My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I fall in love so hard I carry her around all weekend like a baby, rubbing her jelly-bean paw pads and smelling her sweet breath.

I love Mya; she’s the most beautiful dog I’ve ever seen, her fur so thick my fingers disappear to the second knuckle when I give her back a good scritch.

Somewhere in rural Quebec we stop at a Tim Hortons for a bathroom break.

I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

Coming from him, this kind of talk sounds brilliant, but it just makes me seem like a bitch, haughty and harsh.

“I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”

She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.

Maybe that’s what this has always been about—not wanting these men but wanting to be them.

I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere deep in my belly, they’ll take root and grow.

“What could we have done? We were just girls.” I know what she means—not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be. Who would have believed us, who would have cared?

With the sun on my face and a dog at my side, I have so much capacity for good.