FATHER AND I LIVE IN a two-bedroom apartment. It's small and old, but neat and cozy with faded flowery wallpaper and oak flooring that I happily shine every weekend. It's not perfect, but it is home, and it's always been my happy place.
Father's pension ensures that our rent is always paid, and the small amount left over covers the rest of our bills. Father has never asked me for anything, but I've been working since I was thirteen, and I use my wages to help put food on the table.
Even so, money has still been tight, and it was only when I started earning tips from Tap N Tap that we were able to splurge. When we just want to have a nice dinner at home, we indulge ourselves with imported cheese. When we're feeling extravagant, we buy ourselves caviar.
I know it doesn't match our income bracket, but Father has always had a love for the finer things in life, and I grew up listening to him talk about things that only rich and cultured people should typically know about.
It's because of Father that I know more about Beethoven than BTS or Beyonce, and it's also because of him that the other kids in school bully me because I talk funny. On good days, I just get lots of snickering and eye rolls. The bad days, though - they get really bad, but I've never blamed Father for it. I love him as he is, and so he does as well with me, but if there is one thing I wished was different...
Well...
Father, for all his conservative ways, has always encouraged me to be inquisitive, and even something as simple as enabling 'safe search' settings on Google is tantamount to intellectual oppression in his eyes. And I know he meant well, but it's made him forget that there are just some things in this world that a child is never supposed to see.
Things that, once seen, can never be unseen, and a child's life is changed forever.
SOME CHILDREN ARE TAUGHT to dream big, but all I learned at an early age was to dream dirty.
I was eight when I stumbled across my first porn site, and the video that automatically played on my screen was a thirty-minute clip that was filmed in the eighties: a woman had hailed a cab one dark and rainy night, but instead of getting home safely she had ended up in the woods, with the cab driver having his way with her in the backseat.
I had known, even back then, that I had somehow ended up watching something I wasn't supposed to watch, but instead of telling my father about it, I had kept quiet.
I never told a single soul actually, but I had never forgotten about it either, and night after night, I would find myself replaying that clip in my mind and obsessing over how rough and how big he was. For years, I had struggled with guilt, shame, and confusion. Year after year after year, I would tell myself I mustn't do anything even as I craved and dreamt. And God, how I craved. I craved to the point of crying, craved to the point of despair—-
I craved and craved and craved until finally, at age fourteen, I could no longer help it.
I finally touched myself, and at first my fingers merely drifted over my cotton-covered flesh, tentatively and guiltily, and then helplessly, because I could no longer stop. Gentle strokes had eventually become furious little rubs, and I just kept rubbing and rubbing until something gushed out of me, and I felt my eyes roll all the way back as the pleasure took over my body.
I still feel guilty and ashamed when I look back on those days. What happened was wrong. I knew it then, I knew it now, but it doesn't change a thing, and it's all I do almost every night since then.
I would read books and watch movies about a man abducting a woman, and the woman falling in love with the very same man who has taken her against her will.
It's a fantasy I'll never speak of, but it's also a fantasy that I know will stay with me forever. Every time I close my eyes in the shower, I'd touch myself while I imagine being forcibly taken by a man so, so strong that there's nothing I can do to stop him.
And for a while, the fantasies conjured by my dirty mind used to be enough.
But now it's not.
For some time now, I've been dying to know a man's touch, and while I know there are so many ways I can hook up with a guy, the idea of giving myself to just anyone makes my skin crawl.
Just because I have a dirty mind doesn't mean I haven't a single romantic bone in my body. When I have sex for the first time, I want that moment to be with the right guy, and I'm not just talking about someone who's capable of turning me on.