Part One: Ashes- How she was unmade. How grief became gospel.
2361 Words
Chapter One: The First Offering.
The man on the other end of the phone sounded like the kind of guy who corrects baristas and still wears a Bluetooth headset like it’s 2008 and he’s important.
I told him he was an i***t—and I meant it with my whole chest.
It wasn’t the most professional moment of my week, but if I was chasing dignity, I wouldn’t be taking calls from corporate oxygen thieves at nine in the morning.
I’ve always had a mouth on me.
Sharp enough to cut through small talk and soft threats.
I never learned how to use it for good.
I don’t apologize for that.
That mouth? It kept me fed.
So did fists.
And a level of spite that could power a small jet engine.
The man on the line whimpered something about being bad with money and needing to be punished.
I sighed. Like I’d heard it all before—and I had.
I told him to get on his hands and knees and oink like the dirty pay pig he was.
Somewhere, a grown man cried into a Bluetooth earpiece.
Just another Tuesday.
I didn’t choose this job because I had a dream of humiliating finance bros and lonely husbands over the phone.
But I’m damn good at it.
And after the life I’ve lived, if a man wants to pay me to verbally set fire to his ego, who am I to stop him?
⸻
It wasn’t always like this.
There was a time when I thought I could be someone else.
At thirteen, my mother’s husband locked me out of the house.
When I tried to climb back through the window, he pulled my hair.
He got a face full of stitches.
I got juvenile probation.
I’ve always had a gift for making people regret underestimating me.
My dad? In and out of prison.
So I learned early—don’t depend on anyone.
By sixteen, I had my first kid.
By twenty-two, I had three.
I made money however I could:
My looks.
My wit.
My ability to read men like cheap novels.
At twenty-six, I was cocktailing in a high-end restaurant, pretending my bones weren’t made of exhaustion and obligation.
That’s when I met Chris.
He had the kind of smile that made you believe you were safe.
Big, beautiful brown eyes.
God, I loved him.
For the first time, life didn’t feel like a war zone.
He taught me how to smile without grinding my teeth.
How to breathe.
And then, just like that—he was gone.
No warning.
Just hours into a Tuesday in October.
⸻
My life didn’t fall apart.
I tore it down, piece by piece, just to see what was underneath.
Turns out, not much.
A voice.
An attitude.
And a phone line full of desperate men who wanted to be destroyed.
Now I spend my nights cashing in on shame.
One pathetic caller at a time, I rebuild myself—one humiliating fantasy at a time.
Not bad for a girl they left on the sidewalk at thirteen.
⸻
Grief doesn’t come like they say it does.
It doesn’t knock.
It doesn’t creep.
It kicks the door off the hinges and drags you into the street, barefoot and feral.
At the funeral, I didn’t cry.
I laughed.
Loud. Ugly.
People looked away.
That year, I stopped pretending.
Stopped parenting with intention.
Stopped showing up to anything unless it came with a bar, a stranger’s bed, or both.
My kids watched me crumble like a bridge in slow motion.
I told myself they were better off without me.
It was a lie.
I just couldn’t stand to see the disappointment in their eyes.
⸻
I don’t remember most of that year.
Just flashes.
A man grabbing my wrist in a gas station parking lot.
Waking up in someone’s bathroom with mascara streaked like war paint.
Drinking until I couldn’t taste the difference between sorrow and self-hatred.
I didn’t hit rock bottom.
I started digging through it, looking for something worse.
Then one night, I took a call.
He wanted to be degraded.
And I felt it.
That click.
The slow, sickening bloom of power inside my powerlessness.
“Tell me what a worthless little man I am,” he said.
“You were born beneath me,” I whispered. “Your whole life is a pathetic apology.”
He paid me.
And that night—I slept.
⸻
Sex work—especially the kind that lives in a man’s guilt and a prepaid phone plan—is honest in a way regular life never is.
People lie with their faces every day.
But when they’re moaning into a receiver, begging to be ruined?
That’s who they are.
And maybe, who I am too.
I didn’t just play a role.
I became her.
Someone who doesn’t flinch.
Someone who doesn’t cry.
I turned my voice into a weapon.
My pain into currency.
Men paid to hear my disgust.
And they always came back for more.
⸻
I built the persona like armor:
Dark lipstick on a busted mouth.
Venom laced in honey.
Laughter like broken glass.
They called me Goddess.
As if I hadn’t slept in my car six months ago, eating cold fries and wiping my face with a t-shirt I found under the seat.
As if I wasn’t still Googling how to feel like a mother again at 2 a.m.
There were nights I whispered filth into the phone while locked in the bathroom, just to keep the kids from hearing.
Said things that would make a therapist weep—and they begged for more.
I’d light a cigarette I didn’t want.
Just to feel like someone else for a minute.
Because the truth?
I didn’t want to get better yet.
I wanted to be dangerous.
I wanted someone to bleed for what I lost.
⸻
It wasn’t about money.
It was about control.
It was about watching them crawl while I—finally—stood for something.
⸻
I never liked kids growing up.
But when I had mine, it felt like the world handed me three small gods and said: Worship them—or be punished.
They loved me anyway.
Even when I didn’t earn it.
That’s the worst part.
There were days I stared at their faces and couldn’t remember who I was before them.
And nights I’d finish a call with some man crying into his shame, hang up, and tiptoe into my daughter’s room.
Just to remind myself she was real.
That I was still real.
But sometimes I wasn’t.
Sometimes I was still thirteen—locked out of the house, bleeding, listening to my mother scream for the man who hurt me.
Sometimes I was still packing a bag at 3 a.m., heading to a new town, a new school, with no time to process anything at all.
Sometimes I looked at my kids and thought: God, I hope you never understand me.
