Incest is never/always covert

You will have to write the story many times. Each time you write the story it changes. The unspeakable becomes speakable and the unknowable becomes known. The little details you kept, incomprehensible, start to take on the shape of comprehension. The bread crumbs you left yourself, a map of metaphor, a song lyric scrawled in a journal, an arrow pointing this way. You’ll start to remember, not the events themselves but the meaning of them. You’ll start to know what you couldn’t know at the time. When you tell this story, restored, comprehensible, you will be called delusional. They will point to your history of mental breakdowns and psych wards stays and alcoholism to make you an unreliable narrator. They will point to all the times you’ve contradicted yourself in other tellings, how hard you worked to make this story something else. How hard you tried to be a good daughter. Even the ones you love the most will hesitate to ascribe the full meaning to what happened — the truth that looms ugly and impossible. Your father. Everyone will practice the hesitation, the caution, making sure we stick to the facts. Insisting we can never know the content of another person’s heart. Insisting that behaviours can’t be deciphered — comments, looks, postures, rage, entering a bathroom, standing outside a bedroom, a secret compliment, a hand on the back of your neck. But there will come a time when you know. When you no longer feel the need to qualify that knowing. When the double-think of incest emerges as one thing: the truth.

They move under the cover of darkness. They operate out in the open. They depend on one thing — our refusal to see it for what it is.