She stopped being a person who felt, and became instead, a person who did.  People did not perceive the change in her.  She slipped so smoothly and so evenly into a shell of her former self that she was almost unchanged.  She accepted attention at the same rate as she had before, only she stored it in a different place now, a place which allowed doubt to breed self-hatred.  She couldn’t continue dating the man who was currently her boyfriend.  She made up an excuse about focusing on her school-work, but the cruel reality of the situation was that she couldn’t stand his touch.  Every intimate embrace, even non-intimate embraces, crawled up her skin and slid into her belly and filled her stomach with ice.  It was better, she thought, not to be touched at all.  So she made herself even more busy doing things than she had before.  She redoubled her theatrical exploits, she joined a dozen new clubs and societies, she went to church twice on Sundays, and she volunteered at a local shelter for battered women.  She’d sit in her car and cry for twenty minutes after her allotted volunteer time, then drive back to school, sit in the parking lot, and cry twenty more, fogging up the windows with her agony.  She always thought it ironic that a place typically known for lovers, a foggy car, became a place of regular solitude for her.  Solitude became her favorite bedfellow, and at night,  she’d dream of wolves.

Thinking back on that dark place was a common occurrence in the early dawn hours.  It was  hot and the fitful oppressive but the fan blowing on her bare legs made her sweat prickly and cold.  She turned towards the cooler side of the pillow, pressing her face almost directly into her sleeping roommate.  He slept, his cherub mouth parted, and it seemed he hadn’t moved an inch in his contented slumber.  She closed her eyes again and tried to breathe with his breathing, sync with his peacefulness, but his gently rolling snore did nothing but remind her that she was doomed to never find the peace he had in his sleeping hours.  Instead she slid her hand across the floor to a small groove between the television stand and a wide pile of boxes and secured a silver and crystal rosary.  Rolling the comforting beads between her fingers, she pressed the silver cross to her lips and whispered soundlessly against it, “please God, give me the strength to make it through another night.”

Carefully, she wound the length of cool beads around her wrist and began silently praying her “Hail Marys”, using the beads to keep count.  Ten, and then an “Our Father”, ten more, another “Our Father”, but somewhere along the third set of ten, her mind slipped away, and the words of the prayers mixed silently into another dream.  Another dream of wolves.  Only this time, they wore beautiful collars of silver filigree and padded swiftly beside her, protective, as she entered the mouth of a cave.  Almost instantly, she could hear the sound of rushing water- but  as her eyes searched the darkness of the cave she realized that it wasn’t rushing water from a fall, but sounded more like a running shower.  She was awake and the space beside her was empty and still warm.  Those precious hours between 3:00 am and 6:00 am  were swallowed in an instant of cool rushing water and mossy stone covered walls.  She could almost smell the wet, earthy ground as she sat up with reluctance, trying to pull her muscles into line after tossing and turning in the heat and mental punishment for half the night.  She had grown used to fitful sleep, but she would never get used to the memory robbery that plagued her insomnia.  She was still, five years later, his victim.

Even afterwards, after she had broken the engagement, she never really admitted to herself that things between them had been abnormal.  She spoke of him only with love.  She moved to University and filled her room mate’s heads with stories of her summer love and her tragic breakup, sliding past the nights spent screaming at one another, the anguish in the decision he had forced her to make, and the subsequent months of arguments they had about who loved who more.  She placed him deep inside her breast-bone and only let the beautiful, light parts of him to leak out. It was a perfect ruse.  In time she even forgot about the things that tore them apart and the danger that peaked out from his eyes. It was easy, when surrounded by strangers, to make him out to be a perfect boyfriend, separated by the fate of mismatched years.  So easy that she almost believed it herself.

When he called her during her junior year, three long years parted, and asked to see her, the only thing in her heart was excitement at the prospect of reacquainting herself with a long ago friend- someone she had known inside and out.  Dinner together in an expensive restaurant, a chance to catch up on each others lives, and a drink at the bar- nothing in the night could have possibly indicated that she’d made an error in judgment.  She didn’t even think twice about his invitation back to his room to chat more, rent a movie, talk about old times.  His eyes were radiant with light and his smile was genuine, the paradigm of who she remembered him to be.

