I was nine when they divorced, seven when they got married. I remember a lot about hating school in those years, and basically nothing else, except a vibrant sense of anger, of yelling, of hiding in my room terrified waiting for the conflict to go away. Night after night, week after week.

I don't know what they were fighting about. I'm reasonably certain my mother never recovered from the experience emotionally; i'm also reasonably certain that he beat her, although I don't remember it happening.

I remember her close to a year afterward, arguing with a boyfriend, explaining away her inability to function in a relationship with the excuse that she felt like she'd just gotten out of a war zone; and I remember that relationship, with a man she had known before this ill-fated marriage, crumbling like dust under the strain.

But otherwise ... I remember things from when I was five and six, some of them strongly; it's almost as though I have a consistent internal narrative of my life from before I entered school until we moved to San Antonio, and then a different life, with a different me and a different mother, both of us less secure, both of us less happy, after a two-year discontinuity.

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news; I don't want to be the one to tell my brother that our life with his father was hell, especially since I can't actually remember a damn thing about it, so it's all touchy-feely unprovable impressionist bullshit that also happens to be totally real, only i can't prove it.

But what else can I do? I have too many questions about my mother to be able to turn away my brother's questions; that isn't fair to him.

It's too late to second-guess in any event; the email is sent, the most difficult email i've written since I came out. I have been sitting here, trembling, hyperventilating, on the edge of hysteria, just trying to look into my memory of that time and find a satisfactory answer.

It cannot be done.

There are no answers which are satisfactory. I know I will never understand. There's nobody left to explain, and none of the people who could explain were emotionally mature enough to be able to do so in any event.

But it hurts, damnit.

And it's terrifying.

Whatever it was.