Cain, Abel, and Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Day, 2023. I’m seated at a fusion eatery next to a historic theater, an iconic corner of my city. My half-empty table for two is outside. The chilly breeze kisses my skin and my hands ball into fists to try and stave off the cold. I’m clean-shaven. I’m wearing my favorite jacket. I feel dainty and handsome. I’m the only one sitting alone amidst a full restaurant of couples. Each little table has a slim vase of decorative Valentine’s Day flowers. No one knows why I look so content despite having no lover sitting across from me. I enjoy a hearty breakfast of eggs, cornbread, and spicy pulled pork. A journalist with camera and microphone suddenly walks right in and begins interviewing the couple next to me about their Valentine’s Day plans. I’m in the background of the camera view looking extremely single at the only table for two without the second person. I finish eating, pay, and skedaddle before I become the next meme. I make my way over to the specialty café and laugh with the baristas over my funny morning.
Valentine’s Day, 2020. I have no idea what time it is. Night shifts to dawn and sunlight gently breaks through the window. My belongings are locked away in a drawer somewhere in the facility. All I have on me are the clothes I’m wearing. The room is white. I’d been sleeping on two slabs of stone maybe three inches thick; the staff called them “mattresses.” Roughly twelve hours and some change ago, I’d been preparing to carry out the end. I had reached out to my older cousin before following through; she had watched my mental decline over the past couple months and begged me to let her help. I checked into a psychiatric ward. Now I was alone in a cold room. I felt safe. I felt rested. I get up, stretch, and happily do some pushups. I hadn’t exercised in years, yet I felt connected to my body for once and was having fun moving it around. I realize it was my first real sleep, the first time I slept knowing no one could hurt me, especially not him. The screams of terror echoing around the darkest depths of my soul were silent for once. I was 22.
What magic can happen in three years?
When I think back to the circumstances that led to that life-changing night’s rest, I think of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. I’ll do my best to tread carefully given that I’m no expert in religion nor did I grow up with faith, but I feel it’s a short enough story that even I can’t misconstrue its widely known themes of offering, betrayal, and punishment.
My mom’s a first-generation immigrant and a single parent of two sons a decade apart, myself being the younger one. While she worked in a hot kitchen to keep the lights on and put food on the table, the older one was left to babysit me from my toddler years up to my teenage years.
I’ll be using titles like “The Older One” throughout this, so bear with me. The obvious B-word is lost to time and misfortune.
In his view, I was a little brat keeping him away from an extravagant social life of mingling with peers his age, and his treatment towards me reflected such.
In my view, I was stuck with some wrathful psychopath for half the day until my mom could make it home, and my skittish, terrified behavior reflected such.
Every day started with the same objective: survive until mom gets home.
Here was the daily practice:
Get hit or screamed at over whatever reason you could have beef with a five year-old for.
Play video games to hide and dissociate.
Try to explain to mom what the older one did in sub-par and still developing Vietnamese. Be ignored because the older, native speaker steps in and rewrites the whole narrative.
Cry.
Repeat for however many years.
I lived in constant fear. I spent all day and everyday crying so much that I developed a stutter that sounded like a little boy choking on tears.
Memorable moments (greatest hits, even. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Strangled me twice among other assaults.
Hid around corners to jump-scare me. This made me scared to move from room to room.
Threw away my mom’s groceries to force the family on an Atkins diet. I was forced to eat bell peppers and ground beef three times a day. When I asked my mom what was going on, she said “He’s lost his mind.” She was scared too. If I didn’t eat my veggies, he threatened to shove them down my throat. I believed him.
“Next time you open the door to a stranger, I hope you fucking die.” I had opened the door to a salesman and woken the older one up for fear of him missing some abstract adult matter I had no conception of in my little mind. I just wanted to help.
Why was I living with a demon?
Well, that demon started as a person, and that person grew up in hard Vietnam with a strict mother. My family always told me tales of how heavy-handed she was with him compared to how she barely touched me when she got to the United States.
He was hurting too. He’d always been and still is.
He was a socially awkward loner by all accounts. He had trouble making friends. He was jealous that my mom pulled her hand back when raising me. He claims this was due to her fearing Child Protective Services in the United States. While this was true, I always felt there was a deeper reason. She was always so clearly scared of him. I knew part of her understood she had raised a monster and couldn’t do it a second time.
