Daddy’s Girl

I know where I belong. How could I not?

In the house where I was born, my father showed me what my life is going to be like. He put his hands around my little neck and he locked his ankles around my little hips and he told me, over and over again, that this is all I will ever be good for.

Some things you know way down deep. Some things you learn and they go even farther, they penetrate so far beneath the surface of your skin that their poison takes hold and grows, and grows. Until all that you know how to sow is misery like the kind that you grew up with, misery like you think you know that’s all that you will ever ever get.

I’m not sure she had a name. I’m not sure what she looked like or what her voice sounded like because when I reach to that place where my memories of her lie, all I get is a hazy white fog. All I see is his face, hovering above me on my bed, telling me what I am worth. What I will always always be worth.

She was worth everything to me. Did I tell you that already? I want to push my face into her lap like a cat, I want to let her gold rub off on me. She is coated in a fine dust of perfect and that perfect looks gold and that is what I want, is to be perfect. Is to take on a little bit of her perfect until she can stand to look at me without seeing this. This thing I am monster and woman. The monster and the beauty. Some things work best in fairy tales. Some things should stay there.

I am that disgusting thing, now. Doesn’t matter if I was originally. Some things change you and there is no going back, no matter how long you slog and I have been trying, I have read all the books on trauma I have fought my way out of hell after hell but here I am. Ugly and all elbows. Hardly able to talk when it comes to those I love. Lonely with eyes too big and a cunt too small.

When I think about sex I think about my father. I think about burly men with too much hair and I think about that hair scratching me, I think about the cheeks of a man who needs a shave. I think about what it means to be fucked like how fucking someone over and fucking them sometimes happen at the exact same time. I think about how if I ever want to be touched between my legs again then I had better resign myself to being laid out underneath some other man’s body who is my man in another form but really the same. Always the same.

I think about how I will never escape my father. How being fat on me looks different from fat on other people, how other fat women get fucked or fuck and they wake up the next day next to partners who will be there the next day and the next. I think about how even love looks different on me, panicky, like need. Like desperation to be touched so when I get too desperate I stop eating. Or I find a way to get my body beneath some man’s body who is my father with another face. I think about how if I want sex then I have to accommodate the pain and the tearing and the despair. How if I want to be normal I have to lie and say I like it like this, I like the pain. If I am not a thing that someone hurts, fucks, tears open, then I will never be a thing that someone touches. Because I cannot be a thing someone uses I do not want to be a thing someone lays hold of just for fun then lets go of and. My father told me I will never be a thing that anyone loves.

I have to believe him. He’s here, he’s always here, in the corner of my mind where I have him penned up but not yet dead, no. Not yet.

If you help me kill my father in my mind, maybe I can save some part of myself that she can love. So I do not have to watch her from the corners and hate everyone else she dances with who is not me. I am really a very good dancer it’s just dancing is something I do not do, like laughing too loud or flirting with someone I would actually really really like to see naked or. Loving is something I am learning how to do but I am convinced I am doing it incorrectly. Even if no one else knows I know.

I know there is something wrong with me, that pervades everything I do. I do. I know that.

I know I belong in the corner watching and she belongs in the center doing and I cannot touch her, she whirls away and I want to follow and maybe she would have asked me to follow if I had told her I wanted to. There are so many maybes in this world in this life they pile on top of my chest I am the Wicked Witch of the East the maybes are the bricks of a house that belongs to some little girl who is not me. A little girl with a home to go back to.

It has taken me this long to learn that sexuality is not my enemy even though. Because I am touchable and it is not my fault the men who are my father in different forms do not ask first, it is not my fault they think that I want them or they think they can get away with touching me anyway. I want to be touched I want to be touched by her I want. To be touchable to the people that I love.

I want to be touched by the woman that I love.

I don’t want to start a goddam revolution I just want her.

I don’t want to start a goddam revolution but to let her love me back, I will. I will.