Read Instrumental for Free Online

husband, end up broke and disabled and need your own shrink who you won’t be able to afford so you’ll die alone and in obscurity, miserable and afraid. You’re welcome.’
    Then there are the really shaming things. Like getting an erection every time I cry. Somehow the body remembers everything and links tears with sexual arousal. I would cry as he blew me. But physiology is physiology and my dick did its job and got hard. And so now when I cry it thinks, ‘Oh I remember this! Up we go.’
    Sex is an excellent topic also. The ground-swallowing, monumental shame of the orgasm. The images that fly across closed eyelids as you fuck, that force you to shake your head to try and make them disappear. The constant reminders of being touched there, there and there and what it meant at the time and so what it must mean now. The unremitting awfulness of believing at a core level that your girlfriend, wife, fiancee is somehow stained, broken, disgusting and evil because she had sex as a teenager. Despite knowing how ridiculous, how stupid, how illogical that sounds. I had sex young. It was bad. I am bad. You had sex young so you are bad. And so we cannot be together, I cannot respect you. You are so fuckingdisgusting. Marry me. I love you. You vile fucking whore. There’s a Hallmark card, right there.
    There were childhood sexual fantasies of being the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust and wandering around the streets pulling women out of cars and doing unspeakable things to them, getting aroused at the thought of being held down and having to beg for my own life, and a host of other weird and wonderful kinks involving torture, control, pain and God knows what. All before the age of nine.
    And those flashes of anger. Corroding, all-consuming anger at everything in the whole world. Anger at happy fucking families, broken families, families, sex, success, failure, sickness, children, pregnant women, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, schools, hospitals, shrinks, door locks, gym mattresses, authority, drugs, abstinence, friends, enemies, smoking, not smoking, everything and everyone, ever.
    Most of all, anger that I really, truly know that I cannot ever make what happened disappear completely. It’s one of those hideous faceblot stain things that children stare at and adults look away from. It is just there all the time and nothing I do can or will ever erase it. And I can try as much as I like to make it ‘my thing’, the reason I am special, a permission slip to behave however I want and to feel like a wannabe, spastic Holden Caulfield even at thirty-eight, but I know all the time, every day, that there is nowhere I can put it, no way I can frame or reframe it, nothing I can do with it to make it bearable or acceptable.
    There is an inbuilt mechanism in our psyche that helps with that, and it is dissociation. The most serious and long-lasting of all thesymptoms of abuse. It’s really quite brilliant. It started in the gym all those years ago.
    He’s inside me and it hurts. It’s a huge shock on every level. And I know that it’s not right. Can’t be right. So I leave my body, floating out of it and up to the ceiling where I watch myself until it becomes too much even from there, and then I fly out of the room, straight through the closed doors and off to safety. It was an inexplicably brilliant feeling. What kid doesn’t want to be able to fly? And it felt utterly real. I was, to all intents and purposes, quite literally flying. Weightless, detached, free. It happened every time and I didn’t ever question it. I just felt grateful for the reprieve, the experience, the free high.
    And ever since then, like a Pavlov puppy, the minute a feeling or situation even threatens to become overwhelming, I am no longer there. I exist physically and function on autopilot (I assume), but no one is consciously inside my mind. ‘The lights are on but no one is home’ is the