Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:29:43.
Not-me: Autobiography of an absence
By M Satai
Not-Me: Autobiography of an absence
1.
The first memory I have isn’t even mine. It’s my mother’s, that stupid cunt, who lay exhausted and delirious on a hospital bed after shitting me out of her in a puddle of blood and mucous. She hadn’t set eyes on me yet (how lucky she once was), but she could hear my paternal grandmother wailing and screaming in the corridor, “His face, my god his face, why did it have to be his face!”
Later, my mother claimed she’d never forgive the crazy, bearded old harpy for carrying on like this, that she’d scared my mother sick…
What the old lady was referring to was a birthmark on my forehead: a blotch of red that faded as I grew older, but that would darken if I were angry or upset…and I imagine having just found myself born into this rotten turd-pot of a world populated by nothing but assholes had gotten me just about upset as I could get.
Later, when I was two, three, or four …I don’t remember…the birthmark on my forehead would be joined by a small x-shaped scar resulting from when, still mastering the skill of walking, I stumbled into the corner of a television set.
That’s the story, anyway. Who knows the truth? Parents can tell you anything at that point in your life, and mine could lie as well as any of them, even better than most, I suspect.
You have little choice than to believe the lies of your fucking parents until you’re old enough to start lying to yourself.
Maybe my crazy mother carved the “x”in my forehead her own fingernail for all I know…
I don’t remember much about my childhood: it’s as if someone dropped a massive ego bomb somewhere back there and left nothing but a wasteland. I staggered out of childhood, somehow, with nothing but a handful of nightmares.
These are my papers of “identity.” They’re all out of order, of course, and they’re all forged. I have no right to be here, but neither does anyone else.
I’m an alien.
The first girl I ever loved was 5 years old. She was one of a pair of twins. Her name was Rosa and she had absolutely no interest in me. I sat behind her in kindergarten and I’d present her with toy pails of dirt from the playground to get her attention. She ignored me. As I remember her, she had the pale, round, beautiful face of a brown-eyed angel. Emblematic of the irony of my future life, Rosa’s twin-sister liked me, but they were not, alas, identical twins and I wasn’t attracted to the sister at all.
After that initial dissapointment, it seemed to me that I had a fairly lucky time attracting those little girls who I was attracted to…but these crushes never advanced beyond childish emotional connections. I wouldn’t actually kiss or become physically involved with a girl until I was 21.
In the meantime, I began masturbating early and monomaniacally. One of my earliest memories in this regard is of seeing a picture in a kid’s storybook of some sort illustrating the unlikely tale of an Indian tribe who’d choose to sacrifice their prettiest girl, paint her all blue, and throw her in a bottomless hole. The black-and-white line drawing in the book depicted this “poor” girl in mid-air, presumably having just been tossed over the abyss, her legs and arms flailing. She was wearing some kind of short buckskin dress but even I knew that they wouldn’t sacrifice her with clothes. That she’d really be naked.
I masturbated to this picture repeatedly, absorbing the delicious nature of the girl’s predicament to such a degree that the image became internalized. Her emotions, perceptions, sensations…my imagination of what I imagined she might have thought and felt and experienced all heightened my pleasure to the orgasmic point where by empathy I crossed the border between us and I became her.
And so from earliest memory my masturbatory escapades involved some form of conspiracy between sex and death. I remember, for instance, the feel of the cold linoleum on my penis after persuading my brother to drag me by my bare ankles across the kitchen floor following my death during some kind of pretend military slaughter.
To be a victim of violence, and, in particular, sexual violence, intuitively seemed to me the truest and most intense expression of love--the only expression of “love” that existed: and everything I’ve come to learn in life about human beings has convinced me that my earliest intuitions were 100% correct.
I’ve considered, relatively recently, that I’d been sexually molested as a child. I can only hope that was true. I vaguely remember someone’s admission blaming someone or other for fondling my genitals to get me to stop crying. But maybe I just read of someone saying this happened to someone…or maybe I’m just imagining that I read this, or imagining all of it, or somehow making it up.
The past is a myth that I've stopped believing.