Melting Candles

By Lavinia Thompson

A book of poetry and memoirs straight from the memories of a child abuse and domestic violence survivor, "Melting Candles" reaches out to fellow survivors to provide inspiration and hope, a light at the end of the tunnel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lavinia Thompson
• Release date: Oct 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311255730

Lavinia Thompson

​I am a 32-year old author who wants to share the worlds inside my head with everyone. The theme woven through my books is survival. We survive adversity, trauma, hardship and obstacles every day. I survived a decade of child abuse and domestic violence. I want fellow survivors to know they aren't alone. You matter. It is okay to hit rock bottom, to fall, but we don't need to unpack and live there. Writing is what helped me survive, and continues to do so. It has been my life-saving foundation while struggling with mental illness and PTSD. Now, I want the worlds inside my head to reach you.Visit my website and blog for the latest updates! If you like what you read, please consider joining my Patreon for more exclusive content and sneak peeks into future projects.

Book preview

Light at the End of the Tunnel

August 25, 2009

He said maybe we should be friends and see where it takes us. That was last night. But I keep wondering if this is as real as it feels, if that fluttering sensation inside my chest means anything or if I am wishing too much. It’s hard to think this has been make-believe; merely a fairy-tale image from our friends’ wedding a month ago. I remember the moment he took my hand, leading me into a slow dance, and the moment our lips touched. Maybe it was the thrill of a young girl’s first kiss. Maybe it was the power of the thunderstorm rolling in, balancing certain energies upon the horizon. I’ll never forget the expression on his face a few days later when we were walking in the pouring rain. Like a little kid, I was jumping through puddles, careless and free. He was hesitant to join in, perhaps reluctant to let go that much. Maybe I am naïve. After everything I have been through, love is something I know nothing of. So I lie awake watching the moon dance across the sky in familiar steps, asking myself if it has all been an illusion.

Those ghosts never go away. I don’t want to hurt him because of what happened to me, but some damage never heals. I find myself in a similar place to where I have been all along. Will I ever escape the darkness that has been full of torture and screaming ghosts for so long? It makes me so angry sometimes, the morbid thought of the man who robbed everything from an innocent girl. This is far from going away. He lingers without being here, even if he is dead by now. Something inside me says he will until something gives … until I am ready to banish the remnants of the past to the oblivion it came from.

Sometimes it feels like I’m so far into hatred and anger it plagues the rest of my life. I have watched most of my friends marry and have kids. They are happy, seemingly content—something I feel I may never achieve. Here I am struggling with my first boyfriend telling me we should be friends because I may not be ready for this. It shouldn’t be a big deal but it weakens me somehow. Those old friends had fun in their high school years. They lived a normal teenage life until graduation. Now they have a life of happiness and love, something that to me feels so out of reach. They went out every weekend while I was sitting at home every Saturday night listening to a drunk scream at my mother while he threw her around like a rag doll that didn’t matter. I would hide in the basement, in the sweet hidden shadows of my moonlit room, with songs I hated playing on the radio. Somehow it made me feel better instead of wanting to hate them more.

He would come into my room when no one was home, stumbling in his familiar, drunken state, reeking of beer, and talking about how lonely he was, that Mom never paid him any attention and all he wanted was for us to be a family. He would say these things while weaseling his hands up my shirt and slowly setting me on the bed. I could smell the beer on his breath as his words crossed my skin. I remember the things he would say—talking about suicide and killing us all so that we’d be out of our misery. He said no one would believe me if I told anyone what was happening. He would tell me that Mom cared more about my other siblings than she did me because I am the middle child and the forgotten one, that the attention he gave me was much more than my mother would ever give me. He would say that my deceased father had been abusive and was this terrible ogre of a man. I never believed him. I knew he never looked into the mirror at the monster he truly was. Or maybe he knew but shifted the blame to someone I couldn’t defend because I never met Dad. I even stopped writing for a while because Mom’s ex would go through my room and read everything I wrote. I’d hide my journals anywhere from under my mattress to under a dresser or even in my pillowcase. He would always find my hidden secrets, stories, and poems. He’d use every word against me until I could defend them no more. Eventually I stopped defending them and would sit there and let him scream until he finally left. Alone again, I would either write it out as best I could or stay insensitive and block out yet another horror that played itself out in a house that was never a home.

For almost ten years, that was my life. I never noticed if I was going any crazier from one day to the next. But the haunted poems I have gone through, ripped up and thrown out, said it all. They describe the morbid things trickling from the mind of a fourteen-year old who only wanted away from the agony and despair. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, I always heard people say. But is there?

I haven’t written a journal entry for nearly six years now. There’s the occasional piece about lives to be salvaged, other peoples’ dramas, but none related to the sexual abuse. My poems and novels focus on similar things. Yet to focus directly on what happened to me? I guess it’s something I haven’t yet the bravery to do. It is there and will be until I defeat it but how do you deal with something you have yet to tell your own mother? How do you find a sign of life in the dark when all you want is to move on and be happy, wishing none of it had happened in the first place?

I hear people say you have to tell someone. You have to talk about it and let it out. But I don’t know how to say it or where to start. So I started with telling my first boyfriend how I feel. I opened up for the first time about the sexual abuse. At the time, it felt like something I had to do, though now I am wondering if it was the right thing to do. Maybe it’s me. I want to be ready for this, to take that leap of faith into a feeling and know it is right because it feels so. I want to be loved and feel loved, and I want to love someone. But I fear as long as the memories linger it may never happen. Mom’s ex knew how to do damage. It is still here and sometimes I feel it is still breaking me, piece by piece. For so long I have tried to ignore it and move on. I don’t know if my boyfriend is scared to be around someone so broken or if he really means it when he says, We should just be friends …

I feel like I am at a crossroads where I have to decide where to go and what I want and what to do. But it breaks down to this: I know where I want to go. Two years of school and I am out of this hopeless town. I know who I want: my family close to me and I want someone who loves me in spite of the demons in my closet. But what to do? Well that’s a completely different story.

Sometimes it feels as if no one understands. I know this isn’t true. Sometimes I could scream out loud in the emptiness even if it won’t solve anything. Other times it feels like I am so far into this