I always believed there were two sides to every person;
A side they adored, the side the world would see.
The opposing side, everything the world would hate.
I have been exposed to both sides in every person I have met.
Nobody has ever shown one side without the other.

My adoptive father, whom raised me, was a man
Most admired.
I have always hated my father.
He was seen as a marvelous man
For adopting a child into his home,
Raising him as his own.
He was considered a hero.

None of them knew what happened behind closed doors.
How often I had been lashed for committing no crime,
The tears that stung my eyes with each hit;
Each time I hid when the whiskey was present.
Nobody knew about the secret scars I held,
My bruised heart.
They were all clueless.

Clueless to how unhappy I was.
None of them cared.
They never bothered to take
A second look at their “town marvel.”
He was no marvel.
He was a monster.

For ten years I lived in his “care.”
I slept on a basement floor,
Found other resources for food,
I was alone.

My throat would close every time I would try to speak,
I tried to tell my story but no words came.

“If you ever, and I mean ever, tell anybody about this,
Your life will end at the hands of me.” He would repeat
His statement every night before I shivered myself to sleep.
I grew up in a hell that I was forced to call home.

Monsters do exist, but not in the form of the fairytales
We tell children,
Not in the forms of Frankenstein or Dracula, or any abnormal creature.
Monsters walk the earth disguised as humans.
With normal occupations and lives.

There is no such thing as a “hero” or a “marvel.”
My two-sided theory has been proven wrong,
Deep inside all of us, there is only one being.
Fairytales teach children there will always
Be a monster and a marvel.

The fairytales were wrong.
There are no marvels
Only monsters.