all the good girls go to hell

vietnam flashbacks

The midweek commute home is fucking hell. This is it, this is the seventh layer of Dante’s Inferno.

New York is in the throes of its third heat wave of the summer, making the entire shitshow that is our subway system even more vexing to endure. The woman sitting next to me felt it too. Maybe it was the triple digit temps, a workday with a douchebag boss, or children tugging at her at home but she was dozing off. Over it. Done for the day. Her small head with her perfectly maintained updo slowly dropped onto my lions mane. Immediately I tensed up. Repulsed. Flinched so hard I woke her. Scowled even.

She didn’t close her eyes again. And I was glad. Relieved to be rid of her weight. I got enough shit on my shoulders, lady. I’m not the kind of girl to take on yours.

I wasn’t always this way.

---

His neighbors used to call me “snow white”. Maybe it was my long black hair and pale skin. Or the eighth of coke on me at any given time. To him I was “angel” by day, “little one” at night. “Kitten” when I behaved. “Slut” when I didn’t. In all those years I spent curled up in his lap, the one thing he couldn’t manage to call me was his.

“Look how easily you bruise for a hardened girl”, he’d laugh. Is that why I kept my nails black and blue? To match the rest of me, for you?

The first time I let it happen was a mistake. A doe eyed innocent who didn’t know any better. Dragged to a party by a friend who’d end up leaving ten minutes after we got there.

“You stay. I’ll take care of you”, he promised.

“Famous last words”, I mumbled under my breath.

Alright, so maybe I’d let him walk me home. Would I turn down an offer from a boy in a Nine Inch Nails tour tee and lip ring? We only lived a few blocks away from one another, after all. Serendipity or a bad stroke of luck. Verdict is still out.

“You don’t drink and you don’t do any drugs. Sudana, how do you say your name? Su-da-na. Well, Sudana. You sound boring.”

“Oh, do I?”

And still, I let him take me home (his, not mine).

I learned quickly it was his ugliness I had to mirror to keep him interested, to make him feel alive. The rest of him was clearly six feet under. I began to wear his darkest parts as easily as if they were my own, slip them on each morning like some broken girl badge of honor disguise.

Was he proud of me yet?

I laughed for days after he’d end up begging for the safe, bored-him-to-death version of me back. They always fucking do. When my transgressions were no longer accidental but full of intent just like his were, he’d ask where that little girl he met went. “What happened to the Sudana I knew?”

I, too, wonder what happened to her.

When he had to carry my blacked out body up the stairs on a Tuesday, was he not entertained then? When he watched my little frame do more drugs in a weekend than he had all month, was he not impressed? When he dragged me to strip clubs and I’d come home with more money than I walked in with, wasn’t that a good thing? When my sadness turned to hate followed by disregard and his best friend asked to braid my hair because it was sooooooo soft and I let him, wasn’t it fine since we weren’t technically ever together?

What was it he’d say, “Be cool, babe.”

Your turn, babe.

---

I want to find that woman. I want to apologize for not having any decency left in me to not push her off next time. I want to promise her I’m working on it, really. I’m trying to be the kind of girl who has enough empathy to allow a stranger in need momentary reprieve, but the body keeps the score. And mine still remembers.