nothing, terrified and alone, crying for someone to help me, to make it stop, to make it better? If that’s what it is, it will only be more of the same, and I am frightened of more of the same. I’m ready for different and for less now. I heard once that death is going home but where is home for me?
I can feel something against my leg but I can’t kick it off. Mama, make it stop. I guess a lot of people are going to write about my death and I don’t think there is anything I can do about it, but I wish no one ever had to know that I died here in this ruined place, a ruined girl, a girl who had a rat nibbling on her cooling skin and who was crying out for her mother. Of all the people I could call who wouldn’t show, she would head the list, so how pathetic am I?
I hope that she doesn’t find out I still wanted her.
* * *
A hundred billion years ago when I was a little girl, I used to wake up at night sometimes from bad dreams. I don’t know why I had bad dreams then … maybe I was dreaming of my future; that would scare any kid.
No matter how late it was, though, or how hard I cried, it was never her, my mother, who came to me at night.
I wasn’t left alone to scream in the dark, there was always someone around who was paid to love me, and I don’t know why I couldn’t get that through my thick skull, why I refused to understand that the only ones who would ever be around to love me would have to be paid for it. I didn’t, I wouldn’t, give up though. I kept calling for her over the shoulder of whichever nanny or maid was comforting me.
She never came then, and she won’t come now.
Part 2
Golden Girl
Chapter 2
My sisters and I were raised to never use the words 'I want'. It wasn’t that our parents didn’t know that we would naturally want things; it was stressed to us that while it was okay to want things, it was simply not okay to say it aloud.
What was okay was to say, “I will have that.”
I don’t know why I could never stop being annoyed over such a simple distinction. I thought it was petty and stupid. Maybe that’s why, in retaliation, I learned early to say, 'I will have those' instead. I waited for restraint that did not come, or for my parents to notice that though I wanted for nothing, I was still taking everything.
I didn’t like being told not to want things. Automatically it made me desire things fiercely, but I may have expected that someone, anyone, would step in and tell me to at least cut down on having so many things, to calm down about acquiring things, buying things, buying everything - but nobody said a word.
It’s a typical loser's cliché to say that I wanted things that I would never have, like being the center of my parents' hearts, or believing even for an hour that I was good enough, beautiful enough or special enough to belong to a family like mine. Yet, like a lot of eye-rolling clichés, it’s also true.
Poor little rich girl, money doesn’t buy happiness, money can’t buy you love, starving at a banquet, they aren’t just sayings. Oh well, I mean they are sayings, obviously, but it’s because someone before I came along actually did say them, lived them, lived like me. I’m guessing from the depressing nature of those statements that they figured out pretty early on that being rich isn’t for people with weak stomachs, or weak investment portfolios either. The latter is never an issue in my family, it’s the former that will bust you up on the rocks. My short life story, for example, I am guessing is going to turn into a world class cautionary tale. By the age of nine or so I gave up showing that I wanted those silly sentimental things and began to focus very seriously on getting the things I could have, which worked out fine. I quickly learned that what I could have was pretty much everything.
* * *
In the beginning there were the Kellehers, and that is my family. We are considered old money. Here in America, old money means it’s over fifty years old, and we