When your childhood music teacher shows up on the people you may know tag on Facebook

You suddenly feel so little again

I click on a picture of him

He's juggling and suddenly I'm in my school's gymnasium watching him become a fool for us, watching his hands

Click: there's a picture of him with a guitar and I remember early morning lessons with him

Alone

Click: here he is standing next to the American flag, it's the 4th of July and I suddenly feel nauseous

This is to say that I feel a ghost standing over a crime scene I didn't even know was mine

This is to say that my mind seems to have become a killer in and of itself with its clockwork murder of my memories

This is to say he stole my name

Which is to say most of my memories of him are through someone else’s eyes

When your childhood rapist shows up on the people you may know tag on Facebook

You realize that you are the only fool in this situation

So I click through posts, sifting for memories in a memory

Click: I'm caught underneath his fingernails as he holds someone else's hand in the backyard of a home I’ve never in been too

Click: I see myself trapped in his teeth as he smiles, teeth bared, while eating dinner with his friends

Click: I know that hallway

Click: I've killed the memory of his laugh

Click: He’s standing by a river

He’s hiking with his friends

And suddenly I can’t breathe

He made me this unwilling ocean

He molded into me his anchor and reminds me that the only thing I’ll ever known is drowning

Click: He's holding a crying baby

This is an older picture

He’s younger and smiling and I wonder if that child ever grew up and looked through his facebook nearly a decade after the fact

Click: I remember this

It's Halloween

I'm in kindergarten I think and he was so happy with my red dress, my basket, and my red hood

I didn't know it then, but after that he become a shadow, the Monster

Question: if he is the Monster, why did no one ever check underneath my bed?

I don't remember

This is to say I thought I killed these memories, but the internet just dragged it back

We have 9 mutual friends

Two were my favorite elementary school teachers and the rest just some of my classmates

And paranoia grips me almost as roughly as he did

This is to say Mr. H is people you may know

This is to say my rapist is people you may know

He is people you may know so I am people you may know

This is to say that there might be people who know or people who may not know

The word no is a word that I don't even know if I ever really said

I don't know: no, no, no, no, no

I know I was child

Just a kid that got snatched up by the Monster in broad daylight

But now I've seen the Monster's family

I've seen his mother

I know his first name

And that he had a spiderman lunchbox when he was little

I wanted a spiderman lunch box when I was little

Suddenly I don't know who he is or what to call him

The halloween pic got 83 likes on facebook and all those people are gripping my throat, drowning me alongside him now

This is to say that sometimes it feels like they loaded the gun and cocked for him

This is to say I hope I'm the only one that had to swallow that shot