BRANDON
Some days, I feel like I’m fine. I can breathe, somewhat, can move, run, talk, and smile.
I can exist and not suffer from the metaphorical bleeding in my fucked-up head.
On other days, I feel like I’m being punished for the good times. I’m being punished for feeling happy when I have no right to be.
Days where my wrist itches and my mind crumbles into a satire of burning emotions and throbbing pulses.
Days where it’s hard to breathe without choking on the gooey ink that’s been flooding my brain since the day I gave up control because of my screwed-up pride.
Today is one of those days.
Today started with waking up in the embrace of the most beautiful, most affectionate soul I’ve ever met and feeling like I got my fucking ink all over him.
I felt like I was tarnishing him, digging him deeper into the black fucked-up hole of my existence until he’d also be submerged in it.
Until he’d have no way out, like me.
That’s why I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Because the moment they get past the perfect image to look inside, they’ll find a grimy, spineless piece of fucking shit whose worst enemy is his own mind.
Nikolai woke up to me wiping the smudges from his chest and thinking I was stroking him. He smiled and I couldn’t look him in the eye without falling deeper into that muddy hole in my soul.
He smiled and it was okay for a while.
Until it wasn’t.
Until Grace decided to come over for dinner and I had to sit across from her again and pretend I wasn’t being pulled apart by my demons. I had to swallow the food and force it down when my stomach demanded I throw it back up.
It was worse with Nikolai around. The more he watched me like he could peel off my outer layer and see all the ugly parts, the worse my nausea got.
A splitting migraine has been pounding on the back of my head and is making my vision blurry as I attempt to walk to the studio.
I barely managed to tell Dad about our arrangements to leave tomorrow before I bolted out of his office.
If I’d stayed, I would’ve exploded. I feel like a ticking time bomb lately, on the verge of spilling my guts and ruining everything for Mum like an ungrateful brat.
She was over the moon when Grace signed her. I was over the moon when she decided to give me private lessons instead of Lan.
For the first time, someone from the art circuit called me a genius instead of my holier-than-thou twin.
For the first time, I felt more important than him.
Lan never liked Grace or got along with her, and that made me fall deeper into her trap.
He told me not to take her classes and that he’d talk to his art teacher so he could teach us together. But I responded with things like, “It’s none of your business, prick” and “Stop being so jealous,” then went to her just out of spite.
It was only after I grew up that I realized two things. One, from a young age, Lan’s narcissism clashed with hers and he probably saw her for what she was, even if unintentionally. The reason she didn’t pick him was because she couldn’t control him. He’s always been so sharp and manipulative, her tactics wouldn’t have worked on him.
Two, she was grooming me at the time. She said the right things, pushed the right buttons, and used my love for art and my parents to shove me right where she wanted me.
And it worked like a charm.
For her. Not me.
Even before Grace, I didn’t like physical touch. I made out with a few girls, and some of them gave me the occasional blowjob, but I had to stop myself from pushing them away every time they touched me. I had to play the game and pretend it was okay.
Lan, Eli, and Remi kept saying shagging was so fantastic and I felt extremely alienated in their guy talks. So for a short period, I suspected maybe I was gay. Maybe the reason physical touch was revolting was because I played for a different team.
The thought freaked me out to no end. I remember thinking, why can’t Lan be the gay twin? Why does it have to be me? He already excels at drawing everyone’s attention, so why can’t he at least be the different one?
But that thought didn’t have any credence. I never felt attracted to my teammates who stripped in the changing room, and they had pretty fit bodies. I never ogled them even subconsciously and never saw them as anything more than teammates. However, I had to test the theory.
One night, I went for it. There was an openly gay boy at school and he often flirted with good-looking straight guys—Lan and me included. When he followed me out during a party, flirting and touching, I kissed him to see if I liked it.
I nearly threw up in his mouth.
So I thought maybe it was because he was so flamboyant and I wasn’t into that. I tried it with a few other boys, but the result was the same. I felt disgusted and couldn’t get past a kiss.
Turned out, I wasn’t straight or bi or gay. I was simply broken like a fucking malfunctioning machine. When Lan and I were in Mum’s womb, he took everything and left me with nothing. That caused me a lot of stress at the time, and I wanted to talk to Dad about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I thought he’d be disappointed or something.
He had headaches because of Lan, but he listened with a grin whenever my brother told him about his endless shagging adventures. Dad didn’t agree with many of his actions, but he’s always been irrevocably proud of how my brother handled himself in the outside world.
I was so jealous of Lan, so filled with envy that I started to distance myself from him. I blamed him for how I was broken. I hated him because I wasn’t like him. I despised him for having everything while I had nothing.
It was colossally irrational, but there was no logic in the daft, angsty fifteen-year-old me.
My biggest mistake was voicing my displeasure about Lan to Grace. She latched on to it like a hyena and got me exactly where she wanted me.
