First: An absence. An emptiness. A brief abandonment. He left us, but only for a week or so. I cried in my mother's bed.

And I hated myself for it for months.

Second: The warmth of skin to skin contact when I rubbed my head against a friend's neck I now hate. A cat-like comfort I will never get back.

Third: That **** song that sometimes comes on shuffle that I don't remember until it's chorus punches me in the gut. The memory of your long hair forming a tent around me as you kissed my lips. Now my hair is long, and you are long long gone. It plays on.

Fourth: All the times I made my mother cry.

I was a cruel child; always picking and prodding at everyone's difference. And failing to hide my own. Pain to cover pain. More tears shed than I can count.

Fifth: Various childhood oddities. Not even the gay ones. The way I talked weird and ****** wrong and jealously attached myself to people who were indifferent. But I was indifferent too.

Or maybe I became that way.

What fools we are-- so desperate in our need to belong. Clawing at any scrap of affection. But then, hurt again and again and again. Until the very thing that we most crave becomes the thing that we despise. And hide. And bury in therapy and poetry and song.

Maybe I've tried to forget. But they've been with me all along.