The day my world stood still . . .

The day my world stood still . . . 

This is always a very difficult day for me.  

Forty-five years ago today, and at the very moment I heard an announcement from a radio news report about the death of Elvis, I was in a tent in the camping area of a Maryland State Park (a radio was blaring somewhere in the background).  

I was fourteen years old, and still very short and undeveloped for my age. It was just two-and-a-half weeks before my fifteenth birthday; the first day of classes for my sophomore year of high school was only three weeks away. 

Just moments earlier, I had been coaxed and forced, for the first time in my life, to perform oral sex on someone.  The culprit and predator was a man nearly twice my age.  

He was a “diocesan” seminarian studying for the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and had already been regularly sexually molesting me for over a year (something that had started just after I graduated from the eighth grade of my parish school).  

I think he was very happy that things had “progressed” to that level on the eve of August 16, 1977.  He told me I had “a talent” for what had transpired.  

As I heard the news about Elvis, I remember feeling at that precise moment like all I wanted to do was to wash out my mouth with soap, and to take a shower to cleanse my body and soul of it’s “filth.”  

I have PTSD, and this anniversary always “triggers” me.  

But I’m a SURVIVOR!