The first man I ever hated was my father. It was the way he spoke to me like I was nothing, disposed of me and my mother as fast as he could, his disdain loud and all-consuming. There was a violence to him, a violence I found regularly in other men after he died—almost as if he had passed it on, made sure I was exposed to cruelty after he was gone.
My mother only tried to kill herself once. I was on the couch trying to find something to watch before bed. She half crawled, half stumbled out of the bathroom, where I thought she was taking a bath. She was fully clothed and covered in vomit.
I think I made a mistake, was all she said.
My dad had already left by then, and when I was forced to stay with him for the rest of that year, while the court decided if my mother was fit to parent, he brimmed with resentment.
I don’t get it, he said. It’s always fucking something with you two.
He had a new family at that point, a young son and nondescript wife—a woman he’d knocked up while he was still living with us.
Your mother is cursed, he told me. And she passed it on to you.
He was right about that, because he was the one who damned her.
I was drawn to men who thought they could fix me because I knew they couldn’t. These were usually older men with money and families they ignored for days on end. These were men who bought second apartments for the sole purpose of cheating—apartments they readily invited me into, with dark kitchen cabinets and remote-controlled lighting. They thought they were gods, touched me with big, clammy hands, laid me down on their expensive sheets, and begged to choke me.
I knew there was something wrong with me and that there always had been. A therapist I saw once told me I had a self-hatred that ran deep, that I got off on the pain of being horribly dispensable. But what she didn’t understand, what someone like her could never comprehend, was that this way of living was my only form of protection. To me, it was sacred.
I only fell in love once, and it was by mistake. Completely against my beliefs and the hard-hearted religion I’d formed in my solitude, I committed a cardinal sin. Graham was a man with long dark hair who lied to me in all the ways I didn’t know I craved. A boyfriend of an acquaintance of mine, he wasn’t particularly funny or handsome, and he certainly wasn’t kind. He looked at me like I mattered, swept me up in the drama of feeling important at a time in my life in which I knew I was not.
We slept together the night we met, in the bathroom of the bar where his girlfriend sat waiting and unaware. It was fast and rough; my face pressed against the mirror as he bent me over the sink.
I need you, he said as he came, and even though it wasn’t true and I was someone he would quickly forget, I etched his desire into my skin.
He didn’t wear a condom, and it wasn’t until later, once I was back at my apartment, the adrenaline of what I’d done wearing off, that I was gripped with shame. I was younger then and hadn’t yet fully grasped what it meant be a woman.
He came over in the middle of the night with no notice and fucked me like I was something he wanted to get rid of. Afterwards, he talked to me until the sun rose—his hopes, his dreams, all the ways he could not feel. Each time he left, it was an execution.
He ignored me for long stretches of time, each unanswered text sending me into a period of despair and self-loathing. Whenever he decided to reenter my life—randomly and without explanation—I was ready and willing, exceptionally pathetic in my one-sided devotion.
Eventually, he admitted to falling for someone else, a woman he’d recently gotten pregnant. This was after he and my acquaintance parted ways, after a slew of other women he sometimes mentioned when he was feeling especially cruel. I told him he would be a terrible father, and he told me no one would ever love me.
This, from him, somehow did not hurt in the way he intended, because I knew in my bones that it was true.
Sometimes I missed my mother. It would wake me up in the middle of the night, how deeply I needed her. She was soft in all the ways I was not. I molded myself opposite her, had seen firsthand how much the world took from her and never gave back.
She loved fully and recklessly, forgave foolishly, hoped in vain for the same treatment in return. There were others besides my father, men that hated her, truly and intensely, who lied to her, manipulated her, turned her into a fading ghost.
You need to kill them before they kill you, I said.
I promised her this was the only way to salvation.
Some days she couldn’t leave her bed. She only ate if I made something and fed it to her, the fork in my hand, her lips lazily parted. She touched my face, and I knew that hers was a life I did not want, a life I could not accept, one that she could not watch me endure. These were the things that ruined me.
Occasionally, I met someone who seemed utterly innocent, like they hadn’t yet encountered brutality. Some kind of anomaly, a person unmarked by pain. Alessandro was young and Italian, participating in an international apprenticeship at the branding agency I worked for. He was promised six months of American career experience, a very small stipend, and a studio apartment that one of the owners rented out as an Airbnb when it wasn’t in use by interns, secret rendezvous, and the like. It was a very big company, filled with very rich and powerful men.
When we first met, he told me I was beautiful. Bellissima. It was a line like any other, delivered by someone who thought they meant it. He still lived with his mother in Dozza, a small village near Bologna, and he had never met his father. I told him to be grateful for life’s mercies.
For a few months, we played house. I spent almost all my time with him, eating and drinking and sleeping, having gentle sex where he thanked me afterwards, like I was saving his life. It only took him two weeks to tell me he loved me, and I said it back even though I knew I didn’t mean it.
