To quote a Lady, who once used to be a flower girl, “I’m a good girl, I am!” … anyone? Ok, Eliza Doolittle’s and my similarities aside, really. I’m a nice girl. I am. I always smile. I have a bounce in my step that’s insufferably cute. I laugh real pretty, and I listen frighteningly well. I’m well-taught, well read and… well, just a fun person to be around. That’s it. The end. The rest are credits, thanks for reading! Kidding! My God, can you imagine? Anyway. I’m a nice girl… you guessed it, a little too nice. No, I don’t fake any of the things I’ve listed. I genuinely feel all those feelings and truly do care that much. But I’m twisted. As in, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Breakfast at Tiffany’s whacky. And the last one may confuse you, but trust me when I say Holly Golightly was off her chain as are the best of us, she just had a happier ending (which, thank God, because I would have blown my brains out at the prospect of going down the path of Norma Desmond.) I’m sure I have a smorgasbord of flaws, but the three main aspects of my personality to said twistedness: I have a temper that’s shorter than an Oompa Loompa, I cut people out of my life quicker than the life-span of a fruit fly and (the thing I’m most afraid to admit) I’m a total sexual deviant. Before you jump to the obvious conclusion, I don’t sleep around with a stranger everyday… because my upbringing won’t let me, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
To sum it up real quick, I had a fucked up childhood. Something out of Marquis de Sade’s rough draft of a novel, with splashes of Poe interspersed with the real Dahl. I’d rather not get into the traumas from my parents (because, through miracles one after the other, we worked it out and now are the best of friends… but, if you stick around long enough, I’ll share those tales with you too), but there were many, many others. Now, for a lot of you, that’s where your issues stem from and end. Your parents. But I was ‘blessed’ enough to have a whole banana split sundae of childhood grievances. Here are just a few from my list that runs for pages: I was more or less raised by my grandfather, only to be separated from him at the age of three. I was then taken care of by severely unfit nannies, one who would take pleasure in beating me with common household cleaning supplies (something my mother discovered when she found a black bruise around my eye at age 4, which resulted in the woman being promptly fired) and the other molesting me in the same rat-infested bathroom I was locked in – the kicker being my parents genuinely thought I was making up my sexual abuse as a way to garner their attention (only to have a gynecologist threaten to place me under Child Services and hand them over to the authorities six years after the incident because she saw the vaginal scarring and asked a then 14 year old me if I was sexually active, which I was not.) Then there’s my losing my grandfather the same year Uma taught me what is was to be a woman, in the worst kind of way, and watching my father and uncle sell the house he built with his own two hands because they ‘didn’t know what to do with it.’ The cherry atop it all was choosing to go to boarding school because being away from my parents was not a strange sensation to me. In fact, I sought comfort in our distance. That’s just the overview, but there’s a reason I’m telling you all of this, I promise. I don’t think I’ve admitted this publicly before. As in, never to more than two people at a time, but all those incidents listed contorted three
Every time a dirty thought zips past my head, I reflect on 10-year old me masturbating in my private school’s pool because the sensation of water turns me on. You know, because I had my first sexual experience in the presence of water gushing from taps (sickening, right?) And I’m gearing to go pretty much all day, everyday which I’m constantly trying to suppress because my culture demands… well, a pussy as virgin-esque as possible. So I settle for fucking some poor dude’s brains out once every fornight/month and they all gasp and moan the same thing: ‘damn baby, your kitty so tight’, ‘fuck you feel unbelievable’, ‘take me to church, mama’ … all the while, I’m wondering which flavor Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s I’m going to pick up on my way home once I’m done getting my jollies from this guy I’m probably never going to see again. The thing about crazy, and it works the same for twisted, is that you’re not really crazy if you know you’re crazy. You’re just aware of your shortcomings. And boy, am I aware of mine. Have you ever heard of the circle of trust? Well, this is what it looks like:
The breakdown –
4th Stage: Terror/Conflicted
3rd Stage: Panic/Conflicted
2nd Stage: Growth/Conflicted
1st Stage: Comfort
Which, simply put, means that the 1st stage consists of the people you would confess anything to. The 2nd represents your circle of friends. The 3rd represents acquaintances and associates and the last consists of the people who hover around you but you’re not close to. Simple enough.
Now, this is what my circle of trust looks like.
Nothing personal. I just don’t believe in investing my time on people I’m going to go from liking to having no respect for in less than a week, and you may call me jaded, but I am only a product of the lessons life has taught me. Which is basically why I walk away immediately from anyone who talks sweet. As Eliza says “don’t talk of spring, don’t talk of fall, don’t talk at all. Show me.” Lately, I’ve been meeting someone who has certainly proved himself more worthy than the garbage I’ve had to sift through, but that doesn’t mean my feet aren’t warmed up to up and run the minute he starts treating me as ordinary.
Well, this is me. All of me. You, the reader, are probably experiencing one of two emotions: repulsion towards everything you’ve read because it makes you highly uncomfortable (which means that life has been good to you and I am both envious of and sad for you) or empathy because your story may not be the same word for word, but you have seen enough to know enough and you, my friend, understand. Either way, I hope it leaves you curious enough to come back for more. Maybe you’ll be brave enough to share with me who you are too.
Until then.