Afterwards she couldn’t remember it all. It existed for her in moments, smells, certain pressures against her body.   She could picture his dark hair, glistening and wet and sticking to his cheeks in little clumps and his eyes, a dark and inky black water, on fire with jealousy and rage. She could feel his hands, so strong she could barely hold onto her footing at he pulled her up from the table and caught her, breathless around the waist. 
    “I love you!” He’d shouted, and his voice was full of bile, spitting each letter across the terror in her eyes as if he had said ‘hate’ rather than ‘love’. Barely breathing, her legs buckled as he carried her to the hotel room’s only chair and shoved her down into it. 
    “I love you!” He’d spat again as he landed on his knees in front of the chair, pushing his wet head into her lap, and she felt the liquid heat of his tears spewing over her bare legs, his choking sobs, his hands grabbing and squeezing her ankles. When she put a hand in his wet hair, a little shaky, she felt one of his grab her wrist to hold it there, and she couldn’t make out everything he was saying as he cried in her lap. The cries choked off into silence but his grip stayed firm, and pulling her down to the floor he pressed the weight of his body even more firmly into her, pinioning her against the chair leg and his knees as the anger and control rose in a wave over his eyes.  She remembered the way those emotions seemed to fade, his hands sliding against her face, pushing her throat until she choked for breath, how what replaced the anger and control was blank, smooth, devoid of life, somewhere right beyond her reach.

She had called out for him to stop though he didn’t seem to hear her.  She had struggled against his hands that pulled off her skirt, ripped her nylons, and loosened his pants. He was robotic, unseeing .  Pushing him away was useless in her position on the floor, his grip was firm and she felt, when he pushed himself inside her, a gruesome feeling of familiarity, as if a long lost friend had come home, only was somehow changed to the most vile, cruel, demon from the depths of hell.  Her memories faded still more around the act, and she remembered less- his whisper against her ear, telling her how hideous she was, how no one would ever love her other than him, how she was lucky that someone like him would even stand to look at her ugly face. He repeated “I love you” over and over like a mantra between the grunts and insults and the cruel, hard laugh.  She heard what he meant even if he didn’t say it- she felt it in the way his body consumed her, took from her, as easy as a breath, the most intimate part of herself.  Afterwards, before she could form words like ‘hate’ and ‘rape’, she had followed him to the bed, and sat up beside him while he drifted to sleep. He was like a grotesque child exhausted from a tantrum, but the tantrum was her world unraveling.  When she touched his hair, which was now dried and tangled sweat, she didn’t feel anything at all.  She didn’t feel anything when she gathered her clothes from the floor.  She didn’t feel anything when she made her way back to her dorm room, by taxi, with the sun just yet to crack it’s bloody red greeting across the sky.

She didn’t think about how his hand pressed a little too firmly against her shoulders when he pulled her to his chest.  She couldn’t remember when the line blurred between the fairer, sweeter sex of children and the darker passions of his mind.  Perhaps they had always been there, just under the surface, waiting to spring out, maybe without his even knowing.  Six years her senior, she trusted not only his hand but his instincts, and he taught her, with seemed patience, the arts of love.  She was an ample, able, excited student whose eyes would light up when she saw his hand stray towards his belt.   For four years he led her down a path which grew deeper and darker and so unlike the man she had once known, that it was almost like loving another person.  She never breathed a word of the darkness to another soul, choosing instead to exalt him as passionate and creative- an artist whose strength and character attracted everyone to him.  He never for a moment let his eyes stray to another woman.  Even as he grew more darkly beautiful he clung to her like cool black seaweed, obscuring her vision and her senses.   When she first found out about what happened to him as a child, she used it as an excuse to blame away any strange, violent, or bad behaviors.  Being taken advantage of by an older woman, as a twelve year old boy, must have been deeply traumatic.  Being made to believe that he was happy about the liaison; being manly and grown-up;  must have flayed his perception. She would tell this to herself in the darkest parts of the night, his body curled around her like a snake, hand pressed between her legs as if to assure himself that she belonged only to him.

It wasn’t until she moved in with her roommate that she even grew remotely used to a person being physical with her on a regular basis.  It had started with grabbing her hand or smacking her arm, and had progressed to the easy love of very close friends.  The first time he pulled her in for a hug at night, a night they were away from home and sharing a big, fluffy, vacation bed with oceans of space between them (she’d made sure ahead of time), tears rolled down her face as she tried to appreciate the tenderness and subdue the unnamed panic.  His deep and steady sleep had not been interrupted as the silent sobbing shook her, but she pressed her face into the sheets that separated his skin from hers and forced forced herself to identify the love of a friend in an appropriate physical manifestation.  In time she grew so used to his casual, persistent touch that it didn’t feel foreign or scary, or something that hid a little deeper and touched her a little more completely.  She hadn’t thought about that fear in a long time, though it lived, in wait, to descend upon her at any moment, and despite the tender warmth beside her that called her towards sleep, she couldn’t help but let her thoughts stray further, thinking back to the night when she knew everything had changed. It had been a different body beside her that night.  It had been a different intention entirely that had kept her awake while the man beside her dosed.