He had the chance to stop the cycle that so many survivors of abuse like myself dream of ending. Instead, he continued it.
I eventually outgrew the physical abuse but had little safeguards against the mental and emotional. I was constantly put down and made to feel less than. Honestly, and I hope this doesn’t come off flippant to those who also suffered physical abuse, but the mental and emotional were so much worse. I thought it was “over” because I was too big to hit. Little did I know, the abuse was just starting.
Being body shamed, being told I’m hopeless and worthless, being told I’m a waste of space. These all hurt so much more than being hit.
During this time, I thought to myself: Am I Cain, or am I Abel?
Was I Abel who’d been led out to a field only to have my head, hopes, and dreams bashed in with a rock?
Or was I Cain and silently awaiting the day I’d be the wielder of the rock, ready for God to smite me however deemed fit afterward?
Where was my place in the story? Was my story already over, or was it just beginning?
I stayed home for college to look after my mom in what felt like a hopeless household. I graduated in 2019 and a violent depression that had always been there took hold when I no longer had academic aspirations to distract from the deeply rooted pain in my soul. I rarely left my room. I had no funds. All I wanted to do was bash my head against a wall.
At this time, three events led to the biggest mental breakdown of my life.
My best friend of nine years ghosted me. To this day, I still have no idea why she suddenly chose to never speak to me again. One day we were closer than magnets, then the next day she decided I was a closed chapter in her life.
An older cousin (not the one I reached out to prior to Valentine’s Day of 2020, a different one) baited me out to lunch and ambushed me with a scolding about how my mom’s gonna die any day now and that I need to pick up the financial pace to take care of her. Said older cousin had recently lost her own mom and was grieving through berating me. I stood and cried for a whole hour in public, begging my older cousin to shut the fuck up and leave me alone.
The Older One filed my mom’s taxes and sent me an email blaming me for her lack of savings. The email, in so many words, laid out plans to eventually take over my mom’s bills and kick me out if I wasn’t contributing. He declared that he didn’t care about my depression (which he caused from years of abuse) nor did he care about my opinion of the email. He’d been living under the same roof despite being a decade older than me. I’d been helping out with groceries and the bills with my financial aid disbursement from college. I even took my family out to dinner whenever I could despite not wanting to breathe a lick of fresh air outside my room.
The first two events had already left me emotionally scarred. The third one set off my C-PTSD and I flew into a fearful panic of what might happen if I didn’t adhere to the email.
I immediately began starving myself for fear of eating up money. I started job hunting with intentions to pay my mom back for raising me before I kill myself.
I couldn’t stand to see my mom’s face while I fasted. She knew something was wrong. I decided I needed to die faster.
That’s when I reached out to my older cousin on February 13th, 2020 and was checked into a psychiatric ward a few hours later.
That’s when I had the first real sleep of my life.
From the moment I magically attained sentience as a child, I’d always lived in fear. I had no frame of reference for life beyond the The Older One because his abuse was all I’d ever known. My starting point had been fucked from the beginning. I had never been truly happy.
All it took was one night’s rest to see beyond the abuse.
Maxine woke up on Valentine’s Day, 2020. There wasn’t a better day to start loving myself. There wasn’t a better year to see things clearly. Get it? Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
She didn’t have a name just yet, but she could finally live, and Not-Maxine could finally dream.
I sleep easy now.
I blocked him on everything since. I ignore him when I see him.
I started trauma-focused therapy.
Months later, I stood my ground against him. I stood tall. I stood firm. I spoke with justice and conviction. I told him I went to college to support our mom since I had no faith in him being anything beyond the parasite he was. I told him his abuse was never justified. I told him his failure to address his own demons had manifested in being one towards me. I told him that the progress I’d been making in therapy was from talking about him. I told him that his email had made me suicidal.
His response?
“That was a risk I was willing to take.”
We haven’t spoken deeply since and we never will again. He routinely tries to rekindle things. He doesn’t understand that I’m done.
I was never Abel. I had never been killed. I was still there. Maxine was still there.
I wasn’t destined to be Cain. I always had the strength to be kind.
The story of Cain and Abel was never mine. I had my own story to tell this whole time.
I just needed a good night’s rest first.
Now, every Valentine’s Day, I celebrate another full year of love, whether it’s self-love or love towards another.
Maxine loves roses and sunflowers. They make her blush.