I might as well start this essay like I start all of the others and acknowledge that the details of this story are receding into dissociation, a bit like your hairline. I know you happened to me a little after I turned thirty. I may have been thirty-one or two. It was the year when I was almost thin enough. I only ate yogurts for lunch over several months; and, I may have been under 160 pounds. I felt I was still at the large end of normal, but small enough not to attract derision wherever I went as a “fatty” or a “hog” or “Piglet” or whatever bacon analogy the patriarchy might randomly assign. The Black men I worked with at the community social services agency, always a bit more forward than the Caucasian ones, only told me that year that they liked thick women. I had colleagues who were a bit larger to whom they said they liked big women. Any you, last man standing, were charmed enough by my intellect and my eagerness to please you that you overlooked what you considered to be my aesthetic flaws.
I remember how the sun came in and warmed you bed that day in July when you pulled of my plain, white, panties, size large, out from under my unremarkable denim skirt, size sixteen. I wanted your fingers inside of me. Two of them. I came and then I sucked your cock. I remember, very well, when you took off my panties, how grateful I was that I had lost the weight. Everything from that point forward feels like it could have happened in a casino. It was all about numbers and odds.
I remember the first time you ever told me you felt cheated. By me, of course. It wasn’t about my weight that time. It was, I think, my “mental health”. Something had happened. I had gotten upset. Not self-directed-violent upset. Not suicidally depressed upset. It was I drank a bottle of wine and smoked a bowl and wanted to talk to you upset. You didn’t feel comfortable. More accurately, I didn’t MAKE you comfortable. I felt badly; and, I consumed all that wine and pot without even once considering how it might make you feel. It made you feel cheated. I remember, I could not believe what I was hearing. Was this really the man, more than old enough to be my father, who had taken off my panties on a sunny day in July and made me feel calm for, perhaps, the first time ever in my life? Did he really mean he felt cheated by what I am, as opposed to what he thought I was before? That couldn’t possibly be. And, if it was so, who actually SAYS something like that to the person they love?
Thus began a conversation and a narrative that lasted the full ten years of our relationship. It was always about me, and “how I was doing”. Was I stable enough for you to love, or were we “just friends” for the week? Was I swallowing the pills like I was supposed to, or was I having a “relapse”? Was the abusive cunt-therapist you hand-picked for me pleased with what I said to her, or had I “acted borderline” in my session, causing her to abort it at 30 minutes, while still charging me the full price? What else was I to expect from her, you demanded. I wish I could say it was the longest, most tedious conversation of my life. It was close, though.
I always have said I am not much of a gambler. That I avoid gambling because I addict to everything else so easily it seems best not to start. Many more times, I heard you say you felt cheated. Always in a sickening, sniveling, entitled tone that made me want to break you fucking neck. And yet, I think I did gamble on you. And, you cheated so much more than I did, if I ever did at all.
I feel cheated, twenty-three-years-older man.
I was cheated that day in July, before the millennium changed, as the sunlight warmed the smooth linens on your bed and reflected the pale yellow you had painted the walls, a breeze from the open window moving the paper crane you had made and hung from the ceiling. I was cheated, in one of the best years of my life, of a lover who was literally anything more than a marginally controlled pedophile. You had no business touching me; and, you knew it. Your fingers dripped with guilt as you pulled them out of my cunt. But, you knew the others had, so you could as well. And, you knew you had done it before. Somehow, you apparently felt this wasn’t as bad.
A few years later, you cheated me again. Yes, man whose oldest daughter is eight years younger than I. Like you. I feel cheated. Entitled to so much more. Another “relapse”. More wine, more pot. The harder stuff wouldn’t come until later. On the advice of cunt-therapist, you drove me to the hospital and signed me into the psychiatric ward. Where I would be raped one night by a large, Black man who attended the community center where I worked as a “client”. Where the night nurse would tell me that injuries like mine were, “What happens when we throw ourselves out of bed because we aren’t getting the drugs we want.” Where my records were falsified and my future was sealed. You cheated me out of so much that day.
I came out of the hospital and went back in. I don’t know anymore how many times. I doubled-down on our “relationship”, putting even more into you and your family than I had before in hopes a smidgen of your attention. Another orgasm on your smooth sheets. A little more calm. The conversation about my “wellness” and “recovery” got louder and droned continually. It took me three years to tell you I had been raped in the hospital that first time, and by whom, because it was an individual known to you. I told you on a Friday evening. Your response was, “Oh well, you have had so many cocks inside of you, what is one more?” I had doubled-down hard and hedged nothing. I didn’t even challenge you on that statement. I was sure you would come through with loving kindness and plan some enjoyable distraction for the weekend. I didn’t hear from you for two weeks. It was the first time ever that I felt really contaminated by the rape.
I really went for broke in the next two or three years. I planned and facilitated a move for your oldest daughter. Baked endless gourmet treats for holiday dinners and helped care for your middle daughter who went in and out of rehab a couple of times before kicking Heroin. I ferried you to and from the airport for the extended vacations you had been taking since your retirement. You cheated me, man-with-the-middle-daughter-you-call-only-the-borderline. Every time you commented on how much weight I had gained. Every time you offered me a plate of plain greens with sour, red, vinegar. Every time you told me how under-employed I was, most likely as a result of my weight, but also, certainly, because no one ever would forget those hospitalizations, nor should they, of course. Let me say it again. You fucking cheated me.
So many other things happened in those last couple of years, as you might have guessed if you have given it any thought at all, though, knowing you as I do, I do not feel even slightly inclined to believe that you have. When I took in your middle daughter because you were too abusive for her to stand, of course she told me what you had done to her. I lost all my credibility as a human being by not believing her and loving you even a few months past that horrible point in time. It was her, of course, who brought the hard drugs into my life. Years of your toxicity in my blood had mad my tolerance high and my need for something a bit stronger to blot you out intense. I don’t think you noticed, no-man’s land, but I am fucking telling you now.
Ten years are gone now since I sat on your porch swing with you and told you I was not, again, going to assume the “just friends” role in your life so that you could, again, date someone you found more interesting while I continued to fill all of the menial, care-taking roles in your life. “You don’t want to be friends?” You asked, a bit surprised.
“No.” I said. “I am walking away because this is what I want.”
And, I did.
These are the first days of 2018 and it is almost eight years since your middle daughter was found, dead, in your house while you were on a trip to Montana with your new wife. That was also a beautiful day in mid-July. She was dead from an overdose. You and your remaining family called it suicide, though I don’t believe that was probably the case. I cried when I found out I could not view her body because the funeral home had cremated her before I got there. I sent flowers to her memorial service, but I did not attend and disrupt your new life. The truth was, I did not want to see the new wife, there in my place. I did not want to spend another day as one of your discarded women (the cunt-therapist’s term for what I would be if I did not tow the line of “recovery”). I reached out tentatively to your other daughters to have someone with whom to very occasionally grieve. The youngest one eventually told me I was attention-seeking and “pretending I was a part of her family.” Yes, man-who-is-now-near his own death, there is no way in hell they don’t know.
I met you almost twenty years ago and feel cheated to this day. Yet, I am not the one who was cheated the most. If you think it was you, man-without-compassion-or-love, you can go fuck yourself.
©2018 MildlyDysthymicInAmerica
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