And other times—terrifyingly—I hoped they would.
“First came the silence. Then came the tribute”
CHAPTER TWO – THE ROT
Before the wreckage, there was rhythm.
Mornings with Chris were sacred.
Not rushed—ritual.
I made my smoothie thick with fruit and ambition.
He brewed mushroom tea like it was a sacrament.
We’d sit cross-legged, faces to the window, letting the frequency music wash over us like a tide no one else could hear.
Sometimes we talked about goals—short-term, long-term, the empire we were building out of dust and devotion.
Other times, we didn’t speak at all.
We just breathed.
Synced like two notes in the same song.
But then the tea stopped steaming.
The windows stayed closed.
And the music—our music—started to sound like static.
⸻
The change didn’t come with shouting.
It came in edges.
A new tension in his voice.
A sharper hunger behind his eyes.
He said he was tired.
He said he was stressed.
I wanted to believe him.
Because the alternative felt too familiar.
Too close.
⸻
It started with pills.
Just sometimes, he said.
Just to take the edge off.
He still woke up with me.
Still held me like I was made of myth.
Still whispered about the future like it was a promise.
But I saw the vitamins lined up beside what wasn’t vitamins.
And I told myself it wasn’t what it looked like.
But it was.
I knew the shape of that shadow.
I’d grown up inside it.
⸻
My father was an addict.
But also—he made the best steaks in the world.
Told stories that made you believe in magic.
He smelled like gasoline and peppermint.
He loved me in ways I still carry in my bones.
He was broken.
But he was mine.
And now Chris—
Brilliant, kind, laughing-while-burning Chris—
Was crumbling in the same quiet way.
I kept waiting for the monster to show up.
But he didn’t.
Just the man I loved, unraveling.
Thread by thread.
⸻
I didn’t leave.
Of course I didn’t.
We still had Sundays.
Still had the sunroom, thick with plants and ghosts.
Still had those long drives with no destination—his hand on my thigh like a promise he meant but couldn’t keep.
I told myself I could save him.
That love—real love—was holding on when the tide came in.
But I was lying.
So was he.
⸻
He disappeared into the garage for hours.
Came back wired, or hollowed out.
Some nights, he spoke about our future like he could still see it.
Other nights, he went so still I thought he’d vanished from inside his own skin.
I lit candles.
He forgot to roll joints.
The incense curled around us like a warning we couldn’t read.
And still—I loved him.
Still, he was the best thing that ever happened to me.
But that’s the thing about rot—
It starts where you can’t see it.
And by the time you do, it’s already everywhere.
⸻
He started missing work.
At first, it was little things.
Overslept. Stomach bug. Migraine.
Then: patterns.
Mondays blurred into Wednesdays.
Sometimes he was too high to stand.
Other times, he locked himself in the bedroom for four days straight.
I counted.
Four days of silence, of rustling and muttering through a door that felt more like a veil between worlds.
⸻
Everyone loved Chris.
The man who remembered birthdays.
Who stayed late.
Who made strangers feel like they belonged.
Nobody had a bad thing to say about him—
Except the version I lived with.
The one I cleaned up after.
Covered for.
Cried over.
The one drowning in the same house we built together.
⸻
He talked about rehab like it was a vacation he’d eventually take.
Just not now.
Not this week.
He wasn’t ready.
He wasn’t that bad.
But he was.
And I knew it.
⸻
I became his PR team.
Calling in sick for him.
Making excuses.
Polishing the lie until it sparkled.
I was saving his name while his body collapsed inside it.
⸻
I started putting him out.
Not because I stopped loving him.
Because I couldn’t keep dragging a man who didn’t want to stand.
His mother always took him back.
That part made me hate her a little.
She kept the light on for his worst self.
Welcomed the version of him that was easier to control.
Like she wanted him to fail—if it meant he’d come home.
I told her what he was doing.
Told her he was killing himself.
Slowly. Beautifully.
Like a boy setting fire to a paper house.
She just looked at me.
Eyes full of pride and denial.
And said, “Don’t tell me what to do with my house and my son.”
I told her if he died, I hoped it would happen under her roof—
Not mine.
⸻
But that’s not how it went.
⸻
The night he died, I didn’t fight him.
I was just tired.
Bone-tired.
Tired of talking him down.
Tired of dragging him up.
Tired of begging him to choose life like it was a group project.
He came home strung out.
Smiling like love was still enough.
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t cry.
I let it go.
And in the early hours of morning,
He was gone.
⸻
His mother showed up after the EMTs pronounced him.
She stood in the doorway for five full minutes.
Didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
Just stared at me like I owed her something.
Maybe an apology.
Maybe her son.
Maybe she wanted him back in the basement.
Broken—but breathing.
But I got the last night.
I got the silence.
I got the body.
And I still don’t know if that was a mercy or a curse.
⸻
At the funeral, people told stories.
They said he was full of light.
That he lit up every room.
That he brought people joy.
And they were right.
He did.
But I lived in the part of the house where the light didn’t reach.
⸻
People kept asking if I was okay.
Like they expected grief to make me soft.
Like I should be grateful for the time I had.
But I wasn’t soft.
And I wasn’t grateful.
I was tired.
Tired of carrying men who don’t want to save themselves.
Tired of being bled on by people I didn’t cut.
Tired of standing between a man and his own wreckage and calling it love.
⸻
I stopped talking.
Stopped answering calls.
Threw out his shirts.
Let the garden die.
I needed a break from being strong.
From being useful.
From being good.
So I picked up my phone.
Not to talk.
Not to cry.
Not to reconnect.
To find the next one.
The next man who thought he could play me.
The next man who whispered “u up?” into the void like he had any idea who he was summoning.
And when I found him?
I smiled.
“Say please, pig.”
- Writer
