I hate that I love you.

I hate that when I think about you, I am thinking about how much you hurt me and how much I wanted it.

You said it was love, you said you loved me like you loved her, but I was your daughter. Not my mother.
I was so lonely and unnoticed that it felt so special. I felt special. 

Even when I knew how wrong it was.

Even when I was crying and racking my brain, trying to figure out why you chose me.

I hate that I love you because when I pushed all of it away and pretended to be someone else, I loved you even more.
I made myself blind to it the same way your wife did. Because blindness was bliss.

You let me forget it, because if I forgot, then no one would know, not even me.

I hate that I love you still.

I love you, but I'm unable to love you without fear.

I hate that you were so kind and so easy to talk to. That I was your favorite, and that I loved that too.

I hate the terror of lying in my bed at night, seeing your face over mine, feeling your weight on my body and how my mind turns that terror into something I condoned because at least it meant someone cared about me.

You cared about me, right?

Is that why you cried? Why after I kicked and hit and begged you to stop, you did? Forever?

Or did you just hold me and whisper apology and admission of guilt to make me feel better about how awful it truly was?

Did you not stop?

Is that why I was so reluctant to leave? Even grown, I can't trust my own memory.

I can't sit next to you and talk about my day, admire your hard work, or enjoy your dreams without that sinking, biting, all-consuming fear that because we are alone in the dark, after everyone is asleep...you might decide to do it again.

What is worse is that if you did, if you had? I don't think I would have stopped you even then. Because I want so badly to be wanted...

Just not like that.

Not by you.

I hate that I love you.

I hate that loving you rings my insides with a rot so foul that it emanates from what's left of the corpse you devoured.
Like a pack of starving dogs clawing at my flesh and I...

I am the one left torn over my own consumption.
As though I committed that great act of cannibalism.

I am left wanting and wanted in the worst of ways, desperate to cling to affection from you because it is the only form I have ever gotten, and isn't that so twisted?

My body is mangled, my mind even more so, and yet I still love you.

What a tortuous existence.
Predicated in your folly as a father.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME!?

I will never forget the look on your face when I asked that. I thought that maybe it was shock, and anger, rage that I had the gall to seek help despite it all.

But I was so very wrong.

No...

It wasn't shock at my gall.
It was shock that you'd succeeded.

That I'd live my whole life wondering if any ounce of my mind belongs to me when you so easily erased it of your crimes.

Both of you did.

And yet, I still love you.

I hate that so much.