[ in search of the real me ]
by kHo

So she packed up her whole life as she knew it, crammed it in her car, took one last look around, and put the pedal to the metal. Where was she going? Nowhere, but not here. Who had she told? No one, especially not him. Why was she leaving? No reason to stay. Who was she? No fucking clue.

Her life was awful enough to begin with, and that was without happiness threatening to make her realize just how awful it had been. She'd met him on a plane and she'd fucked him at the airport. That's all that was supposed to be. Just her, a guy, a broom closet, and a fuck that would hopefully make her come and cloud her thinking enough so that when she got home it wouldn't be quite so excruciating.

He was a surfer boy. He was your stereotypical California male: sandy blondish brown hair, a killer smile, stubble, and a little bit of a lilt to the way he spoke. When she'd seen him she'd immediately thought to herself that if he wasn't the "what's your sign" pick up line user, she didn't know who was.

And if he wasn't, what the fuck did she care? She was fucking him in a closet, and god yes was she gonna come, but that was supposed to be it. She didn't give a good god damn if he had wife, nor did she give two shits if he had a child. She didn't give a fuck what he thought of her and she was next to certain that he felt the same towards her.

And then his cell phone rang and just like that she was offering to bring him home. It was the least she could do. His father died, and she wasn't completely heartless, not yet.

But God did she wish she had been. There was something about him that had pulled her in. She didn't know then, nor did she know now, what it was that pushed her from "I wanna fuck him" to "I wanna be with him," but good golly had she been pushed in that direction, and, it would seem, with a vengeance. For Christ's sake, she'd been about to marry him. Her, Brenda Chenowith, married. Christ on a cracker, down was up, black was white, the sky is falling...

And then she'd fucked it up. Or had he fucked it up? Or had she fucked him up? She wasn't even sure who it was that was to blame for the downfall of this particular conquest, but for the first time in her life she cared. Somehow, despite the hell that her mother, her father, Billy, and the endless string of external and internal psychoanalysis had put her through, he'd somehow managed to break the brick wall that had been so impenetrably built around her down and she cared.

The question now was this: Did she love him for it, or hate him for it?

She wanted to hate him, for making her love, for making her feel the little bit of happiness she was capable of feeling, but she had the sinking suspicion that she loved him, and wasn't about to stop. Not anytime soon anyway. As a matter of fact, the only person she did hate at this point and time was herself.

How dare him make her feel worthy?! How dare him make her feel happy?! How dare him give her a taste, the sweet, beautiful, magnificent taste, of the sugary sweetness that was what love could be?!

And how dare her let herself buy into it?!!!

Girl is born. Girl is fucked up in the head for 20 plus years. Girl becomes woman way too soon. Girl has to pick up the broken sharded pieces of equally broken brother. Girl vows to never love anyone. Girl meets boy. Girl fucks boy. Girl falls in love. wait a minute. isn't that contradictory? And speaking morally, isn't that a bit backwards? Isn't it girl meets boy, girl loves boy, girl fucks boy?

Then again, since when did Brenda Chenowith follow the norm? Had she ever? And most importantly, could she ever?

And what the fuck was normal anyway? Was normal barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Or was normal working 9-5 in a stodgy old mothball smellin' office day in and day out? Was being normal normal? Who was ever normal? Was Person A's normal the normal for Person B? And did Person A envy Person B's normal? Did Person B look condescendingly upon Person A's normal? Were Persons A and B bored with their so-called normalcy? Did Persons A and B envy Person C's non-normal lifestyle? And, most presently on Brenda's mind, was it normal to invent Persons A, B, and C and give them hypothetical lifestyles for the purposes of self-psychoanalyzation?

Ah, but therein lied the rub of having psychologists for parents: You hated what they did, who they were, but in the end you ended up more like them than you ever cared to be. And they could, for that alone, go to hell for all Brenda cared.

She turned from Santa Monica Boulevard onto Interstate 10 West and gunned her engine. The faster she got the hell out of dodge the sooner she could shake the image of Nate lying on a hospital bed, getting his brain operated on like a lab rat.