Powerless. Hopeless. Used.
Since then, I’ve been submerged in the dot of ink on my hand that I looked at the entire time she fucked herself on me. While I screamed and begged her to stop. Like a fucking weakling.
I could’ve fought her or pushed her off. I was hitting puberty pretty hard and was definitely physically stronger than her. But I was too confused, too caught up in the attention she showed me, too scared and horrified about the thought of hating the idea of having sex with everyone.
The reason I cut my left hand is because it’s the hand I wrapped around her nape when I kissed her that day. When I gave her the opening to violate me thoroughly.
I’ve often had fantasies about cutting off that hand. Chopping it to pieces. Extracting the cancerous organ that signed my mental death certificate.
The reason I posted stories with #NewDay every day is because I was proud for surviving another day, for not letting my head get the better of me and pushing me down the cliff of my sanity.
It’s been over eight years, but I still can’t escape the ink and the nausea that flooded me during the whole experience.
I remember that day so well. After I stumbled out of her flat, I spent it roaming the streets, walking in the rain with a dazed expression. Though I was drenched, it wasn’t the physical discomfort I felt.
No.
I was frozen, cold and frosty, all the way to my goddamn mind.
When I got home, I stood in my shower for two hours. But it wasn’t water that rinsed me.
Black ink poured down on me, covering my eyes, nose, and ears and jamming inside my throat until I was retching on the shower floor again and again. At some point, I was dry heaving. The entire time, a strong floral perfume clogged my nostrils and my fucking throat and her red fucking nails choked me.
I didn’t go to my bed. I couldn’t.
Whenever I moved, I felt her ghost right behind me, cackling and cooing, her nails sinking into my arm.
I was terrified that she’d do it again.
So I ran to Lan’s room. Ironic, really, since I was the one who demanded we have separate rooms two years prior. Lan never wanted that and he became so petty afterward.
However, when I stood in his doorway, he immediately knew something was off. He jumped from his bed and asked me what was wrong.
I whispered, “Nothing. Can you hug me?”
The moment his arms wrapped around me, I broke down. I cried in his chest for so long that I think I passed out.
My brother held me through it all, and even though he doesn’t know how to soothe people, he was patting my back the entire time. He carried me to his bed and let me sleep in his arms.
He whispered, “Tell me who did this to you so I can end them.”
Then he begged me for the first time in his life.
I didn’t tell him the real reason. Instead, I poured my heart out about how I was struggling with art and school and attention. I also admitted out loud that I hated how I wasn’t as strong-minded as he was.
That worked for a while, but I don’t think he ever believed me.
Then the experimentation phase I went through bit me in the arse and some homophobes started mocking me and calling me slurs.
Lan thought the breakdown was because of that, and I saw firsthand how he targeted them and turned their lives into a nightmare. To this day, not one of them is a functioning member of society.
For a long time, Lan kept watching me, but I was already good at building façades and perfecting my image.
I stopped trying to experiment with guys and kept to girls because they made me feel like Lan. Straight. High sex drive. Normal.
As for Grace, I handled her soon after.
She made the mistake of sending me the footage of what happened with the caption: Study this and you’ll let your raw talent loose.
I told her she needed to be the one who told Mum that she was discontinuing my lessons because of work or whatever excuse she could come up with. If she didn’t, I would show the footage to Mum.
That was a lie. I would rather die than show that to anyone.
Grace was appalled. She thought we were in it together and that I liked her. She even told me that she felt like I’d used her.
I used her.
Me.
She complied, not because she thought she’d assaulted me. No. It was fear of the scandal of having sex with a minor. To this day, she believes it was consensual and has often told me we could revisit ‘the good old days.’
She was out of my immediate life, but she never left it completely, not when Mum’s career depended on the almighty Grace Bruckner. She worked so hard to be considered by her and I couldn’t be the one who ruined that.
So I swallowed the knife with its blood and pretended everything would be fine. I did encourage her. I did kiss her back. I did feel drunk on the sense of power she offered me.
A man can’t be raped by a woman.
That’s the stigma that stayed in my head even though the nausea from that time followed me for the rest of my life.
It got worse, not better, but I had it under control. I believed myself to be fine.
Until Nikolai invaded my life and forced me to see just how fundamentally broken I am. That no matter how much I hide, I’m still naked and desolate.
The truth I hid from for years coiled from the ashes. I betrayed that fifteen-year-old version of me and he rose from the decay and transformed into the reflection in the mirror. He became the pool of ink and the eyes who’ll never forgive me for letting him down.
Nikolai fundamentally changed me, because he crushed the lies I’ve been telling myself for years. I thought if I convinced myself I was normal, straight, and completely unaffected by the past, I’d eventually believe it. But that was a pipe dream.
Being with Nikolai hurts because I crave him despite hating myself. I need him so I can mend the broken pieces I shoved to the back of my closet of skeletons.
And that’s wrong.