help! Help!" for they are long dead, too. 

So, I am here, writing and posting on Poetbay, to people in the world, my safe world, revealing a puzzle piece of my life. I do it because I want to give voice to that little girl. She hid beneath beds, back as far as she could go, into the darkest corner, in literal dark closed closets, in the middle of corn rows and somehow she found comfort and peace there.  

Somehow no one ever knew about her endurance of the abuse; she even hid it from herself for as long as she could. Until one day, the walls of that coal mine started crumbling and that dark, smothering hand appeared as a vision over her and she remembered.