One summer when I was around 6, my dad drove my two younger brothers and I across British Columbia in a tangerine Ford Capri. It had a black interior and burned my bare skin when I sat in the front seat in shorts. It smelled of hot greasy dust, chip bags, and melting plastic, wires stuck out from the dashboard where the old radio had been ripped out. Dad loved that car. He'd been "souping it up" for months before we belted ourselves in and burned westward to visit Grandma.

He was in a vindictive mood. He and my mom were split up, maybe it was after their first separation, and I remember feeling his indignant air, a special malice held for those he believed had wronged him. He liked to be really righteous when the mood stuck him, you know, state rules about how people should behave or whatever, but mostly he just wanted do whatever the fuck he wanted. There was always a wild, unhinged feeling around him, like anything could be said, or done. We swore loudly, ate licorices and gas station treats for dinner, on long stretches he’d get me to drive or steer while he took a nap, and sometimes a wave of rage swept the car and gritting his teeth, he'd say things like, "That fat old bitch has NO business...what a STUPID fucking hag!" about someone he didn't like. He also liked to drop "secrets", adult stuff I wasn't supposed to know about, retaliative little bombs about my mom, or aunts, or grandparents or my two older half-sisters. Really mean, personal shit. Speeding down the snaky B.C. highway, he told me a big secret that shook my body and caused me to burst into tears.

"Why are you crying? I thought you already knew that." I didn't know. I held that secret in my chest for years. It made me think there were always secrets being held from me. I was obsessed with secrets. "Guess someone should have told you," he said. Guess so. Guess it was always him who told me horrible things about the ones who loved and protected me."You're my best girl, my princess."

___

"I’m just sitting here realizing that I want you to hate me. Like, I’d prefer that you hated me and things were clearcut in that terrible way rather than this strange, icky greyness I feel now. Could you block me? Or tell me something more concrete so I wouldn’t be able to communicate with you anymore?" This is what I wrote to a nice man I recently met. About a week previous to writing this message, my dad sent me an email with this inside: “As for me being a combined monster/asshole or either or both. Monsters are those people locked up in jails for serial murder, those who have molested, raped and abused and tortured children.”

I never mentioned any of the above, but he has a point:

How to measure our monsters?

I recently learned about the term "emotional incest" and it's like my whole inner architecture suddenly made sense. I've had 35 years of being open and porous to a very sick, broken man. I’ve either been the absolute epicentre of his happiness, or the point blank reason of his pain and sorrow. A princess or a piece of shit. He makes others responsible for everything that's wrong with him and his latest wife is the reason he's 'good' again. He's a vampire. He uses whatever open being to either soak up goodness or as a receptacle to spread his poison. I carried his sick for years. Long after my brothers and sisters were exhausted and boundaried, I held his sickness and I tried to cure it.

When you cut off a parent, people in our patriarchal culture love to tell you to suck it up and respect them as they gave you life. Fuck that. What's a child supposed to do when the parent fucks with their head year after year then dumps them? This is what a breakup letter from a pathetic, weak, spineless man reads like:

“I spent most of boxing day lying in bed, weeping and heartbroken about my children. No more. I have a family here who loves me and respects me, including grandsons who are respectful.

I now need to focus on those good things in my life. I'm busy and happy and productive. I do love you all and miss you all but this is not working, and evidently there is no possibility for reconciliation. You'd all rather prefer to demonize me. So be it. I'll deal with it and the pain will subside eventually....and our lives will go on.

Be well and be happy.

Love, Dad”

Always the fucking weeping: we all got it in person, over the phone, in emails, I even got one of his weeping episodes over Skype. He never sought out help, never thought anything was wrong with him. He was too rational and levelheaded, of course: like so many blind men, he was smarter than his sickness and his sadness.

I used to like men who really loved me in moments, then cut me out completely. There are plenty of special people like that, sick ones and married ones, they were perfect. My dad has rejected me in so many effective ways. Words, gestures, but mostly words. Poisonous words. I've tried to turn the words inside out -- is that why I'm a writer? Are these little shields against him? Monsters versus Monsters. Booze used to help soften these kinds of truths, all the variations of self-hate I acted out in relationships. I meet a nice guy, we spend some time together and I find myself hoping (demanding) he'll love me forever (before really knowing me) then as I reveal more of my personality, I start wishing he'd quickly hate me and cut me off (before really knowing me).

