Once upon a time, a little girl was born into a distorted reality. She thought it was a real, normal existence, but as she grew, she realized she was looking in on life from the outside. She learned what normal family life was like from her friends’ families and families in the movies. Her family was separate from the rest of the world, and lived in their own strange, stagnant version of reality.
Nothing ever changed in this dark kingdom. A mean, malignant king ruled over this hellish existence and he treated his family like subjects that were there to serve him and to be used as he saw fit. In time, the little girl came to realize that her mother wasn’t a powerful queen, but just another slave of the king. Or at least, that was what she had come to believe herself to be, and she behaved accordingly. She used her slave existence to create a victim persona and lived like this, gaining admiration from some people for all she was able to put up with, and for what she was willing to sacrifice.
Meanwhile, the girl felt like a ghost in her weird existence, always standing apart from the rest of the world. She was an observer, who hardly participated in anything, as this seemed the safest way to be. At home she had learned early on that it wasn’t good to be noticed. If the spotlight was on you it usually meant that you had done something wrong, and that you’re going to pay for it. Often that meant listening to endless complaints and insults from the king, until she cut off his voice in her head and drifted away in her mind to one of the fantasies she loved to read as escapism.
When she was small, he used to beat her until she was covered in bruises, as punishment for whatever she had done and didn’t realize was wrong. He stopped doing that as she got older and then the main punishment was the constant, senseless grating of his monotone voice on her nerves. The girl hated the king more every day as she grew up and often fantasized that he would die. This didn’t happen, though, and his evil powers granted him a long and useless life. The king became even stranger and more hateful as the years passed. Sometimes he smiled at the girl, and they talked about what he wanted to talk about, but if she dared to say anything he didn’t want to hear, his face became like thunder, and then the anger erupted like a volcano. She stopped telling him anything about her life and gradually learned to avoid him altogether. At the best of times, they lived together in a strained peace. There was always the walking on eggshells, to avoid the next eruption.
To be continued…