Do you remember that night we stayed up talking about all the ways we hated ourselves? You took me on the grand tour of your psychosis, from the scars on your wrists to the demons hiding in your closet. It only made me love you more—that way you lived in the dark and made no fucking apologies for it. To this day, I still look for you.
I still see your face clearly. Sweet and innocent, despite the monster terrorizing your insides. Deep and dirty, the way I was desperate to hold onto every piece of you. Empty and alone, just like the way you left me because I was simply a waste of time.
Your long, dark hair surrounds me, and I reach out to touch it in my dreams. (Because that’s the only place you exist anymore.) I follow you through the depths of my mind, hoping to travel back to a time you’re still alive. Your soft face. Full lips. Dangerous look in your eyes. Blood covering your lost soul.
I still see your face clearly. It’s soft and perfect. Kissable, though I never quite had the nerve. You make your way over to me, and the man who connects us sings raw, rough, and dirty about all the ways you never fucked me. (Is it wrong to think I never got to own that part of you?) Would you still be alive if you knew how much I wanted you? Want is such a terrible word, though. I craved you. And, yeah, maybe I was a little obsessed with you for all the wrong reasons.
I told you about him, about the man who ruined my childhood. It was my way of trying to show you that I knew what it was like to be fucked up too. That I knew how it felt to live in that dark place of wanting to feel consumed by love but never quite able to reach it. Never good enough. Always the wrong person. Forever stuck in the wrong time. That’s who I am at my core: fucking wrong all day.
Don’t ask me why you’re here still living in my story. You did not see me as much of a person all those decades ago, no matter how much I tried to grow into one. I think it’s more about the story you pulled out of me. The voice I finally gave my pain and confusion, forever trapped in the ways our eyes met. It was demonic, this way I felt for you, and it always will be. Some demons just stick around as long as you’ll let them.
The story I’m about to tell you is one of the most vivid memories I have of my childhood, and you’ll soon figure out why. I don’t have a lot of those these days because they’ve gotten stuck in all the ways my mind tries to protect me from myself.
Since you’re dead, anyway, I think you’ll appreciate that all the people in this story are dead, too, but don’t feel bad that they’re not here to defend themselves. Because it’s all true, no matter how much they tried to deny it when they were alive.
I’m sitting in the car with my mother, anxiety rising because of the plot twist I’m about to reveal. It’s just me and her driving in California during a trip we took all those years ago. My face says: Mom, I have something bad to tell you, and I hope you don’t hate me after I do. But my words come out much differently.
“Mom, Grandpa is molesting me.”
She stops the car, and I tell her the story, at least all the things from over the years I can remember. The kissing. The nakedness. The secret hiding place. The gifts. The man was grooming me, though I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain that.
And she stops the car.
Let me tell you something about my mother. By that time, she had already escaped an abusive marriage to her first husband, and she’d been married to my dad for a long time by then. (My dad is the hero in all the stories, by the way.) My mom survived trauma, and I’m pretty sure there’s so much I don’t know about how much she survived. Needless to say, she was fucking pissed.
My mom drove straight over to their house to confront her mother. And I guess that’s where the story stops, in a way, because she shut it all the fuck down. Said I was a liar. That it couldn’t be true. And the way he looked at me that day? I’ll never fucking forget it. Dark. Looming. Monstrous.
Years later, my mother confided in me that there had been other accusations lodged against him. And that was the full stop for her. My pain never seemed to matter after that day. If it did, she didn’t have the tools to show me how much she regretted what happened to me. And I hated her for a long time after that. It never really stopped until after she died herself. It really is a shame how we let generational trauma kill every little good thing about us.
That story was merely the beginning of all the ways in which I hated myself. But it’s all tangled up in my memories of a young man I met who killed himself before he ever got to live his life. I think about that often.
He was beautiful, smart, fun, and interesting. A lot of the music I listen to from the nineties was because of his influence. But, hold on tight for a moment, because he wasn’t really all those things. Though it’s not my story to tell, he did a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people. In dark, unforgivable ways. It’s important you know that because I think if you’re going to remember someone, you need to remember them as they really were. I didn’t know that version of him, but that doesn’t mean the monster didn’t exist.
We all have that dual way about us. Though my demons might manifest much differently than his did, they are still there. I’ve lived an entire life of demonizing myself and some of the people around me.
Those stories are here. They are raw, ugly, and unforgivable in a certain light. But, if you’re going to talk about what happened to you, you also need to talk about all the things you made happen.
Talking has always been hard for me. I have an entire world inside that’s always wanted to break free and dance around the universe, but I could never figure out how to do it. For as long as I can remember, my mouth has always betrayed me.
Speak. And they won’t understand you. Speak. And they will judge you. Speak. And they will hate you. Speak. And they’ll never love you. Speak. And you’ll always be the wrong person. Speak. And they’ll laugh at you. Speak. And you’ll no longer be the good girl they want you to be. Speak. And you’ll always be broken.
But, fuck, man, I’m so fucking tired of feeling so broken all the time. Aren’t you? It’s time to speak. It’s time to tell your stories. It’s time to use your voice for something important. It’s time to become the person you always wanted to be.
In the years before he died, Von and I crossed paths many times. One of the first times that happened was at the Nine Inch Nails/Marilyn Manson/Jim Rose Circus show in 1994. He went down into the pit while Trent Reznor played, moshing around with Twiggy Ramirez and/or Marilyn Manson, as they hadn’t quite caught fire back in those days. He talked about being hit by a water bottle and fucking up his contact. I saw him again not long after when Manson returned to play a small show with Clutch in Oklahoma City.
Von cared a lot about music; we all did, especially back then. It was a way for us to figure who we are, where we’d come from, and who we wanted to become. I wish I had known the life Von wanted to build for himself. Maybe he wanted to know that too. But, at some point, the pain he held inside became too much for him. Whether the things he did were good or bad, I still memorialize him as a human being who I remember from time to time. His life marked me in ways that linger, and I wish he were still here to understand how meaningful that is.
Perhaps the mask I wear is made up of other people’s faces because I want to see myself in them so badly. I see something powerful in the real ways they are unapologetically themselves, and I admire the depth it takes to get there.
Here’s my truth about Von. In the grand scheme of things, we were nothing to each other, hardly even friends. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t be important to the way I interpret the world. I also think it says something more about the impact we make every day. You never really know if that girl or that guy thinks you have something beautiful to show the world.
I’m still under the impression that I do, and that’s why I’m telling my story.
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