by Gabe Salgado
I was born in the large looming shadow of violence, and while I have tried before to justify it’s existence through highfalutin and pompous ideas of protecting myself or others, I know now that no matter what kind words cross its lips its hold on me has never and will never be about anything more than its pure action.
As a victim of violence, I started life knowing it’s wrong for me to do it to others, but as I grew, I tried desperately to protect myself from both of my parents’ abuse. Thus, as a very young child, I was introduced to the want to commit violence.
The beginning thoughts of wanting to commit violent acts are comparable to that of Brutus’s beginning thoughts of assassination. It enters the mind as something frivolous at first, but measure by measure the plans become real, more visceral and vivid until they come to fruition just as imagined.
It started small for me when I was in elementary and middle school with fights against schoolmates who I’d imagined had wronged me or my friends at the time. But eventually into High School I started to directly defend myself from my parents. It escalated to the point of hitting my father several times on the head with a frying pan before backing out of our kitchen door holding it at him. I walked without shoes a mile down the road to my stepmother’s work to tell her my dad had been hitting me again. I remember the rage I felt when she called me stupid for coming to her work, the betrayal I felt as people looked away from me while she scolded me and told me to get my ass home.
Not long after that the abuse started again as it always would even after all the heartfelt promises and empty platitudes, so I started to think of a more severe solution. I planned to wait until my dad went to sleep in order to suffocate him with his pillow. I knew that once he got through the last beer in that day’s 24 pack of Milwaukee’s Best Ice, he’d be done playing our landlord’s PS4 for the night and he’d be out cold. I crept upstairs as quietly as I could muster, and slowly I walked up to the head of his bed. I loomed over him watching him snore like an innocent child, like someone who didn’t have a care in the world. When I had my father’s life in my hands I let it go, but I have no illusions of that being a choice made out of mercy. It was a practical decision made in the moment, by someone who wasn’t ready to face the world with blood on their hands.
But violence doesn’t reward those who scorn it. Though I would endure into adulthood, I can’t count the times I wished my father was dead after that night. People speak highly of forgiveness, for working within polite society. I’ve listened to these people before, I’ve lived their truth through to its conclusion, yet still violence followed me every step through the foster care system. I did everything I was told a victim of violence should do and yet I perpetrated it every time I found myself in a justifiable enough position to experience it. I felt its victory fill my stomach with pride, felt the impacts within my very bones, knowing exactly how much every blow was earthshaking to my most hated adversary. Whoever that happened to be that fleeting moment to me was everything I’d ever resented, everything I’d ever wanted to destroy. I soon started to grow a taste for it, for the satisfaction of felling some great imagined evil in front of my peers. The rush of proving I knew exactly how to hurt others to people who believed I was some great savior was better than anything I’d ever felt before.
No one knows how truly unjustified all violence is until they have had another person they believe to be evil laid defenseless before them only to decide it is not enough. It will never be enough to satisfy the red stain within them, until someone outside of the act stops them. I had so many people in my youth stop me, and because I thought of myself as striking with righteous fury, I never once questioned why they stopped me. I understand now that when one denies the truth that violence is senseless, no matter how you seek to justify it, you will never succeed. You will seek in folly to satisfy your desire for it in the moment, and the second you let it in, it will continue unobstructed until it is forced out of you by someone else.
How does one live with violence within them, around them, in every word they speak? I wish I could say you simply wash yourself off, move forward towards the future understanding that violence is the worst option in almost every situation. I truly wish that was the truth of life in the absence violence, but it’s not. The truth of a life absent of violence is one where every action not taken rings in between your ears forever. It is a monkey on your back never to fall, constantly reminding you of the punches you never threw that made it so people you cared about got hurt. It sulks along with you no matter what path you choose, constantly reminiscing on only the absence of it, severed from any outside contexts. If you take pride in your perceived growth it scoffs at you, putting forward the idea that you’re just too weak to protect those around you, that if the greatest imagined evil ever conjured comes to take its due you’ll lose everything. Every pain you experience will have the added aftershocks of regret and anguish as you go through created scenarios of the past which may not have even been feasible.
The worst of it is that deep inside you know that given the chance you’d do it again. If the horrible imagined evil did appear you’d fall limp into barbarism’s loving embrace because the people around you need to be protected especially now that they’ve been hurt. You lie awake at night thinking of this inner desire and you weep for you do not want to be that person.
No one who has seen the true face of violence does. But they also know that others are not so introspective. That others do not suffer from qualms, only seek its honeyed kiss to grace them once again. They know this as they too have been nurtured by its bountiful harvest before, brought up by its enticing well of bottomless anger. They have lived with it, eaten meals with it, had conversations with it. They speak the same tongue as those who would theoretically hurt the ones they care about. And then the question arises: What makes one better than the other? The one who does not want violence, and the one who would hurt those they care about? Is it that one works under the assumption that it is a last resort? That one avoids it even though it will forever be a part of them? These notions are alien to those who have truly come to know violence as an old friend, an old lover come to grace their doorstep once more at the first opportunity.
No violence is ever truly bereft of cruelty, no violence is ever truly unentangled from sadism, anger, hate, and eventual regret. So why fight it? Why try to resist the inevitable sting of the aftermath, when you can accept that when you perpetuate violence it’s an act of malice, of desperation, of hate, of pleasure, of sadism, of masochism, of villainy and of heroism. I haven’t gotten into a fight in 3 years. I want to live without violence, but I know its true face. I see it every day, in the world around me, in children’s eyes, in the glares of people who don’t see me as human, in the loathing glances from the people I hold dear towards people they perceive to have hurt me, and I especially see it in the bathroom mirror late at night when I look into my own eyes ruminating on its absence as of late. I so naively wish to be free of its horrible omnipresent ire, but I’ve also accepted that the best I can do is stave it off.
It’s difficult to reckon with how I personally feel about violence and how others use it. People are killing people like me and my boyfriend simply for existing. As a part of a couple groups of people that are persecuted currently, I can’t exactly hide my fangs. Not in today’s world. I’m not about to let myself cast aside my weapons when others brandish theirs. Yet I desperately want to live a life where I don’t have to worry about people hurting me or the people I care about. People in my past who meant well argued that violence is never the answer and I wholeheartedly agree! I’m also not going to allow people to hurt me because they see my life as less than theirs, but I’m always open to communication. For now, at least I’ve let myself live a life without any of the hallmarks of my adolescence and it makes me feel fulfilled, even if I know some people wish death upon people like me and my boyfriend. I just want to let go of the anger that I’ve felt before, and so far I’ve succeeded. I’ve let its starving cries for vengeance, for victory, for triumph over the wicked fizzle out inside of me and reignite as the conflict inside me goes on and on into the future until eventually someone quite as terribly misguided crosses my path.
Leonardo Magazine 