A Thousand (EASY) Pieces (ca. ’96)

So it’s perfect. It’s all so perfect now. My hair – perfect. Not too much makeup. Body looks great. Took me long enough. Damn baby-weight.

I’m experimental these days. I like hanging out with him. Makes me feel good. Nothing feels good anymore. But he does. Yeah, he sure does…

I use the kitty-condo to mount my fancy Polaroid Spectra. I’m doing it. I am actually doing this.

I am taking off all my clothes. I’m sitting up on the edge of the bed. Waiting for the camera-timer countdown. Waiting to see my first ever self-portrait. Knees bent up; arms wrapped around my legs; head tilted slightly forward and to one side, so my curls fall enticingly in front of my left eye. The way I like it… hiding behind but not.

*CLICK!* *FLASH!* Done.

And I wait. Wait for the ghostly image of someone new to solidify; to become the actual color of flesh that wipes out the milky, grayish white-out color that hides the developer inside; to feel pride I’ve hardly ever felt before. Been a long time since I was proud of this body – when you’re in your twenties 5 years of “chunky but funky” is a long-ass time.

Wow. Great photo.

So I hid it away. Tucked it safe in an envelope inside the book inside the bag I take to work every day. I don’t want my kid to find it even though it’s not exactly showing anything. It only hints. It hints at a sexy I’d not felt for a long time.  It hints… at certain other things.

I especially don’t want my husband to find it.

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My good friend tells me he’s doing watercolor portraits now. Wants to start doing nudes. So one night I hand him my Polaroid to see if he can use it for anything; but mostly to show off. A small compliment would be great to hear and he is my inner-circle. Totally cool. And I get what I want; and more…

And then I don’t.

I come home from work. The Husband and I are hardly talking anymore. He spends a lot of nights at “his mother’s”; which is basically code for his bitch’s house. Fuck him.

I find one of his notorious envelopes on my table. FUCK him. He still has the key to the apartment on Bath Avenue. Motherfucker. The envelope’s got writing all the FUCK over it…

“DID YOU RUB YOUR TWAT WITH IT BEFORE YOU SHOWED IT TO HIM!!?? DID YOU FUCK YOURSELF WITH IT!?? FUCKING WHORE CUNT!!!”

I’m shaking. Furious. And the envelope contents feel totally wrong. What the hell was inside that thing? Crazy motherfucker.

I carefully tear it open. Trepidatious, I peer inside. My brain cannot even process what I’m looking at here. What the ever-loving HELL is wrong with him? The entirety of my nude Polaroid photo has been meticulously snipped with a scissor into, quite literally, a thousand almost microscopic little pieces. I could have snorted that fucking shit; or saved it to pour into his fucking ear while he slept on nights when he had no choice but to come home.

That photo was my pride for a little while; something I coveted. I would often stare at it to get that renewed feeling of “hell yeah!” whenever the status of things at home got me down. And that was a LOT.

Now it was all completely beyond repair. Gone.  Destroyed.  I would’ve needed a microscope and a pair of needle tip tweezers (AND a forensic GENIUS) to put all those miniscule pieces back together again.

Fucking slut. WHORE. Bitch. Raging CUNT. Fucking liar… Horrible mother. Junkie.

Right.   I’m a “ junkie” and a “horrible mom” because my son saw me smoking a joint with friends while he played with friends’ kids in friends’ house.

SlutWHOREbitchCUNT for entirely different reasons… One perceived reason. Named Bobby.

Was I horrible? Intermittent tennis bout between horrible and “Fuck that”. He’s spending weekends at his bitch’s house but I’m the slut for taking a nothing-showing nude photo of myself? For taking care of myself?

Fuck that – he cannot rip me down by cutting a photo apart. It may have been more than a photo but it’s just a photo. Just a fucking photo that I miss…to this day.

Even if taking it in the first place and showing it to my friend did rip him to shreds …

He’ll always be that fucking psycho who taped nasty notes to the bathroom mirror. Put even more notes in our son’s school knapsack because he thought the kid wouldn’t read them. Fucking lunatic who spent a good amount of time snooping through my shit and then cutting MY SHIT into teeny, tiny pieces.

But fuck that. And HIM.

Horrible?  Me?

Nah, fuck that.