Original Writings

Borderline

The world doesn’t stop for people like us. Cars buzz down faded highways, broken yellow lines separating them and serving as invisible barriers between the metal that encases other soul; the triumphs and burdens borne by these souls a mystery to the small child pressing her face to the glass, lustful for the stories begging to be told through the tinted windows of these cars. The humming of the road pierces her cheek as her baby fat pulses against the coolness of the window, the closest thing to silence she has experienced in weeks. Life moves at a pace her chubby little legs can’t match, its wheels turning as too-big-for-her-body feet weary and stumble, coltlike, until destiny finds her prostrate and resigned to change.

An prematurely lined and scarred hand reaches up to the glass to join the ruddy cheek, nails bitten to the quick and swollen with red stripes of the painful remnants of her cuticle. A heavy book dangles lazily from her other hand, a sore finger nestled near the climax of the story within, hugged securely by the exposition and the resolution. She sighs into the coolness, craving the air outside and wishing with ardent fervor that her mother would open the window to let a giant gust in and fly away on the planes and shifting veils of invisible billowing clouds of air. She begs her mother with a plaintive whine, and her mother’s large, shining eyes flicked back to her and she regally inclined her head to the eager child. A window is cracked, and with a whoosh, the air broke its stillness and the child melts into the breeze.

I often found escape on long road trips, my mind drifting through the heavy tendrils of wind creeping into the nearly always open window. I find comfort in the wind. It never stays touching you for long, always moving, never planting roots, and on the wind I can feel my spirit soar. I ride the wind, cresting high and skimming air pockets with my ethereal soul’s toes, until I enter through a crack in the dark windows of a gold SUV. I whistle through the thin crevice and quiet as I fill the cavernous interior of the haphazardly-cared for Escalade. I embrace the scene before me and melt into the lives of the occupants of the vehicle, a tall, elegant brunette with a long, thick braid, and a young girl who looked like a smaller, awkward version of the elegant woman. The girl was all arms and legs and wire rimmed spectacles and had not grown into her mother’s timeless features and huge eyes heavy with curling, dark lashes. I always wind up  here, in this vehicle, with Her. My spirit form withdraws for a moment, for the elegant woman is my mother, and the gangly nymphet is me.

You may wonder at my use of the term “nymphet,” taken from the appalling and breathtaking novel Lolita, which consumed me after I read it in just three days. The prose is confusing and poignant, and Humbert Humbert, the wretched abomination, almost garners sympathy in his love for the wayward nymphet Lo. 

I was a wayward nymphet, too, in my way. 

The wind I have become recoils at the memory upon which I have stumbled, and I speed through the crack back into the safety of the rushing air, flitting back from my memory into the safety of my haphazardly cared-for silver Chevy. Some days, it’s safer not to roam. Some days, one attractive thought appears, and I relish in the sultry darkness of succumbing to the cacophony of rage and fear and insecurity that twists and writhes in my brain like nasty little tendrils of ooze instead of the pink and plump coils of the brain we see in anatomy classes. The nasty bit of ooze, I later discovered, is a powerful entity. It is the force behind erupting volcanoes, the spark that fires a gun, the tectonic plates that cause an earthquake or a tsunami. It is the demon that causes a woman to shoot her husband, the mastermind of devious escape routes for problems that don’t exist.

It’s the emptiness in your heart when it goes quiet at night, and the desire to fill it with a hard cock. It makes you rationalize:

Letting a stranger tie you up and fuck you. Contemplate a gangbang.

Visiting a man who can’t get you off and leaving his house to get better dick.

Inviting men over at 2AM.

Driving the next town over in a snowstorm for mediocre sex.

Blow and swilling Jim Beam at an old mill with a drug dealer you’ve known for two days.

Blowing him on the roof of your dad’s car, in his dad’s cornfield.

Riding the Sky Lift at a National Park, whiskey in my backpack and a 2g blunt behind my ear.

Running from the cops in a park, loaded on booze and weed. Never again.

Letting a homeless stranger crash on your couch. He’s hot, and he’s here. Sleep with him.

Lucky I’m not dead.

I wasn’t a child when it started, but an adolescent. I’d had experiences, of course. The first time I was described as curvy, or womanly, I wasn’t even nine. My hips were full and I wore bras from third grade on. Men coveted the nymphet, and I bridled and blushed and accepted their praise and basked in the warmth of feeling beautiful. Boys my age didn’t notice, but men noticed the swell of my breast and the innocence in my eyes and naked in their vision I grew hungry for the greedy eyes of men. 

Seventeen. The year the wheels began to turn, the spokes spiked and tearing into flesh as they tumble down the hill, down the hill to a dark place, to hell and back and the end of the earth. Seventeen was the year the elegant woman got sick, and with that tumor infected the whole family, and the nymphet met her faun. How fitting, this imagery, for the man looked like a wicked satyr, with gray stormclouds lighting his craggy, goateed face and the thickest, matted, gray streaked brown hair surrounding his cruel face like a shaggy graying lion. I didn’t mean to date him. He was in his twenties, and spoke sweet words in a deep, gentle voice. I wasn’t like the other girls, and my child’s brain relished the attention from this man. When he said he loved me, I said it back out of curiosity and because I had to.

Things changed after I said I love you. He kept me up until morning on school nights, leaving me to sleep for an hour until school started. I cried to him to let me go to bed. Teeth gritted and eyes flashing with rage, he utters my full name and growls “Julia Irene, I forbid you to go to bed.” I hem, scared of this new side to the man I am convincing myself to love, for he so desperately needs me to love him back. I lost a lot of sleep the summer before I turned eighteen.

He kept naked pictures of me as his phone lockscreen until I turned eighteen. He’d show them to any man who asked. Child porn. He said that he was into BDSM, and that it was the only way he could have sex. He was going to be my dom now, so he would show his property to whomever he pleased. I shivered at the sound of that gravel, convinced that this was true love, and the sickness turned me on.

We had sex more the first night than in the rest of our three year relationship. I was seventeen, and after I turned eighteen the sex stopped. Ten months of my eighteenth year were sexless, but he would talk about other women’s bodies in detail. Tell me he was going to “get a girl, a hot Asian.” Always talking about women as objects, and always lauding features I did not have. He explained I had gotten too fat and he simply wasn’t attracted to me any more. “Julia Irene, I forbid you” became a chorus in our house. 

Food smacked out of my hands. I was fat enough.

Searching my phone. I cheated over text twice. 

Locking my computer up to make me do the dishes. I cook, I clean. He cooks, I clean.

Kicking me out of the gaming room. I was too loud. 

A butcher knife in the shower. Lights off. Heeeeeere’s Johnny!

Throwing my cat at the wall. He shit on the floor.

Yelling at 4:30AM for biscuits and gravy. Still can’t eat ‘em.

No, the world won’t stop for people like us. It cannot. What happens if the world stops turning? Everything would shift and crash and life as we know it would end. Waves would tumble towers, fires would probably raze California and Australia, of course. Don’t end a name with -ia if you don’t expect some type of uproar, after all. California. Australia. Julia. I feel rage, and hurt, and emptiness, and recklessness, and impulse. So much impulse. I crave rash decisions, crave them as I have never craved anything else. 

My single greatest defining feature is my resilience and ability to thrive despite everything that has happened in my life; and, in fact, my value has only increased with the blows that have been dealt. This story is not a cry for help. This is for me, this is my story. My path. In this book I lay my shoes out at the beginning of my road, ready for you to walk in them. If you walk in my shoes, you’ll find a story not unlike your own, not unlike your mom’s, or her mom’s. Walk in my shoes on the borderline.