I Want To Be Emily Ross

In life things are hardly ever simple and almost never easy. No matter how much I wanted, when I was caught in the passions of pleasure, to descend into them so much I couldn't just do that. And no matter how much I wanted to find some kind of acceptance, that is sometimes precisely the most difficult thing in the world to achieve.

Some people spend a lifetime and fail at it, and here I was barely a day into having my whole damn world turned upside down and the only thing I was really certain of was that I was uncertain of things.

I curl into myself on the bed, the pleasure ebbing out to the edges of me and seeping away into the mattress below. Reaching a hand out I drag the sheets over me and I don't stop until I'm cocooned beneath them and only then do I give myself a chance to breathe.

His voice echoes in my mind. Cold and cruel though it might be the words of my father tell me the same thing over and over again with a sneer of disdain and disappointment and hate.

"Look at yourself," he told me, "What do you think you are?"

I shiver, curling into myself and hugging my knees up to my chest. I clench my eyes shut and I shake my head and I try to hold on to the warmth but it's too late.

It's all too late and it's slipping away.

I worry that he's right. It's been so long since I really listened to him and I have sworn to myself time and again that he doesn't control me anymore but still he was the first to put his hand on the scales of my life and I can't say that he wasn't formative.

I hate myself and maybe more than a little of that comes from him. Though I can't blame him for everything, it's still his voice I heard when I despise what I've become.

But I heard his voice when I was a man as well. Sure now it's pronounced but it was back then and he hated everything that I ever was and ever could be and maybe that's a good enough reason to ignore him. Scratch that I know it is but it's not as simple as that. You can't shrug off a lifetime’s worth of trauma overnight.

I am Emily Ross, but am I?

I worry that I'm not, that I'm just fooling myself into believing the easy lie. I worry that I've deluded myself and am riding high on a wave of pleasure and that I'm misremembering the life I left behind and that the other voice in me, the one who keeps telling me to relax and enjoy and be her, is the one that's lying to me and I just don't know which one to believe. I don't know which one is right.

But for the first time I think I might be open to believing the latter and when I close my eyes I hear words I don't understand and cannot remember but seem so familiar all the same and they tell me one thing with sadness and regret but hope all the same.

"Worry not. You're almost there."

It feels so much like I'm caught between these two destinations and I don't know which is real and which a lie borne of comfort but know that I'm open now to understanding. If the little voice in my heart that tells me that I belong here is true, then I will follow it. I will do my best to live this life to the fullest and not make all the same mistakes I did before. I'll put the words of my father and his hand on my life out of my mind, cast it away from me and forget it forevermore.

Because honestly it feels right now like he's the one that's lying. It feels right now like this is where I belong.

I'm not certain, though. There is a part of me that worries that all the certainty that I've found comes from a moment of temporary insanity brought on by the urges and desires of this body. Mere chemical reactions, a cause and efffect.

There is a part of me that's terrified that, even though it’s what I want to be, I'm not Emily Ross after all.

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