Swagatha Christie

1. Last year the doctor told me that this kind of sadness is inherited. That they have discovered that sometimes it skips a generation. That the darkness inside me did not grow from nowhere it came from somewhere. I thought to myself, that there is a reason why I have always thought my heart was an attic where I hid pieces of myself. Pieces no one ever wanted. 2. The first boy I ever chose to show this sadness to decided to take it from my attic heart and planted it inside my soul instead. It was easy for him. My soul was a garden I showed him too soon. And he decided that meant he was allowed to take anything he wanted to. 3. Every man who has dared to love me since, has stared at this dark ivy covered soul like it is a haunted house, and I have never tried to explain the thing I have always known. Because men do not have to learn how to open their own selves and lock themselves up again. They are taught to be themselves and the world will accept them better that way. We are taught to break our bodies to be loved. We are taught to confuse sex and love. 4. I knew a girl whose father left her and she took all of her love for him and ate it to comfort herself. People joked how she lived in the kitchen. No one saw her tears when she ate. 5. A friend once told me that she locked herself inside the closet when her parents fought because her father beat her mother and she wished herself into the wood, just so she knew what it was like to be an inanimate object that couldn’t hear or feel anything. 6. My mother told me, that it is the way of the world for girls to grow into women by locking secrets inside themselves. Till now I still imagine every woman I have ever met as a big beautiful house. Full of secret rooms, hiding places, once filled with innocent laughter and joy. Now slightly sad and forgotten because of all those lost places inside them full of secrets.