back to reality (?)

Hey there. Forgot about this place. I wrote one entry four years ago on this new account, and then life got in the way, as it is wont to do. I suppose I said what needed to be said at the time. In the past, I’ve just come here when Nicola springs to mind. I wish I could be different, but maybe the key is writing out all those memories, putting them down somewhere where I don’t have to wear them close to the vest any longer. Sometimes I think it’s no good to hold on to her secret memory, but I’m afraid if I try to share our stories, people won’t understand. I know they won’t. She’ll be the villain in my history. The adult who preyed on a naive teenager, filling me up with her lies and treating it like a game.

I’m also afraid to lose the memory of a place where Nicola could write secret diary entries to 17-year-old me, so I’ve returned. I hope I can unburden here and let you, dear reader, whoever you may be, decide for yourself if she was evil or just sick, misguided, or maybe a victim of religious trauma, drug addiction, and abuse up until her death in December of 2008. I’ll probably never know for sure, but the web of lies and vague memories gets ever more tangly the older and further away from 17 I get.

Stay tuned, for here we go…into the thick of it…