“I won’t. I’m twelve now and I’m stronger! I have to tell someone. I have to get the poison out of my mind. I can’t take it anymore.”
‘Rosalie, nobody can know about my sickness. You understand? You are the only one who knows. It’s our little secret.’ His words sear across my mind.
“I don’t wanna die.”
‘You won’t if you keep this just between you and me.’
The traffic in my head is too much. Memories—words—voices it’s all too much.
‘Three whole years later? What’s going to happen? Nothing, that’s what. Get over yourself; people get hurt. You suck it up and move the fuck on, little girl.’
Cracking in half, everything draining from my soul.
‘Our secret.’
Torn . . .
Apart . . .
In Seconds . . .
I rubbed my eyes, hoping the harder I pressed my fists into my sockets the horrid visions in my head would stop. Fuck, I didn’t need this tonight. It had been six months since my last episode. Six months of freedom from the nightmares. The repulsive feeling curdled my stomach, my heart was in a race it couldn’t seem to win, no matter how fast it was beating. My memories created a desert in my throat that day. It shattered the peace I’d tried to embrace in my adulthood. A hope with a sliver of peace only available to little girls who had found their voices as adults.
I was the little girl who sweated out the poisonous recollections from her flesh night after night. Tonight, the memories drenched my skin, dampening my clothes. The only physical shift I could manage was rocking back and forth. I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapped my arms around my legs and surrendered to the fact that the act of one monster, one hour, of one day, eleven years ago, destroyed a lifetime I was entitled to have.
Pushing myself, I got up and walked around. I figured if I changed my physical place in the world, maybe it would change my reaction to it. I couldn’t pinpoint why my body betrayed me or my mind fucked with me so hard, other than pure exhaustion. I didn’t want to be that little broken girl anymore. I didn’t want to own the ache that scarred more than my physical body anymore. I just wanted to pick up my life from the point where I shackled my heart in iron locks with steel chains. I wanted to pull out the weeds of hate that were buried deep. Weeds that sprang from the collateral damage of a childhood tainted by a despicable fuck who chose to capture my innocence and hold it for ransom my entire life.
“Ro? You okay?” Sybil whispered shifting to look at me from her bed.
“I just couldn’t sleep,” I answered. The problem of sharing a studio apartment with someone, was that our beds were merely steps away from each other, only separated by an open space we conveniently called the living room.
“You having those dreams again?” Sybil propped herself up on her elbow.
“Yeah, but I’ll get through them. Nothing I haven’t dealt with before.”
“Have you thought about going to one of them shrinks? You know those types you go and spill your guts to and they tell you if you’re crazy and shit?” She said, wiggling across her bed, she adjusted herself to sit up.
“Naw, I’ve always found ways to work through the shit clogging my head. The less people know about my business, the easier it is for me to forget about it. I sure in the hell don’t need anyone beating that fucked-up day into my head over and over again. Besides, I don’t have the money to pay some shrink to fuck with my head,” I answered truthfully. Every last dime I had saved was for the day I could get the fuck out.
“They say it helps to talk about it to a professional,” she snapped.
“Who’s they?”
“They,” she answered.
“Yeah, I heard you say they, I just wanna know what they you are referring to?” I argued.
“They, the fucking shrinks,” she spat.
“Right, ‘cause, there are plenty of fucking shrinks sick enough to implant fake memories into your dome. Trust me Sybil, it didn’t help me, all it did was teach me how to keep these bastards out of my head. We are manipulated enough selling our bodies for money. These shrinks are nothing more than the cheap ass John waiting to take advantage of you.”
Okay, so maybe it was my defense mechanism; I always made someone the bad guy. But let’s face it; life wasn’t always about finding something beautiful in a heaping pile of shit. I fuck for money; I made guys come because their wives or girlfriends didn’t have the gall to do half the kinky shit their men fantasized about. So their boyfriends or husbands found me on the corner of Geary and Taylor and paid a fist full of dead presidents to live out their kinkiest fantasies. There’s nothing noble or life altering in what I do. I’m a whore.