You know that saying "a man or a woman after my own heart"? Well, I always thought that my woman had lost her way at some point and could no longer find my heart, so I'd have to spend my life alone… which was totally fine by me. I mean it, I've never cared about "alone", just as long as long as I'm not lonely -big difference-, and there's a whole lot of things a girl like me can do to avoid that.
Put me in a random bar full of strangers, give me enough money to buy a couple of beers, and I'll end up dancing on top of the tables with five girls I've never met before, who'll now love me like their best friend. In addition, I would carefully select one or two of them and show them a glimpse of what their lives could look like if they surrendered to me. Ideally, they would be pretty stuck-up and rich, so money wouldn't necessarily be a thing for them. That's not what I'm really about. I'm mostly about the adventure, so it would be more important to promise them great fun and the chance to see a different world and live a different way. And it would be so damn easy. Sometimes it was too easy.
It's one of my gifts. I know people. I know how to work them, which buttons to press and the right moment to do so. When you grow up like I did, surrounded by stupid bitches that have it all while you've got nothing and they relentlessly tease you for it like it's your fault, like something's wrong with you, you learn pretty fast that your mind is your greatest investment. You learn to shut up and listen, to sift through everyone's bullshit. And you read, oh yes, you find a quiet spot away from the chaos and you read every single thing that falls between your hands like you're fucking Matilda. At first you try to escape through books, but the real world will manage to screw you over anyway because you cannot run away forever, can you? Reality bites, and you better mold your life into a very sharp-teethed denture so you can bite back, and bite it harder.
So I did it. I absorbed everything like a sponge, I refused to be a victim, and then one day, I was given the chance of using all of it, and I earned the right to be a powerful person in this world. Forget about good and bad, because power has nothing to do with that. I was happy, I was visiting all the places I had always read about, and I had all the financial security a person who moves around large quantities of heroin could ever dream of. Nobody would look down on me or my mom anymore. People found me interesting because I knew who I was and I lived the way I fucking pleased to live, and when I opened my mouth, interesting and hilarious things came out. People like me are never lonely.
Then she came along, looking just like another insect I could play with, and of course she hadn't met anybody quite like me before, so she felt extremely drawn to me. And let's face it, she was pretty hot. I knew her type, or I thought she belonged to the type, down to the "I've never been with a woman before" proclamation. However, somewhere along the line I noticed that I wasn't reading from a script anymore, that I wasn't trying to pull the legs off of a fly. I realized that I was living my life like I'd always done, but with her. She had somehow shimmied her sweet, little ass inside my house, and not just my bed. You would not sit on your sofa with your drug mule on your lap, and she would definitely not be wearing your pajama bottoms, and you would not think her cute. You would not talk about books, about movies, about plays, until four in the morning, consuming several bottles of wine in the process, and then stumbling to the floor in a giggling pile of arms and legs. You would not take a moment to gaze at her before diving into a kiss, and you would not want to transform your skin into a body-sized hand that could caress every single part of her, enveloping and taking care of her.
You wouldn't, but I did, and I knew that "my" woman had finally found my heart, that she hadn't lost her way - it had just taken her a little longer to get there. Having found my heart, she had crawled inside it and made room for herself. And that was it, I was no longer alone.
She became essential, as she laid her little, tingling touches all around my life, and my things, and my body, altering them somehow. And that is why, when she vanished, precisely when I needed her the most, she left me completely alone -which I could live with-, but also left an absence, a space of loneliness which nothing else could fill. She thought I was a manipulative bitch, which I was, but weren't we over that? Hadn't I proved that she was different? What the fuck did she want from me? As always, she wasn't responsible for anything. I found that I couldn't carry the weight of that absence, nor of my rambling mind, so full of useless words. In a way, it was as if she had gone but had failed to take her shadow with her, so I couldn't forget, not without help.