It's amazing how little attention people pay to you when you're the quiet kid. How deeply you melt into the background, how quickly they forget your presence. Particularly when you're both the quiet and good kid. The kid who never screams for attention, lashes out, or sneaks around. Especially when you're the quiet, good kid in a large family of not-so-quiet, not-so-good kids, who all scream, lash out, and sneak. It's shocking, almost, how easily you disappear.

When you are remembered, it's with a shrug, followed by an underbreath muttering of 'oh, don't worry about her, she's fine.' Fine. That word, that stupid word, has followed me around my whole life. It has engulfed everything I am, everything I think, everything I feel. It has been used to absolve my family of their guilt, as an excuse for their neglect; a way to both favour and dismiss me. It has become the only answer I can give when asked how I am. My own personal adjective to describe myself, my accomplishments, my innermost workings — my whole life.

But I was not fine. Everything is not fine. Because while they were focusing on the loud, problematic, demanding kids, while they were ignoring me, overlooking me, forgetting about me, while they were letting their attention lie elsewhere, I was watching. And I was listening. I heard everything. Every hushed, whispered argument behind closed doors. Every secret spilling from the lips of one sibling to another. I observed it all, drinking it greedily. They may have known nothing about me, but I knew everything about them. I was quiet, but I was not blind. Wrapping myself in the soft certitude of my storage of secrets, I was safe.

Or so I thought. But as they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I had always scoffed at that, thinking myself nothing like my family. I did not neglect. I did not live in a bubble of ignorance, unaware of those around me. I noticed it all, perceived everything, contemplated my family's attributes as though they were main characters in my own book of life. But while I was so immersed in surveying the existence of my siblings, he was watching me. As I obsessed over the others, I paid him no mind. I had decided he was nothing. Despite his angry outbursts and his control over the household, I had felt he was no threat. Maybe that, along with my own invisibility, was why he chose me. Maybe my fixation with the others encouraged his fascination towards me. Who is to say?

All I know is once he struck, I was never whole again. Once he moved in on me, my quietude overtook me, certainty fled, and that word, that unrelenting word that has followed my whole life, kept me from ever being able to tell someone about the unmentionable things that had begun. Not that they ever asked. After all, I was the fine one. But I wasn’t fine anymore. My life was changing in ways I could not understand. Ways I still don’t understand. Suddenly, because of him, I no longer felt safe in the cocoon of my sibling's secrets. I had thought myself perceptive. I had thought myself the most discerning. Turns out, I was blind after all.