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I remember, being too big.

I woke up to the sound of my blackberry alarm in pitch darkness.

What... Why was it so dark?
Fuck.
Welcome to winter.
I dragged out my coat from the cupboard and pulled it on as I shut the front door behind me. Memories came flooding back. As a teenager, I pulled on my frumpy school fleece or jacket as I went to the bus stop. A huge cloak of ugliness and foul shapelessness - years ago I felt the disgusting poison of my blood seeping out the pores of my face, ugliness, fatness. Why couldn't I be fresh and pure and lovely, why did I have to be an unclean lump?
I pulled on my jacket on the morning of the new season to feel these same emotions flooding back - covering up the pretty pencil skirt and fitted blouse with a woollen jacket and woollen discomfort. I felt the cold daylight burning my skin as it had been for years, harshly highlighting the foulness of my skin, my attempts to patch over my natural ugliness - but nature is harsh, is cruel is TRUE - the natural daylight shows you who I really am.

I felt a sense of blunt despair, an autumn grimness. I had been feeling this for years - since I was a little girl - years of self disgust - would take a lifetime to change - it would never change.

I feel power when I feel beautiful.
I've lost it with Chris now. I avoid him because I don't want him to realise what a mistake he made in finding me attractive. I know he got it wrong. I know he's going to see that. So I ignore him and hide from him. So he gets the wrong impression. Again. I told him, so he knows, I'm a horrible person.
 
I sit here in bed craving him, craving his comfort, the tightness of his arms around me.
That's all.
I crave a father. I want love - the unconditional kind - the fatherly kind - the kind where I can cry and the only thing that matters is that I stop.
Oh hell, oh hell, I am a grown woman and I write like a child,
think like a child, dream like a child, cry like a child.
 
Shed tears for a daddy I lost a lifetime ago. Little child. Little child who shed a tear drop on the card she wrote to partner the flowers on his coffin.
 
I run to the arms of a man - with an ever-changing face, knowing that I'm not running to him, but to who I want him to be, who he never will be, a face across the room that I cannot see but always feel.
 
And now, I have no understanding of l-o-v-e. I only know the way men feel for me is something else, something I do everything in my power to control,
 
control
 
control
 
control
 
but I have no power
 
I want to shrink and have his arms about me.
 
I am too big now.

Comments

  1. Your writing is so beautiful and honest - I'm so glad you're back. My father left when I was very little so I know what it's like to go searching for that unconditional love as you put it and that sense of security and stability. Funny how we go looking for it in the most transient, dangerous and damaging of places isn't it? xoxo

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