Happily Ever After

This really needs to be written out. I don't see any way of getting past it without going through.

I am happy now.

Happy at last. Happy in my life. Comfortable. Free. Safe. Happy.

For the first time in my life, I am loved and wanted without perimeters, without conditions. I am married and happy and done with Victoria and Canada and all the terrible, sour things that held me down and made me miserable and you know what?

It is making me mean.

Far from having the freedom to forgive the people in Victoria who bullied me, the rotten family - don't even get me started on how destructive and horrible it was to grow up with them, the mediocre jobs, the lack of care and concern from nearly every person who was supposed to help. God, in the end, looking back, now that I'm happy - could there be a more bitter and miserable life? No. Not really. I was thwarted at every turn, usually by the people who were supposed to be helping me.

So I find myself asking the universe why someone who tried so hard for so long would have to work, struggle, scrape and suffer for half their life, literally, just to get to what most people would consider to be a state of normal.

I know you're supposed to forgive. Living well is the best revenge, being proven right is supposed to be sweet - all of that stuff but I spent my youth suffering. My life was wasted. My only son, given up for adoption in order to get him to safety. And when I finally found my happiness? When I found my husband and my life? It turned out to be in another country and so of course the "powers that be" are doing their damnedest to make that hard too.

I know I should be grateful and most days I am. After all, I have health and a sound mind, I was smart enough to know, all the time I was there, that something was deeply wrong. I was strong enough to try to fix it. There are many, many people who don't get this far.

How many people find their "happily ever after"? Not many. And how fucking sad is that?

Still. I hear about the successes of Victoria, people coming from there and their lives were easy, their hopes realized young. Friends of mine go and visit the place, (for reasons that completely escape my understanding) and they find it charming, beautiful, wild and lovely and you know what that does to me? It makes me hateful. I hate them for it.

Short of cutting everyone and everything that ever had anything to do with Victoria out of my life, I don't know how to handle this. It's making me a person I don't want to know. But how could a whole community allow a man to abuse his daughter and then blame her for it and carry that blame into her whole life? My father was popular. He was clever. He knew what he did and he told everyone about the "wild stories" I might tell them about him and how he abused me long before I even had any conscious memory of it. He set up a preemptive depth strike that still resonates.

If you were tortured somewhere and if your torturer found a way to get everyone there to believe it was you who was crazy or evil or something just fundementally bad, how would you deal with that?

Once you get out, get very far away and finally find your own, clean happiness on your own terms - I tell you, you just want the dead to stay dead.

It doesn't seem to me to be so much to ask.

I live 3055 miles from Victoria. I live in a whole different country. And yet the place finds ways to intrude into my life on a near daily basis.

I just want to erase it. Where do I have to go to be free of this? Why won't the dead stay dead?