My Dark Vanessa

I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.

People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.

The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.

Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.

Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.

It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.

I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.

Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.

To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing

She didn't understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn't agree to.

How much strength does it take to hurt a little girl? How much strength does it take for the girl to get over it? Which one of them do you think is stronger?

It's both creepy and out of my control, this ability I have to notice so much about other people when I'm positive no one notices anything at all about me.

He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.

Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.

Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.

There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.

Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?

He’s the only person who ever understood that desire. Not to die, but to already be dead.

He's always going to be old. He has to be. That's the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.

He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.

I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.

An older man using a girl to feel better about himself - how easily the story becomes a cliché if you look at it without the soft focus of romance

I'm a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so long I can fly for miles. I'm the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.

I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.

This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction. Once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.

So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.

We're born, we live, we die, he says and the choices we make in the middle, all those things we agonize over day after day, none of those matter in the end

My worst habit, according to my mother, is how I deflect compliments with self-deprecation. I need to learn how to accept praise. It boils down to confidence, she says, or lack thereof.

I´m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.