I thought I could change him, that he'd finally change and look at himself, get help. I thought it’d be different after my last letter to him. I was so compassionate, clear. I wasn't drunk. I just asked him to please respect me and not speak badly of the people I love. When I need to tell the truth my heart pounds. It pounded as I wrote him that letter asking he please respect my boundaries and not speak ill of my loved ones. It's pounding right now.

I always admired girlfriends who didn’t cry after one-night stands. Girlfriends who didn’t feel like they had a gaping hole in the middle of their bodies that needed to be filled. Girlfriends who could casually date a guy first, not even be tempted to sleep with him. Girlfriends who could wait to text or call, and didn’t feel nauseous, painful anxiety when a man didn’t respond.

“Make him work for it” they’d say.

I had a close girlfriend in my mid-twenties who was in a relationship for years and never uttered the words “I love you” -- that was the kind of withholding I’d dream about having. I had to work very hard on not being vulnerable to a man, not desperately need him to validate my existence and “complete me”. I trained myself to be the taker so I could flip the script and make them vulnerable to me, make them fall in love with me; walk through an afterparty wasted and keep those rays of light to myself. Be untouchable. I wanted the opportunity to reject and use someone without remorse, walk away feeling nothing, gloat a little bit even.

Why did I want to use? There is a simple answer (which applies to non-sociopaths only):

“Hurt people hurt people”

The love monster only feeds on love as power, because it believes it’s getting back what it lost by consuming it in another person. The love monster is strictly a consumer, it doesn’t give anything back. It’s just a love hungry bitch.

“Just be patient” they’d say.

We’ve been sharing my bed for a few nights but not having sex. This slow, tender intimacy is unfamiliar but it’s lovely. We spend our days talking and walking and gazing at each other. We’re cuddling at one point and he says, “I know I really like you cause you keep getting prettier and prettier…” Driving back from a restaurant one evening I ask him why he’s so reticent to have sex with me.

“It’s not explicitly about you. I haven’t slept with anyone for a year and a half,” he says back.

“On principle? Or…?”

“Yeah I felt like I was being used, and I was using in return, and humans shouldn’t use other humans like that…”

“I’ve used…” I say quietly.

“Yeah so you know…”

“Yes…”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the whole spectrum of consensual sex, I don’t judge anyone’s choices, like, do what you want, just for me at this point it needs to be right,” he says, grabbing my hand.

The Swiss violinist pays for our drinks and we skip back to my apartment in the Beaubourg at 3 a.m. The romantic story about “The Canadian girl who moves to Paris to write her first novel” comes to life as he looks around my 5th floor flat to behold piles of books, journals and pens, empty wine bottles, ashtrays full of cigarettes, dried up roses, and a broken laptop open on a page crawling with little black letters.

I turn on some music and stumble around the tiny flat looking for a couple of clean glasses to pour us some wine. “I love your place,” he says.

He’s a tower of Swissness at about 6’5” with slightly sloped shoulders and a blank but handsome face. He wears tidy little glasses propped on the end of his nose. His green eyes are kind and his gaze is winsome - I sense he really likes me. We start kissing and I try to set down my glass but miss the table and it crashes all over the white tiles. “Fuck!” I yell, throwing a towel on it.

Red hot lava burns down the walls leaving me alone on the top of a swaying tower overlooking Paris, its streets filled with reverent onlookers, the ghost of Henry Miller holding my hand. I breach the bank and the violinist ceases to be a person, he’s like a giant wave, there’s water everywhere, shards of glass, red wine, smoke and ash.

We’re woken at 8 a.m. by the sound of an angry fist pounding on my door. It’s my downstairs neighbour, a woman I’ve never met, screaming about waking her baby in the middle of the night. I don’t open the door cause I’m terrified. “Bitch,” the Swiss violinist mumbles, turning over. I rise and start cleaning up, my head aching, the sheets bloodied and the floor soaked in wine. Not exactly the spitting, smouldering volcano of last night, but I don’t feel empty. I feel OK.

“Can I have your number? I have a few nights here and I’d really like to see you again,” he asks, putting on his glasses.

I’ve cleaned up the apartment and July sun is pouring in, “Um how about you leave me your number? I’m pretty busy the next few days and…”

He gently interrupts, “I’d really like to take you for dinner."

“We’ll see…”

I feel OK. I feel OK!