27/01/2024
I finished My dark Vanessa today. I wasn't expecting it to hit so close to home, I had to keep putting it down and reminding myself that I am a separate entity from the book.
I wonder if you'd view it in the same way, the dulled abuse under a guise of adoration. I wonder whether you'd see her as broken, unable to grow from the fifteen year old girl he loved her into being. I wonder whether you'd scream as I did when her mother found the Polaroid, helpless to the truth and unable to save her drowning daughter.
It has made me question whether you liked something similar in me, an ember of malleability, young and socially isolated enough that you could be my saviour. Do you try and replicate me in your students now? Do you see me in the girls who come into your classroom, one too many buttons undone on their shirt?
I loved you, I love you still, even though it was abuse. What made you kiss me that afternoon, what alcohol fortified your courage to ask an eighteen year old if she was a virgin? I was just on that cusp of womanhood, legally an adult so the school could do very little, but chaste and sweet enough that I was deliciously wet between my legs.
Do you now have to satiate this, this hunger I poured into you? A new, chosen one from your graduating class each year? I feel it, the itch of needing an older man's eyes on me again, a reminder that I'm still young enough for someone. You were my formative years, and I still feel the high in replicating you in every man I see.
