Life as a House:
George: You know the great thing, though, is that change can be so constant you don't even feel the difference until there is one. It can be so slow that you don't even notice that your life is better or worse, until it is. Or it can just blow you away, make you something different in an instant. It happened to me.
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: Hindsight. It's like foresight without a future
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0159789/"]Sam[/DLMURL]: How do you become something you're not?
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: What do you want to become?
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0159789/"]Sam[/DLMURL]: What I'm not.
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: What are you now?
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0159789/"]Sam[/DLMURL]: I'm nothing.
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: My dad used to play this game... I never really understood what it was until after he was gone...
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0159789/"]Sam[/DLMURL]: I was holding for somebody else; it wasn't even mine!
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: THE GAME was to make me smaller than he was. Smaller. Always smaller. No matter what! He could be almost invisible as a human being, but... I still had to be smaller. So that i-if I got good grades in school, then I was a pussy for not playing football, or-or if I... cut my hair for him, it was never short enough. Or if I shaved my head then I looked like a psycho. I never won the game, never! And if he couldn't... make me smaller with words...
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0159789/"]Sam[/DLMURL]: ...I'll have to pay him back.
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: Sam... I won't ever hit you. Ever. I don't want you smaller. I want you to be happy and you're not. Not here with me, not home with your mother, not alone, not anywhere. You're what I was most of my life, Sam. I see it in your eyes, in your sleep, in your answer to everything! You're barely alive!
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0159789/"]Sam[/DLMURL]: [whispers] I'm not even listening.
[DLMURL="https://www.ptsdforum.org/name/nm0000177/"]George[/DLMURL]: I put a gun to my father's head once. Ever think like that? He was passed out. Had just been yelling at my mom over nothing. Under-cooked meat. I went to my room, I held the barrel right up to his ear, and then I chickened out again. Of course it was a BB gun but still it would have hurt like hell.