Footsteps (The cult of "K")

One day, as I was walking across the living room, "K" said, "What's wrong?" I told him nothing was wrong, I was just going into the kitchen. He insisted something was wrong: My footsteps were too heavy on the floor, I must be angry at him. "No, I'm not angry at all." I said. It didn't matter what I said, he believed what he wanted to believe. If my footsteps were too soft, I was hiding something from him: I was being sneaky. There was always an underlying reason for it and I'd be interrogated until the "truth" came out.

Whenever "K" was in a suspicious mood, which, after a while, was pretty much every day, "S" and I would have to sit down and anything we said would be taken apart, bit by bit, to get to the "truth". His truth. He'd sit us there for hours and hours, dissecting why we were walking or behaving in any way he deemed "suspicious". Every day we had to be careful what we said or did, to avoid an interrogation. He would lecture us from the Bible about respect and what God wanted for us. Many times, we would be kept up all night, alternating between being yelled at and forced to "forgive" each other when he sensed "S" and I were angry at each other (we weren't). The more he sexually abused me, the crazier his ideas and his paranoia seemed to become.

Forget trying to argue (which I did, a lot), it made things much worse. There was no being rational. When he walked out of the room to get something, "S" would whisper to me, "Just agree with him! Don't argue! Tell him he's right, at least it will shut him up." It killed me to do that. Why would I agree to something I didn't do?? That was one of many times I actually made things much worse. I wouldn't back down. I didn't understand that I had to play the game to stay safe. I don't blame myself but I soon understood that "S" didn't want to agree with him, she was just trying to keep things from escalating. And it didn't take long for me to see how they would escalate.

I remember the day, years after everything was over with "K", that I saw David Koresh. Koresh was the leader of the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, Texas. He was so eerily similar to "K". The face. The same glasses. The hair. His "preaching", his "beliefs. When I heard what happened at Waco, it's scary how similar it was to living with "K".

                                                                       David Koresh