Chapter 1
	I used to feel everything. Torrents of emotions flooding through my body: Pain, jealousy, terror, anguish, fury. Eventually, I didn’t know what I felt, or if I even felt at all. But it didn’t just happen like that. I didn’t just decide that today I no longer wanted to feel. It was a process that took place year after year until I no longer knew what it was like to feel either bliss or angst. It was a process that started when I was young still living with my parents, and continued into my first years as a so called ‘independent.’ It started as an attempt to show my father what strength really was. When he hit me, I’d try as hard as I could not to cry. I would look at the ground when he yelled at me, blocking him out entirely, envisioning that I was somewhere else. Eventually I became so adept at blocking him out that I could even look him in the eye and neither hear or see him. That didn’t mean that he didn’t take me by surprise every once in a while. Occasionally, he would catch me off guard, and his words would go straight through to my heart, slicing off a bit of the tenderness. For me, physical pain was easier to ignore than emotional words. May whoever said, that ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ fucking burn in hell for traumatising children who knew better. Bones heal with time, and with the proper care, they don’t scar. When I die, whoever is doing my autopsy is going to be astounded. When they take out my heart, they’ll see what I mean. That mound of bleeding flesh will be covered with black wounds and scars that have never completely healed. In reality, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will be the death of me. It was those physical wounds that I first learned how to disregard. I learned how to project myself out of my body while my father abused it. My lack of tears infuriated him I know, but I refused to let him rule both my body *and* my soul. It was much more difficult to ignore the stinging words of hate. They shot down my self-esteem, made me turn against myself. For quite some time, I assumed he must be right, that there was something seriously wrong with me. After a while I snapped out of that phase. But that didn’t mean his words didn’t give me doubts. I turned to drugs, sex, booze. Anything that would give me a high to block out the doubt that was slowly ripping me apart. But the drugs and alcohol just left me feeling lower than before, and I started using more and more just to maintain the initial high. And the sex? The sex left me empty. Most mornings, I’d wake to find that my partner had disappeared without a trace. All I wanted was to be loved, but all these people wanted to do was fuck. After trying so hard not to hurt, any measure of pain was intolerable. So I learned to leave before they could. Hurt them before they could wound me. Things only got worse once I moved out. While I no longer had to deal with my father and his irrational ranting and beatings, I had to deal with the frigidity with which the real world had greeted me. My war against emotion took another step forward. I vowed that if the world was so intent on tearing me down by my heart, then I would slice it apart first. Until, that is, I met someone who reached down out of the liquid sky to hoist me back up into his arms.
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