Degrees of separation

I had a dream in the early hours of this morning, of my being on some sort of day trip to a seaside place, then getting on a coach to head back to wherever my 'dreamworld home' was supposed to be. And cuddling into my side on that coach was a lovely boy, blond, 10/11, wearing a Chelsea football shirt. No-one I consciously recognised, though, in the moments after my alarm brought the tableau to a crashingly abrupt end. Something nagged at the back of my mind, though, and was still doing so an hour or so later as I sat on the tube at my local station, waiting for it to depart on the first leg of my journey to work. Then it clicked. The boy in my dream bore a strong resemblance to a boy I've written about before, the victim of an awful crime, decades ago, being raped and murdered by a family friend. The shock of recognition made me feel physically sick, not just because of the heartbreaking horror of his fate, but because I know how few degrees of separation there are between me and the perpetrator of that crime. I can talk all I want, in hypothetical terms, about how anathema rape is to me, how I never want to hurt a boy, how I could never do such a thing, but hypothetical is all those assertions are. If I'd been in that attic, that day so many years ago, could I have resisted the temptation the rapist failed to resist? Not knowing the answer to that question is one of the most torturous enigmas of my whole benighted life.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B