Mary: An Awakening of Terror

by Nat Cassidy

“I love you more today than yesterday. But not as much as tomorrow. Every day’s a new day of loving you.”

Because life is all about cycles.

And life, with its deadly surprises and unassuming horrors, with its mysteries and miseries, just goes on and on and

Why was she so weird? Why was she always such an easy target? Because people could sense it, smell it on her. That weirdness. That wrongness. And wasn’t it at least partially her fault? She didn’t try hard enough to be normal. And then all those years of isolation and loneliness, like dirt, like smog, they accumulated, layer by layer, into an invisible film. A protective shell. Like the body of an ant.

Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.

I could have been a Stalin But I was born with Nadia’s body If you knew how much anger I had in me you’d say Thank God she’s not a man She might destroy millions Thank God the only person she has the power to destroy Is herself

Trauma inflicted, trauma incurred, trauma passed on. The reincarnation of abuse.

How men are allowed to forget what it’s like to have a body.

We invest so much in certain objects, don’t we? More vessels, dipped into the waters of life, holding identity inside. Which I guess just goes to show how little of what we think of as identity is really real.