He opened himself whole, confessed his life to me in ways that were holy. I tried to take his goodness for myself, but it was a part of him, trapped inside his skin and blood.
I broke his heart on purpose, when things felt too serious. He asked me to come back to Dozza with him, to live with him and his mother, and meant it. Instead, I found the first man I could, an ugly man with the face of a dog, someone I knew would hurt me if they got the chance. He called me names in his car, and I wore them like armor.
This was the person I was, the person I would always be.
My half-brother kept in touch throughout the years. Although I never spoke to my father again, after that horrible year I was court-mandated to live with him, I still heard from Noah from time to time.
I’d like to stay in each other’s lives, he wrote.
I wondered if he was close to my father, if they had the kind of relationship I never did, couldn’t even imagine. My father used to tell me I was not special—words that became an oath, a feeling of insignificance he was committed to ingraining in me. He loved Noah like the sun.
I wrote back because I was curious, lonely. Sending handwritten letters through the mail felt intimate, something from another time altogether. It gave me a sense of nostalgia that I never had about my childhood, something primordial in our shared DNA.
When he sent me a photo, it surprised me. I somehow still expected him to be a child, after all this time. He was standing somewhere outside, a sunrise or sunset in the background, smiling and barefoot. He was tall and broad, his face a perfect replica of my father’s—proud, entitled. He did not resemble me at all, and the relief I felt was immediate.
It was hard to keep writing. Sometimes I couldn’t stand it—the existence of someone I could have been, a version of myself that had not been discarded. Noah was not like me—he was not constantly on fire, itching to become someone else entirely.
We spoke on the phone one night, his voice foreign yet familiar.
Why didn’t you help me? I asked.
I was just a kid.
So was I.
I wondered how much he remembered. Could he recall the nights my father did not allow me to eat at the table with them, simply as punishment for existing? What about his rules—the ones that were only created out of cruelty? No sleepovers, no playdates, no friends. My year of forced isolation at the hands of someone who was supposed to care for me in every single way. It was the first time I found real strength, the first time I knew without a doubt that I would spend the rest of my life being hurt and hurting others.
Does he love you?
Yes, he said.
Do you love him?
Yes, he said. I’m sorry.
His apology rang in my ears, the emptiness of it. This was all I had from the son my father deserted me for.
We both knew our relationship was something neither of us could sustain. I told him this the next time he called. He apologized again, but his words reeked of surrender.
You have made room in your heart for the devil, I responded. And that is something you will have to live with for the rest of your life.
His laugh was mean, dripping with disdain.
You really are fucking crazy, he said, and it was a full circle moment—the past encroaching on the future, the future revealing the past, both slightly different, but mostly exactly the same. The father, the son, and the holy spirit.
His disgust was a homecoming, my rage a refuge.
By the time my mother died, Dorian had already tried to kill me, in the way that men do when they love you. Love that comes from owning, possessing—blasphemous in its very existence. To cherish is to control.
We met on a subway car when I missed my stop and kept going for no other reason than because I was tired. When we reached the end of the line, I asked him how to get home. Instead, we went to his.
He had money, lots of it, but I wasn’t exactly sure how he acquired it. I think he sold drugs or did something similarly boring and illegal. He threw huge parties with old men and young women, with so much booze and coke that it was overwhelming, but somehow relaxing at the same time. I was just one of many—it was easy to blend in. Dorian paraded me around, bought me expensive dresses to wear while he shoved me in his friend’s faces. He asked me to marry him regularly, each and every time we drank ourselves to sleep.
He was constantly high, manic, and aggressive. He was an avid fist fighter—with both friends and enemies—and broke his nose twice in the short time I was seeing him. He had never hurt me, but I knew he wanted to, how it simmered underneath his skin every time he fucked me.
When he threatened to kill me, I knew it was something he was capable of. He caught me going down on a caterer at one of his parties and choked the guy until he passed out. I was huddled in the corner of the bathroom, scared, really scared for the first time in a long time.
He told me he would kill me, swore on the lives of his children I didn’t know he had, had never seen, had never even heard of before this moment.
Whore.
He said the word like it was disgusting, like it wasn’t what he valued in me. The way I gave my body without any coaxing or trouble, how I did whatever he wanted whenever I could. This was the only connection we shared.
It wasn’t until weeks later that he found me. We’d never been to my place, but he was on the front steps of my building, waiting. He stabbed me four times and only stopped because a woman walked by and started screaming.
It’s hard to remember the series of events that followed the white-hot pain, the blood on my hands as I pressed them to my stomach, the shock that overtook the fear, the realization that this might be the end. It felt fated—like I had only been born to die in this way, by the hand of an insignificant man who could not regulate his emotions.
But I lived. The screaming woman called 911 and sat with me in the ambulance. She held my hand even though she did not know me. I would have died if it weren’t for her screams, the simple act of being there, loud in the face of unexplained evil.
