I need not ask a single question. You need not speak a single word. For I know that I love you so deeply, so strongly, and I know what words can and cannot do. I have lived my new life within these four walls like I lived my previous life, when I spent my days reading filth alongside Uncle. The difference is that now I am the writer as well as the reader, and I only read that which I write. I know the prose, the pace, and the terms, and this is what I create: volumes full of words that strive to capture the intensity, the physicality… everything, from the way you moved your hands about me when you undressed me, to the way you called me "Miss", to your blush, or the fall of your eyelashes when you looked at me and pretended to be innocent in your way while I pretended to be innocent in mine. This has helped me discover the usefulness of words, but also how imprecise, how blunt they are now that I know how it really feels like.
Those girls in my stories… they are and are not us at the same time - although none of the respectable gentlemen reading them will ever know where I get my ideas from. Writing has helped me at times, but it has also flushed and frustrated me almost every day.
However, I was never as aware of my frustration and the ineffectiveness of the written word as when I raised my head from my papers and saw you standing there, like you used to, behind the old mark on the floor: the line, pointed by the simplified drawing of a finger. In those days, I came to associate you with the discharge of my duties, and so you would always bring me the sense of temporal liberation, something I had never felt and thus could not miss. But I was fast in learning how to miss you beside me. How I cursed you in silence for having taught me to feel your absence; and then I cursed myself for having played out the plan until the end.
But this is not a story; there is no real "The End", with the exception of death. Life went on, whether I liked it or not. It went on with the lack of you -which I most certainly did not like-, and I had to work to survive, doing the only thing I was ever taught to do. My trade was my curse as well, and I took them in together: I chained myself to the memories and to Briar. You would appear constantly, like a spectre, both in my mind and in my rooms, haunting me, reminding me of everything I had done... Then, at night, I stared at your imagined figure undressing at the foot of the bed and then hurrying to get into the warmth of the covers.
You need not speak, for I do not have questions for the answers you want to give me. Rather, I'm the one who needs to explain who I really am, and bear the risk of losing you again, now that I have you here. I need to tell you the truth about what happened in this house. It functioned as a convent, but a convent of filth, and I was its only nun: fed, kept and bound like one of those precious books, away from the world. My eyes have grazed words and illustrations put together with such reverence that one would think them sacred books - Uncle certainly did. He had me read them with the coldness and accuracy of a surgeon, but I knew what lay underneath its smooth and respectable layer, and it was the hunger and lust of men. No matter how detached those gentlemen seemed while I read, smoking their cigars or their pipes, sipping their drinks. I was aware of how they looked at me. I knew what was happening underneath their trousers; I knew they were about to explode, like the men in the books.
I am sorry. There is no meek, innocent girl. There is only me, and everything I know is dirty, and everything I do is poisoned. I was poisoned by the hunger of others, and then by my own, and thus I managed to do away with the only pure thing I have ever known. You thought I was good, but I am not good and I am not pure. I am afraid of myself, of the rot inside me. Somehow, with you, I managed to become something of what I could've been if I hadn't lived my life locked inside two different madhouses. With you I could smile and hear my own laughter. I felt your eyes and they were kind; I felt your hands and they were warm. For the first time I knew what little girls feel like when they dance or play. Furthermore, for the first time, I felt what girls my age should feel... what Uncle's books talked about.
During the day, I squirmed in my seat for you. During the night, I bit on my gloved fingers. My hand hovered above your body while you slept - just a little space and a little fabric between us, but I was so scared that you would notice, that the warmth emanating from me would give me away. The scent of my own wetness came to me so clear that I was sure you would smell it. The men in Uncle's books could always follow the smell of a woman's wetness like bloodhounds, and then got under their skirts, gobbling it up with gluttony. Would you do that as well if you found me out? I feared it and desired it at the same time.
I honestly thought that you came to kill me. What did they do to you in the madhouse? What is it like, living among the insane? I honestly cannot say; I lived above them, not among them. I was raised by twenty women who enjoyed watching me play the "little nurse" -they called me that-; they dressed me like them and even gave me a small wooden wand to strike the inmates, persuade them to be good. Thus, I never put myself in their place - I did not know how to do it then, but I learned later, when I thought about you in that place. I understood if you wanted to kill me. I expected it.
However, I did not expect you to come towards me in peace, not in rage, and call me Maud so softly... It was a completely different name in your lips, different than other times. You looked so thin and slight, but so strong at the same time... I, on the contrary, felt weak and surprised, but I gathered what strength I could, for there was one last straw. I needed to explain who I really was, even if that would surely mean losing you. I spoke self-loathingly, and read from one of Uncle's books with spite. For the first time, I wasn't reading like a surgeon; there was a force behind my dissection of body parts. Oh, how you looked at me! You even tore the book from my hands unbelievingly, to look at it personally, and you saw the engraving, even if you could not decipher the strange symbols which spelt the various bodily fluids with fancy names, such as honey and milk. I knew them all by heart. My heart had been poisoned by it, year after year.
How could you look at me still? How could you touch me? You, the real you, not one of my spectre-memories. Here, I'll read to you. These are all the words I have ever written, these papers, these books, and they have all been incited by you. If you could read them, they would tell you a story: the story of a smuggled glove and a folded card with two hearts; the story of a lady and her maid; the story of an intricate scheme like a spider's web, and, finally, the story of the good thing that bloomed from it. All these words -and they're not nearly enough-, they say how I want you. How I love you.