Dear Father,
(I use the word “dear” loosely, for I cannot really say that you are dear to me.)
Twenty-four years ago, you brought me into this world; a bouncing, crying baby with soft down on her head and a cheery disposition. I remember how you looked at me then – so full of joy and love.
I spent the next twenty-four years yearning to see those eyes again.
I was the second of four girls. Four beautiful, intelligent girls who were born into a world of material comfort that you and my mother had built for us through the profitable construction business that you inherited from your own father.
My early days were full of sunshine. I spent them laughing and crawling and playing. I would bring you sticks and things, wonders discovered in the mud.
Love me, father. Love me, I had said then, as you looked up only for the briefest of moments from your newspaper at the treasures I had brought you.
I took up ballet nearly as soon as I could walk. It was my dream to be a ballerina, you see. Like those pretty girls you see on television, with their beautiful pink dresses, their elegant pirouettes and plies. And I was good at it. My slender build and natural grace very quickly made me the prima ballerina among my peers. I was the youngest girl ever in my class to do a proper fouette turn while en pointe, did you know?
I remember how full of pride I was during the encore, when the spotlight was on me and the crowd clapped and cheered and my teacher handed me a bouquet of flowers nearly as big as I was.
Love me, father. Love me, I had thought then, as I looked up to the stands and saw an empty seat in the second row next to my mother and my sisters.
When I was old enough to enroll grade school, my mother enrolled me in the exclusive school located within our subdivision. Your alma mater, I understand. Yours and my mother’s.
It was easy for me to become popular. I was pretty, and pleasant, which endeared me to my classmates. I was smart and active in class, which endeared me to the teachers. I became class president, and head of our cheerleading squad. I was consistently earning top honors. I was admired. I had suitors, boys and girls both, from my year and older.
Did you know that I once had a suitor, the heartthrob of my school’s senior high school class, pursuing me as a sixth grader? I was the envy of my friends, and yet I turned him down – my heart was elsewhere, in my dance and in my grades.
Love me, father. Love me, my heart pleaded, each time my mother would arrive alone to my school activities; each time that she would join parent-teacher conferences without you by her side.
My first real relationship came when I was a freshman in high school. He was a nice boy. Good-looking and sweet. We used to play together as children, do you remember? He used to come to the house and we would swim in our pool and splash around and make a mess of things.
He was my first love, and I hurt him. Deeply, when I told him I was leaving him for another man. An older boy, a senior, with a nasty reputation and a bad aura about him.
I was angry at you, you see. I hurt this boy that I knew you would approve of, in favor of one that you would not.
He took my virginity one night in the back seat of his car. It hurt when he claimed it for himself, another notch among the many already on his barrel. It was far from the fairy tale that I had always imagined for myself, and I wondered to myself as I lay there, with him thrusting roughly, painfully into me, if my nice, sweet boy would have been more gentle.
Love me, father. Love me, were the words that underscored each pained gasp and forced moan that escaped my lips as he tore my insides in his rampage towards his own release.
He left me two days later. On to greener, more virginal pastures, I presumed. But I didn’t care. I threw myself at other men. I amassed a number of partners as I learned the ways of my body and grew to enjoy six.
I would come home in the wee hours of the morning, my clothes rumpled, my hair awry, and my womanhood filled to dripping by the semen of strange men and boys I had met at bars and clubs and school parties.
They would take me in bathrooms, in cars, in back alleys. They would take me from behind, pounding into me, stuttering their lust into the night with my face pressed painfully against the wall as I grimaced from pain and pleasure.
I would take them into my mouth, my lips expertly working their lengths as they emptied their load into my throat, my tongue teasing every last drop from their hardness.
Men and boys, stretching my purity wide with their obscene manhood, sending fire and electricity shooting down my veins. They would climax inside me, because I knew it would hurt you that they did.
Love me, father. Love me. Acknowledge me. Recognize me, my eyes pleaded each time my mother admonished me and I would see you shaking your head from a distance before walking away.
She left us, that year. She took my younger sisters and left, and it was just you, myself, and my older sister; and when she went to university in Stanford the following year, it was just you and I.