Clover hearted

Cath..

Inspired by the song "Cath.." by death cab for cutie. A story written as a woman named Cathrine is reflecting on her life, a very harrowing chapter.
TW: substance addiction, CSA, incest undertones, suffocation/injury, abusive relationships

Everybody will ask what became of you
There are dozens of ways to ask what happened.
Cath, where did you go wrong? Cathrine, why did you give up on being what you wanted to be? Cath, why did you stop trying?
I wish I could remind them that this is not what I wanted to be, I was not ten years old hoping to become an addict who doesn't stand a chance up against this.
I wish I could tell them that the change was not sudden, I was not a pretty church girl on Sunday and a strung out hollow body the next, it is inconspicuous, I didn't notice I was lost until I was too far to return home.
One day you're having fun with some friends from highschool and the next you're a nobody, another disgusting addict who everything will avoid eye contact with.
I'm sorry I never lived to prove them wrong. I'm sorry the genetic code won this match. I'm sorry I became everything I didn't want to be.
I never planned for things to go this way, it's just how they went, but this is not what I wanted, I just thought something in this would give me what I was looking for.

She holds a smile like someone would holding a crying child
I love you more than anyone in the world, you were my beloved, and I was your precious little girl.
I loved you and you wanted me to be quiet, and you wanted me to pretend and I did as I was told.
When they asked me to point at the doll I shook my head and painted a confused look on my face.
I taught myself to keep an extra pair of underwear in my backpack in case I began bleeding again.
I lived in unending confusion but your precious little girl had to pretend that she was sunny.
It was like being a house fire but in a pretty, easy way. It was like knowing the worst facets of humanity and covering it in pink ribbons. It was like rotting from inside out but somehow always managing to hide it behind church dresses.
Do you still love me? If you love me, why don't you listen? If you love me, why do I ask myself these questions?
No one tells little girls where men aren't supposed to touch them, no one tells little girls about the molding that can happen to you at the hands of an awful man, no one tells little girls how to breathe when someone who is supposed to love you visits you in your bedroom every night.

You closed the door
I remember him, he remembers me before I fell apart, before everything within me collapsed in.
We studied and drank together, I will forever cherish those nights we got stoned and watched stupid movies.
When people who aren't addicts watch someone become one they leave, it's inevitable and it's only rational but that doesn't make it easy.
Friends were water dripping down the window of my car, pretty and gone soon enough. I rest my head and stare at the ceiling, I get it, I do.
He never left. He stayed when I stopped making sense. He stayed when I left.
"Cath, can I ask you something?"
I am not quite nodding off on his couch. "Yeah."
"If I paid for rehab, would you go?"
Something within me awakens and I scowl at him, I scream at him, I tell him he's a worthless piece of shit, and so when he walks out I know why.

Who could have loved you more
The world was senseless in a way no one really saw. I knew the stories but I was never allowed to tell them, I was told to live them but never mutter those lines out loud and I was told that was love.
Love was a quiet suffocation in your childhood bed, love was covering my mouth because I was crying too loudly, and love was a finger over his mouth and a rotten innocent look on his face.
So when he loved me in the way that real people love each other, when he didn't want to if I didn't want to, when he didn't want me to be anything but what I was I didn't know how to breathe.
I was accustomed to quiet gasps of air in between moments of near unconsciousness, that was what I knew, so when I wasn't praying for survival I didn't know what I was.