I should be asleep. I'm exhausted. But my brain is running around like a dog chasing it's tail. I should get back into meditation. I should exercise. I should do a million other things, but I need to sleep, since I have a long day and an early start. So I find myself flicking through Netflix, looking for something to watch that's under sixty minutes and I find myself clicking onto the true crime segment, which I never usually watch, to be honest. The Paedophile Hunter is 59 minutes and for some reason my brain went yep, that'll work to put you to sleep and so I put it on.
For the record I love psychological thriller movies, and can watch them in the dark but I always shy away from true crime especially anything regarding children.
Strangely enough, I do find myself drifting in and out of sleep until about halfway in, when I sit upright and stare at my television. There has to be a mistake, but there isn't. I'd woken up just as a new paedophile was being shown....and he's the neighbour that lives across from me. Stinton's associate had posed as an 11 year old autistic disabled child, and this worthless excuse for a human being sent full on nude pictures to this decoy, thinking they were as I had described above. That doesn't hold a candle to the text messages he sent but also the fact that this monster (called Roger) travelled about 2 hours by taxi out of Manchester to the decoy house that Stinton had, thinking he was going to have sex with this 11 year old and thinking they were alone.
I had to re-watch it with the lights on because I was hoping wrong, tired, delusional. But unfortunately I wasn't. What I was was spiralling into a panic attack that left me scared and sobbing in my bed. This show aired in 2014. Roger had never been convicted, despite the evidence. I was angry with my city, angry and betrayed. This monster had invited me into his home and talked about his life with me. I'd created art inspired by him and knowing he's gone and done something so disgusting left me sick to my stomach. What made it worse was that his windows face the street where young children play, the children I wave and speak to everyday, the children that play together as friends in the street. I don't know why but it enrages me. He shouldn't be allowed to look at children, and he may be pretty much house bound but that's besides the point.
I end up crying myself to sleep. And the next morning I call my housing association. I don't know how to word it. I don't want to cause trouble, but I thought the least I can do is inform them in case anything ever does actually happen.
When I speak to my housing association manager I am absolutely appalled when she informs me that they are fully aware of his past, also that he is someone, "We know is someone we feel is a good customer, also he wasn't convicted and that was the past." So, essentially, as long as the rent is paid they don't give a flying fuck. Sounds about right.
I realize my anger is partly my paternal instinct. I want to protect my neighbourhood children from this monsters' gaze.
When I tell my boyfriend he wants to smash Roger's windows in, not only because he feels as strongly as I do about it but because of the anxiety Roger's existence so close to me causes me. I tell him not to do anything stupid and he promises me he won't.
When I walk past his open curtains I try not to think about him. If I walk out of my door and see him about to walk into the hallway I turn back and wait inside until he's inside his flat. I don't know what I'll say to him. I know I can't be polite and I don't want to pretend to be. But my running away is also due to an irrational fear. I know he won't hurt me and yet knowing what he's done makes me feel like I was that 11 year old or something (being an empath can be strange and stressful sometimes) or that I'm afraid of my own desire to hurt him. That desire often makes me feel like I'm more of a monster than he is but I can't abide by anyone that would hurt a child in any way shape or form, thought or action. So I hide behind my door if I see him coming.
I can't bring myself to destroy my poem only because I understand that most monsters are not simply one dimensional, that there's a possibility of love and positivity and courage within the same mind that thinks it would be okay to go and fuck an 11 year old disabled autistic child. That's why I refuse to take it down and destroy it. Because I want the reality of it to be seen. We all have the potential to be wicked, cruel and disgusting just as much as we can be kind, loving and encouraging. It's just that most of us have a moral compass. Most of us would never dream of it, and for the ones that do, well, society find it easier to handle if we don't think about them caring or loving anyone or anything, because then it's just easier for us to think of them as pure evil.
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