She loved to think about what people would say, what they would do, if she ended up being a “cutter”.  Would they pity her?  Would they be angry with her or with themselves for ignoring the tell-tale signs of mental instability?  And what if she aimed that knife a little lower and sliced across her wrist instead?  She would get lost in the simplicity of ending her life.  How her simple, white linen summer top would be stained red like morbid, hippie tie-dye.  She smiled privately at her mental list of those people who would weep when they found out she’d died.  She would place some in the definite category- her best friends, her parents, an old boyfriend- and some she would place in the maybe category- her old professors, a favorite boss, her high school soccer coach- but her preferred list were the ones who she thought would not cry.  She spent hours pouring over the long list of her acquaintances, imagining their reactions, savoring a moment in which she was confidently the most important person in the room- even if she was no longer living. She tried not to think about her list tonight though.  It got tiresome re-imaging so many of the people she had come to know in her life, and though she did end up letting her thoughts stray there for at least a few moments every day, it seemed a waste to spend the coolest of these summer hours thinking about death. The calm of the sleeping presence beside her nagged her and reminded her of the softer and better things in life.  She put her hand against his warm arm and willed herself to concentrate on not pulling away. She would silently count to ten and think about the way his skin felt against her hand.  Skin was her worst enemy in so many ways.  How she hated it.  How she loved it.

It was hot that night, but it had been hot every night for the past week that they lay beside one another on the mattress on the floor of the apartment they would soon be sharing in earnest- construction keeping them confined to one room and on one double bed.  All at once she thought about how different it was to be sleeping, or trying to sleep, beside a man who was not her lover, to share her bed with someone whose love came without strings and without expectations attached.  She regarded the swirling pattern of his hair with a bemused expression, and reached over to touch the small circle where his hair was most thinning.  She considered how silly it felt that she could so love something that made him so self-conscious, but that small, soft place where the hairs were growing thin touched her heart and made her feel safe.  Stroking it once more before the perceived risk of waking him became too great, she regarded her fingers in the shallow light of the early morning.  She had ugly hands.  They were short, and square, and chubby. Her nails grew in an odd, square-ish shape, never looking quite right, even after a trip to the salon, which she went through phases of requiring and detesting depending both on her mood and her pocketbook.  She wore a size nine ring, a sapphire in white gold, and it seemed squished against the pillows of flesh on each side- even before, when she was younger and thinner, her hands were ugly and lumpy.  The additional fifty pounds she carried now did not help add grace to her hands or her features.

Fifty extra pounds seems like an enormous amount. Any normal person would cringe at the thought of adding that much weight to their body. When someone is labeled as “fifty pounds overweight” images spring to mind of rolls of fat streaming out over the tops of blue jeans, pudgy double and triple chins, greasy with fried chicken, and flabby arms squeezed, sausage-like into sleeveless shirts- but really fifty pounds overweight did not cause massive deformity of the body.  Yes, a bigger stomach, meatier arms and legs, a thin layer of fat gently clinging to every body ridge, softening rib cages, cushioning knees- but not so much weight that you couldn’t fit in an airline seat or an amusement park ride.  That is the sort of overweight she was.  Just enough extra to protect her from the roving eye of the average male, just enough to fit into the largest of the regular sizes at a department store without having to stray into the “plus” section.

She wore simple and stylish garments, nothing too expensive, nothing with too low of a cut or too high a heel.  Gentle, easy, middle of the road clothes which solicited as little attention as possible were her favorites- she liked cotton blouses and linen skirts, in solid colors.  She wore her soft, curly, hair short and well manicured in a deep auburn color.  Though she was often complimented on its natural beauty and softness, its unruliness was still a trait she was deeply embarrassed by. To her mind, her one true possession of beauty were her emerald green eyes, dotted with flecks of blue and yellow, and her long auburn lashes which naturally curled at the tips.  She liked to stand in the bathroom mirror and stare deeply into them, until all she could see were layers of color, a pretty swirling mass of green and blue, which would quickly mix with tears, blurring her vision and making her breathing short and choppy.  She couldn’t remember the last time that she didn’t cry when she looked into her own eyes. It was better to look at her hands.  Ugly hands she could handle.  Ugly hands she understood.

Books Read in 2011

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
Mocking Jay – Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins
The Dark Angel-  Meredith Ann Pierce
A Gathering of Gargoyles- Meredith Ann Pierce
The Pearl of the Soul of the World-  Meredith Ann Pierce
The Help – Kathryn Stockett
Mermaid- Carolyn Turgeon
Danse Macabre – Laurel K. Hamilton
The Harlequin – Laurel K. Hamilton
Staying Alive: A Love Story – Laura B. Hayden
 Breaking Dawn - Stephanie Meyer

May the odds be ever in your favor…

We wrapped our arms around each other and tried to shove ourselves back together-
we were making love. Making love.
It was a cold dark evening, such a long time ago,
when by the mighty hand of Jove,
It’s a sad story how we became lonely, two-legged creatures.

The story of the origin of love.

The origin of love.