I have something I really need to get off my chest, I need to tell people and know how they feel about it.

My cousin recently sent me a letter. It’s the first correspondence he and I have had in 2 years, and it contained a startling statement. For those of you whom don’t know which cousin I’m talking about, I’m referring to Joe… the one whom stabbed me in front of the school: the one whom gave me these scars on my chest, permanently damaged my lung capacity, and caused me to undergo severe mental trauma. As some of you know, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia coupled with acute paranoia, and is currently being treated for it before he will stand trial for my attempted murder.

Before all this happened, he and I were absolutely inseparable. We would always eat the same things, do the same things, love the same things, everything. We were truly as close as two heterosexual males could possibly be. When we were younger, we would ride motorcycles together. As we grew older, we would race our cars for fun. As we grew ever older, we would plan on running businesses together, plan on trucking together, just we two.

And then he snapped and tried to kill me.

After the fact, I found it simple to ignore what he had done, to brush it off and say that it wasn’t a big deal.

But it was.

I had just been stabbed by the one person in this life that I was closest to, and who had my deepest trust. If someone had told me earlier that somebody would stab me that day, I NEVER would have thought it were Joe. He would be the first person I would rule out, because I KNEW he would never harm me, would never try to end my life.

What the hell did I know?

Sleep walking, screaming in my sleep, nightmares during my non-waking hours, relapses during the waking hours where I could still feel the warm blood running down my body, feel the wave of despair at what he had done, feel the fear of impending death… these all have haunted me for the past two years. They changed who I was and stole from me the definition of who I am.

I wandered around as if in a daze, never truly gaining back my coherency, as if I could no longer tell dream from reality. Truly, I couldn’t. I seemed to feel myself slipping into madness, incapable of differentiating between fact and fiction. My dreams became life, my life became dreams. Everything in my life spun out of control: friends left me, family deserted me, my intelligence slipped through my fingers, everything went wrong!

And then, it took one person to show me the path back; the way back to reality and back to life. My mother was that person. She sat talking to me one day, and said that I was denying what had happened, that I wasn’t coping, and that I wasn’t moving on. “You can’t just pretend that it didn’t happen, or it’ll tear you apart mentally.” She had hit the nail on the head. I had denied what had happened and why, I tried to play it off as a big joke, and my friends loved it. They thought it was so funny of me to play on the experience for a good laugh, but it tore me apart inside.

I started to recover, I really did. Not quickly, but I did start to recover. The turning point of my recovery was a letter that I received from him. A shoddily written letter with extreme grammatical errors and terrible sentence structure (Yes, I know my writing standards shown in this posting are much lower then my normal attempts, but I’m writing from my mind, it doesn’t have to be correct) The letter was short by any regard, hardly even a paragraph in length, but its message was clear. He realized what he had done and was asking my forgiveness. Upon reading that letter the first 7 times, my emotions went haywire. My mouth wasn’t sure whether to smile, grimace, cheer, or frown. I felt anger come, only to be replaced with mirth, to be replaced with disgust, to be replaced with happiness, to be replaced with depression, and, finally, to be replaced by peace. It felt as if my emotions were being rebooted, and when the dust settled from that remarkable experience, I found myself once again my own master. My emotions reacted as they should: my aggression subsided, my arrogance went to the wayside, and my cowardice was replaced with strength.

I remember things now! I remember the list of groceries I need, I remember the list of chores I need to do, everything! My constantly-moving mind is once again at peace, and my dreams are comfortable and pleasant once again. I looked around the world with new eyes, seeing everything from an empowered point of view, and suddenly got scared again. What if this feeling won’t last? What would become of me then?

Then I thought about it, shrugged, and smiled a mischievous grin the likes of which I haven’t grinned in a long, long time. I remember who I am, I remember what I can do, and I remember what is important.

I am William Griffin: the world is my bitch.