u/ReinaQueen

Maybe my existence was a glitch in the universe. A mistake that never should have been coded into reality.
That realization didn’t fully click until I was twelve, the year my brother was born. I remember trying to change his diaper—he was this tiny, screaming pink thing—and I was clumsy, my hands shaking. My mother didn't just stop me; she threw me against the hallway wall with a force that made my teeth rattle.
The look in her eyes wasn't just anger. It was a cocktail of pure loathing and bone-deep terror. She shrieked at me, demanding to know what I was trying to do to her son. Then came the words, the ones that landed like a serrated blade in my chest: "You’re just like him. You’ve got that rapist’s blood in you. Why didn’t you just rot with your father?"
I sat there, clutching my bleeding head. For the first time in my life, I didn't fight back. For the first time, I realized she was right.
She’d never hidden her hatred. When I was three, she tried to "help me sleep" with a bottle of Benadryl. When I was five, she’d "accidentally" let me get into the industrial cleaner under the sink. But I was stubborn. I was a weed that refused to be pulled, surviving every attempt to prune me from her life.
By seven, I’d learned how to bite back. If she didn't feed me, I’d flip the dinner table so no one else could eat either. If she came at me with a belt, I’d wait until she wasn't looking and give her precious youngest daughter a black eye. I fought her tooth and nail for five years, a bitter cold war within the walls of a suburban house. But the birth of my brother—her "clean" start—finally broke me.