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Anonymous
Brooklyn, New York USA
Email Anonymous
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REPORTS:
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I was born in June of 1979 at a hospital in a suburb of Boston. When she gave birth, my mother was the same age that I am now. My parents had recently emigrated to the states from Moscow and were still in the process of becoming Americanized. We lived in an upper middle class suburb near the ocean in a gray house. That house remained the way it was from when we bought it, until we moved out. My parents probably didn t redecorate because my father hated to spend money on anything extraneous. Both of them worked full time, so I was mainly under the care of my grandmother who had been brought over from Russia soon after I was born. Days with her were excruciatingly boring and incredibly productive. She raised me methodically. Taught me everything from how to brush my teeth to how to read the Russian alphabet. I rarely saw my parents and remember thinking that they were way cooler than my boring old grandma.
My brother was born when I was aged five. When they brought him home I remember trying to be excited, but I had reservations. I was made to switch rooms so he could have the bright one with the hardwood floor and I could get the weird office-like room with dark brown wood paneling and shag orange carpet. Around the time when he was born was when I started lying to get attention. I told some pretty vicious ones. There was this hyperactive kid in my kindergarten class who always had a snotty nose and whom everyone hated, because he was kinda poor. I told my parents that he was beating me up at school. So they called the school, naively, and I was found out. That was shameful.
I had a best friend, she was Russian too. Our parents had introduced us. Her dad was fat with a lazy eye and thick rimmed glasses. He was also a composer. Her mom gave me piano lessons for a while. I sucked though. I went over to their house often. We made another friend. A poor girl who lived on the same subsidized street as the snot nosed hyperactive kid. Coincidentally, they had the same last name - a source of constant torment for both of them. The girl smelled kinda funny and was fiercely independent because her mom wasn t around too much. She and I used to get naked and lie on top of one another in my bedroom with the shag carpet. That was my deepest darkest secret for a while, till I got to fifth grade. By then my parents had divorced and my dad was living in an apartment by himself. They split when I was eight because my dad was a controlling tightwad with a bad temperament and my mother couldn t stand it anymore. My father had my brother and I on most weekends and two nights during the week. He would take us to Wendy s where we all shared one salad bar plate. We had to stop going there though because I think that eventually one of the managers noticed and told my dad it wasn t cool.
But our relationship in those days was pretty good, because we were forced to spend structured time together. We ate lots of ice cream and watched woody allen movies at his apartment. I don t remember time like that spent with my mom. She was stressing all the time I think. Overwhelmed and in single mother victim mode. They always fought about child support. I do remember her going crazy when my brother and I would fight - which was often. Her high pitched shrieking would only make the situation worse. I don t think we ever got to properly resolve anything because she was always in the background hysterically trying to pry us apart. She was an only child, and she didn t understand that fighting between siblings was normal.
Puberty started on the day I woke up with one breast. My mother took me to a pediatrician who said it was wasn't fatal. The rest of it is a blur...big tits at a young age, getting my period at the mall, starting to really fucking care what people thought about me. I made a friend in the fifth grade who was skinny with breasts the size of mine and a dirty mouth. She was 10 and her mom was 27. What s even better is that her stepfather was 24 and had a sizable porn collection, that we often perused. This girl was incredibly obnoxious and taught me all about how to be popular. And I just ate it up. When we had sleep overs we would rub against eachother and kiss without our lips ever actually touching.
At age eleven I received the unhappy news that we were downsizing to a condo in the next town over. We moved out of our house and into the townhouse that I was to occupy until I moved out to go to college. I started in the new elementary school in the new town. I got braces. It was a rough year. Everyone in my sixth grade class sucked and I knew it. But I made some temporary friends just to have people to hang out with. Middle school was also traumatic. I thought I was ugly and weird and was filled with self conscious anxiety (how unusual). I sat with other miserables like myself in the cafeteria. Then I made a best friend. She had long straight red hair and glasses that were slightly bi-focal-like. Her mom would drive us to the mall. Her older brother was cute and had crazy hair. His friends who loved Megadeth were always over at their house after school. We would watch them run around and cause trouble. We made angel hair pasta. I wore eyeliner. We burned incense and listened to the music that would become my foundation...we had long penetrating and analytical conversations about everything imaginable.
