Tell Me I'm Worthless(19)

Ghosts are born from trauma and violence.

I pull myself from the daze I was in beneath the bedsheets, forcing myself upwards. I make coffee. I hustle or whatever. Glancing in the mirror, last night’s eyeliner smeared down my cheeks, skin pale and sickly like fog. Girlboss. Wash your face clean, brush the knots from your hair, eyes watering as you tear through each tangle. Change into a new dress. Put more makeup on then maybe you won’t be so fucking corpselike. Open your laptop. I open my laptop and look at the pixelated face that stares back at me captured by the webcam. Fuck you, I tell it. Fuck you, it says back to me. A man sent me money for a video, but I haven’t been able to think about making it. I saw his specific instructions and I couldn’t look at them. But I still took the money, didn’t I? Not too proud to refuse money on ethical or moral grounds. I look at the instructions again. I think about them. I vocalise them.

“I know how you used to sneak into your mother’s chest of drawers and pull out her panties and rub them all over your little sissy body, before putting them on. I know how you would wear her make-up and her high heels when she was out, and watch yourself, in the mirror, strutting about. You’ve never told anyone about that, have you? But I know. I know everything about you. I can see into your soul. I can see every dark corner you have. You don’t live at home anymore but at Christmas when you go back to visit you tease yourself with the thought. You still want to wear Mummy’s panties, don’t you? You are worthless. Worthless little sissy boy dreaming of being a girl.” I’m shaking, and I don’t know if you can tell in the video. “If you want to be a girl then act like it. Go on. Bend over, and take a big dick deep in your pussy. Let it stretch you out until you barely exist, until the big dick is the thing that defines you, until it fills up every single inch of your insides. Whimper. Go on. Whimper, little sissy pig. If you don’t have a big black cock with you, then use something else, use a dildo. You like your dildo don’t you? Let it fuck you. Scream like a hysterical little girl as it fucks you. Like a hysterical little girl getting…”

I say what he wants me to say, but automatically. I don’t think the words. They just happen, they come out of my mouth, and the shame and the disgust wash over me until I can’t take it anymore. I turn off the video. There are some sick people out there.

I look at my phone, and see that Jon’s texted, asking for updates about what happened with Sabi. Did you fuck her then? When I slept, I dreamt of work. She wasn’t in the dream at all. In fact, her absence was notable. There was a space somewhere in the centre of the dream that she was supposed to fill, but somebody had pulled her out of it, roughly, leaving a gaping wound. Perhaps she was what was following me, that unseen horror. But that thing could just as well have been something else, some other nightmare from my trauma following me. Hannah, maybe, twisting, clawing after me. Or five older boys circling me, when I was, oh, I must have been nine. One of them told me he had seen my mum’s tits. Which honestly, I just found strange, because he had never met my mum. These boys took me into the forest. The floor was covered in wet mud, mud so wet it would have been possible to sink into it. There was a wooden plank suspended from a tree, with a rusted nail poking out the underside of it. The boys, I can’t remember their faces, they all look the same in this memory, told me to stand underneath the rusted nail. If I would do that, then I could join their gang. I knew that if I did this, they would make the plank drop from the tree, which would send the rusted nail into the top of my skull, killing me. And inside the rusted nail, a woman was being chased by another woman, they were looking for work, they thought they were going upwards, ascending, but their centre of gravity was all wrong. In fact, they were headed down. But they never made it, they never found fulfilling or honest work, they just simply kept climbing until one or both of them was dead. Climbing a tower is unskilled work. Cleaning is also unskilled work. Filming yourself making sissy hypno is unskilled labour. Climbing a tower, being chased by an unseen entity which might be the woman who raped you when you were in a haunted house, is not an easy job, and it seems unfair to describe it as unskilled, considering there are a lot of factors which go into it, certainly not everybody could do that job. For one, you have to be physically fit enough to climb all those stairs. Of course, outside of my unconscious, I am probably not fit enough to do this, but inside it was a possibility. You have to be able to do that. You have to have been raped by a woman inside a haunted house. It’s not clear if the scar you have in the shape of a cunt on your forehead is required for the job, but I suspect it might be. Furthermore, not everybody can work in such a haunted place, in such a place steeped in obvious, rusting, decaying symbolism as this tower, or this house, or my flat, in fact, with cracks in the walls, with a carpet thick with dirt that is impossible to clean, with the eyeless gaze of the man in the poster, did I even hang the poster back up or did it hang itself?, its eyeless gaze always looking at you wherever you fucking turn, and the lone eye of your webcam watching you as well, and who knows who is watching through the window, through the cracks in the ceiling, through every little gap. I think the room has to find something to look through. When I took away the singer’s eyes, it had to search for new eyes. There were no real eyes left, so it had to spread itself thin and use other, more abstract things to represent eyes. It had to watch me, it had to see and laugh and call me a degenerate or a fag or whatever it wanted to call me, whilst still wanting to be inside of me or for me to be inside of it. And of course, it being a room, I am inside of it. And it is inside of me.