He somehow missed my organs and major arteries, but he had marked me for life. Four deep scars on my stomach—two right above my belly button, and two underneath. Whenever I saw them, I thought of him. Although he did not kill me, he made me in his vision.
My mother liked the rain. She liked the color blue, cherries, and lemonade in the sun. When it was warm, she pressed flowers from the backyard into book pages, finding them years later—flat and crumbling, beautiful in their decay.
She died from being worn down, that’s what I think. She wasn’t very old, and she wasn’t sick. One day she just didn’t wake up. At the funeral, I cried for who she was and who she wasn’t, what she never had the chance to be.
In my despair, I reached out to Graham. He’d left the mother of his child by then, deciding that fatherhood was, ultimately, not for him.
It was too stagnant, he told me.
A person is forever, I reminded him.
His flaws—the parallels he shared with my own father, the damage he caused—did not make me hate him. It somehow fortified his magnetism, dragged me towards him with an unexplained intensity. My want was tangible, despicable in its transparency.
When he first saw my scars, he pretended he didn’t—it was only a few months later, when they were still red and angry, bumpy and mottled. This was after I moved so that Dorian couldn’t find me again, after I spent weeks changing gauze every few hours, my body draining, leaking, melting into something grotesque.
Eventually he asked, so I told him.
Well, he said.
It was condemnation by machismo—his one-word answer the verdict, me sentenced to death.
He left again, and I knew it was coming—an underlying ache that was easy to place and harder to acknowledge. He was sleeping with someone else and not even attempting to hide it. His conspicuousness was a bullet, but I’d been dying for a long time.
You know how it is, he said before the world came crashing down.
I nodded, because I did.
I met Lisa in the elevator in my apartment building. She was striking in a way I would never be. She used men professionally, while I used them recreationally. She made a good amount of money doing it, convinced me to give it a try.
It’s basically stealing, she said. From people who deserve it.
I was offering what Lisa told me was the girlfriend experience. I met the man through one of her clients and he told me his name was Greg. We went out to dinner, he took me to shows, he had selfish sex with me throughout the night focused only on his insatiable pleasure. He asked me to sleep over, adding more hours onto my bill.
There was something about the transactional nature of it, how predictable it seemed to me, that wasn’t the same as catching someone in the wild. My animal brain was used to picking up on cues and scents, actions and reactions. Every time I saw Greg I knew what was about to happen—the game we would play that wasn’t a game at all, but a carefully constructed meeting. I missed the serendipity of a natural hunt, the charge, the need emanating from both of us, the decision that seemed to matter in the moment but never actually did.
You are just a broken little girl, Greg said to me one night, after we took a bath and he washed my hair. He thought he was profound, unique in the way he hated me.
You cannot save me, I whispered into his ear.
The last time I saw Greg, he was forced to watch his daughter on one of our scheduled date nights. He blamed his ex-wife for the mix-up, but I knew at my core that everything was and always would be his fault. Since he’d already paid the deposit, he told me to come over anyway—that we would barely notice she was there.
She was already in bed by the time I arrived, supposedly sleeping. Greg pretended she didn’t exist as he poured me wine, fingered me on his couch, and had me suck him off on all fours. The whole evening reeked of unoriginality, and I very suddenly and fiercely detested him. I was supposed to spend the night, but I was tired of his overly air-conditioned room, his night sweats, his snoring. As he lay in bed asleep, powerless and naked, I was disgusted.
When I left, I passed his daughter’s room. The door was open, and she was still awake, looking at me. All I could think to do was wave. When she waved back, I began to cry.
The next day, I told Lisa that this line of work wasn’t for me. But that I was proud of her, and I meant it. She was one of the cleverest people I knew. She was young and beautiful and used it as a weapon and a means to survive.
You are a shark, I told her. An apex predator.
She pressed her forehead against mine and we stayed like that for a few silent moments, being understood and understanding, fully and without judgment, for the first time in our lives. It was a love I haven’t felt since—sisterhood—the strength of knowing one another so openly, all the things that made us tough, the softness underneath that could have changed lives.
Years later, I saw Alessandro again. He’d either forgiven me or accepted me for who I was—knew that we could only exist within a timeframe, one with intense tenderness that was destined to end.
He called me, let me know he was coming to New York for work. He was now a semi well-known artist, a passion he hadn’t chosen to share with me five years ago, during our time together. He created mosaic pieces that spoke to empathy and longing, evoked the blurry feelings of missing home. I still worked the same job at the same company where I’d met him.
He kissed the scars on my stomach, ran his callused hands over the raised lines.
Who could do this to you? he asked, and I felt his heart in his words.
I did it to myself, I responded, and it was true. I leaned my head onto his chest and missed my mother—being held, loved without conditions.
These are the scars of a warrior, he said. Victorious in battle.
I was with Alessandro when I found out my father died. I fucked him and it felt like praying.