There was one friend of her brothers that I found intriguing. His locker was near mine at school. He had a mullet and wore incomprehensibly disturbing black t-shirts. We started talking on the phone for hours and hours. He was into Norwegian Black Metal. He was sarcastic and had a perverted sense of humor. He made fun of what he called my little friends and our whole scene. We started hanging out after school, and then we were going out...I didn t find him attractive...I think I was just interested in impressing him, because it seemed impossible. One day we were in my bedroom making out and he took out his penis and started asking me to put it in my mouth. That was when my mom walked in without knocking. She freaked. We weren t allowed to hang out anymore. We saw each other anyway. He started pressuring me to do stuff...verbally abusing and degrading me. We would fight all the time. When I would hang out with other people he would get jealous. We would fight and he would scream at me over the phone slamming it down over and over. Sometimes he would get so pissed that he would tell me that he was going to come over my house to rape and stab me when I was alone. It got to the point where he would call what seemed like hundreds of times a day. He would intimidate me at school and make me feel scared to walk down the hall when no one was around. Then we would make up, usually cause I would give in and admit that it was all my fault. Then we would repeat the cycle. This lasted well into freshman year in high school...my friends and family were all very disturbed, disappointed and in denial of the seriousness of the situation. I finally snapped out of it, but don t think I ever fully recovered. I stopped all contact with him...and eventually he stopped trying...I think he also eventually he dropped out of high school and got into trouble with heroin. Several years later I ran into him at the local strip mall and he tried to tell me that he still loved me. That made me feel gross.
But then the rest of high school was a little better...I started smoking lots of cigarettes and pot. The best friend with the red hair dropped out of school at fifteen and started drinking. She also started to act like a floozy. I found this very upsetting and tried to pretend it wasn t happening. We hung out at the local Dunkin Donuts with some older grungy post - high school kids. There were crushes and kisses and car rides around suburbia blowing pot smoke out the window, running in the dark on the beach from police, that kind of thing...
Later, I fell in love with a kid who played in some fucked up noise bands and had decided to drop out of society at the age of 16. I knew he liked me when he came up while I was watching television at the best friend's house and revealed to me that he had been thinking about me in the shower. At a party on New Year's Eve at his ex-girlfriends house we had strange candid conversations that made me very nervous - and then he kissed me tenderly in front of all of our friends. Later we went into her sister s bedroom and slept there. I found out the next day that he had been tripping on acid that night.
Our relationship consisted of him throwing stones at my bedroom window in the middle of the night when he felt like seeing me, and us taking walks around the town. Alas, I wasn t the only one. He went away too eventually (not permanently), but not after causing some more damage to my psyche. Sadly, I am probably giving him more credit than he deserves.
I was done with high school long before it actually ended. Then college. I went to an art school in the state and majored in a practical field. There I learned a lot about art history and incorporated that knowledge into my being. I made some friends and kept some old ones. I also learned about how to discipline myself to work hard and be serious about it. Sophomore year, I met a friend of a friend who lived elsewhere and we fell in love. But not really. We had a long distance relationship for the next two years that was good in the sense that it didn t damage me. The boy was non-threatening, childlike and very detached. He basically went along with whatever I wanted. I was able to concentrate on my school work and not really worry about developing a social life because I had this long distance boyfriend. Then he decided to move to where I was. Soon after that we became brother and sister instead of boyfriend and girlfriend. While he was away for a month, I came back into contact with the guy I was in love with in high school. We ended up sleeping together in what was an unproductive and desperate time in both of our lives. I broke up with my boyfriend. The guy from high school behaved in a very unsurprising way and we stopped sleeping together soon after we began. After graduation there was some frustrating time of inaction. I didn t really know what it was that I was supposed to be doing with myself, so I kind of did nothing. I surfed the internet and had some silly jobs, like giving public health surveys to alcoholics over the telephone and filing boring crap in office buildings. I also had some internships in my chosen field. In the winter after school ended, I impulsively came to the city of New York. I moved in to a crappy apartment in Brooklyn with a peripheral friend and some people I didn t know, and put all my energy into establishing a life here. Sometimes I think that I have succeeded, and at other times, I fear I have not. Since then I have lived in three different apartments and held four different jobs. Right now I am at the office typing this shit when I really should be working.
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