Chapter 1: Wanting to Be Happy

My earliest memory is wanting to be happy; this desire itself reveals I am not.

In the paved yard of my daycare, I watched the other children running and shouting, easily slipping into one another’s games. Two teachers swung the long plastic jump rope. Some kids leapt in and out without waiting for it to stop. Others sang the alphabet, counting how long the jumpers lasted. They radiated a joy I couldn’t grasp. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand them. I stood at the edge, watching—until Violet, my favorite teacher, took my hand. I pulled back. She didn’t let go and told the others to stop, set my feet in place, and held both my hands. I jumped when she jumped. Then she gave her spot to the blonde girl who made it all the way to Z.

While daycare was filled with these kinds of group moments, my sixth birthday brought a different, more personal kind of joy when a neighborhood friend gifted me Imogen. A doll with a porcelain face, copper hair, and a blue dress with white polka dots. My very own Anne of Green Gables. She was my first confidant. I cradled her for hours, whispering stories only she could hear, convinced she came to life when I wasn’t around. Her tangled hair invited constant offers from adults to brush it, but I refused. No one else could hold her—what if their hands were dirty, their touch too rough? She was an extension of me, woven into the fabric of my identity. If they hurt her, even accidentally, I feared I would feel it, too. When kindergarten allowed us to bring our most beloved toy, I proudly carried Imogen to class, keeping her close on my lap all day, safe from everyone else’s hands.

At home, during family dinner parties, Christmas, or Easter, Imogen and I deliberately sat at the adults’ table, my head barely reaching its height. I thought to myself: Stay silent. Become invisible. If they noticed me, they might send me away to play with toys or, worse, other children. I strained to capture their conversations. Words like money, politics, religion, philosophy, were beyond my understanding. But hands sculpted invisible concepts while wine swirled to the edge of glasses, always threatening, always on the verge of outpouring as passionate debates unfolded around me. Through their emotions, these big words began to take on meaning. My restless little mind raced to piece together their world, hoping that understanding would bring some stillness to my own internal chatter.

The presence of these giants—my intriguing family—comforted me. I resented childhood’s powerlessness and yearned to join their ranks. This pursuit lived within me, an instinct I followed without knowing why. I gravitated toward their authority—those who knew more, who lived fuller lives. Their wisdom exerted a pull I couldn’t resist. But that yearning to belong, to understand grown-ups, to earn a place at their table—only revealed how unmistakably I was still a child.

The powerlessness I had already known deepened when I was seven and my parents dragged me out of the multi-cultural, bilingual lifestyle of Montreal—where white shoes rarely saw mud and mosquitoes didn’t exist—and into one of its vacation lands, the Eastern Townships. I lost the little friends I had. Our new home was an upgrade from our first-story apartment, but really, it was just a cottage never meant for year-round living.

In such a rural area, far away from our babysitting grandmas and without backstreets to play in under the supervision of other parents, my mother raised me as her helper, shaped me into her ways.

My parents and little sister were often gone before my brother and I woke up—Mother straight to work, Father to drop my sister at daycare. This meant my alarm clock, set for 7 a.m. (with Mother’s 7:15 a.m. call as a backup I never needed), was the start of my day. In our home, surrounded by a forest where any child could vanish, I shouldered grown-up responsibilities. I felt like an adult each time I walked to my brother’s bed—he wasn’t much younger than me, two and a half years. I woke him up like any siblings would, by first telling him it was time to get up and then giving him a good shake. His eyes still sticky, I pushed us through our school morning routine. Our breakfast options were usually two blueberry Eggos from the toaster—my favorite—or a bowl of Cheerios.

Mother called to check if we were alive, and to give me the daily instructions: Were we eating at the cafeteria today? Staying at after-school care, taking the bus, or was my father picking us up? Were there clothes I needed to retrieve from the dryer? What remained to be packed in our lunch bags? Our schedule changed depending on our money situation, since after-school care or eating at the cafeteria were luxuries. I lived in uncertainty, and I feared missteps. Sometimes, one of us called my mother before her 15-minute check-in—most often because we were fighting and needed her to settle it, like unsupervised children did.

Bellies full, clothes on, and backpacks ready, around seven forty-two, we walked the dirty road, always to the sound of mourning doves, nearly a kilometer to the bus stop. Snow, rain, or sun. We walked.

We weren’t always alone. Some mornings, my father worked later. But, much like my brother, he wasn’t easy to wake. So, once my brother and I were finally ready for school, I often had to be the one to get him up. Half-awake, he’d usher us into the back seat, slam the rusted door behind us, and start the car with a groggy sigh. Then we listened to the same tape cassette song on repeat—“Our House” by Madness. It was my little sister’s favorite, and we all sang along as my father drove past our school and down the hill to the nearest convenience store. He stopped there for his “breakfast of champions”—a tall can of beer, usually a porter he claimed was “more nutritious.” We waited in the car, our school backpacks heavy on our laps. He always came back quickly, cracked the can open in the parking lot, took a long sip, and squeezed it between his legs in a paper bag, saying that way the police wouldn’t see it. Then he drove us up the hill, retracing our path, and dropped us off at school before heading home—or maybe to work.

In class, I sat quietly, staring at the vast green chalkboard, its surface reflecting the harsh neon lights above. The laminated alphabet letters lining the top watched me like silent judges. Anxiety wrapped around me like an invisible cloak, pressing against my chest, tightening my throat. I obsessed over small things: being first in line when the recess ended, making sure I finished my lunch in time, reaching the bus before it pulled away without me. Routine was my anchor.

My mother had told me that morning that today my father would pick us up. When the last bell rang, I got my brother from the yard and we went to wait in the queue with other children who didn’t take the bus. All the yellow buses vanished from the parking lot. All the other kids disappeared. Silence descended. I stood there watching my brother, looking even more worried than me, his backpack like an alien creature trying to devour him. I looked around. I didn’t know what to do. A knot of panic tightened in my stomach. Had I gotten the day wrong? Was it my fault we were stranded? I replayed my mother’s morning instructions in my head, searching for my mistake. We waited longer until one of the after-school care women approached and asked why we were still here. I tried to hold back tears. My lower lip shook uncontrollably.

“I don’t know.”

The words came out as a whisper. I felt abandoned, forgotten. What will happen to us? They called home. The answer came back, a casual confirmation of my deepest anxieties: my father was asleep – an afternoon nap, the kind of deep, oblivious sleep that had often required my intervention on school mornings. It wasn’t my mistake after all. This happened a few times: he was either napping or simply didn’t know it was a “pick up your kids at school” day, despite my mother’s clear instructions.

The anxieties I swallowed during the day often found their way out at night. I ground my teeth in my sleep—my jaw locking so tightly that I often woke with a dull, aching pressure in my temples and cheeks. My mother sometimes mentioned hearing it, a faint, unsettling scraping sound in the quiet hours. Though I had no memory of the act itself, I felt its aftermath each morning: the soreness, the peculiar way my mouth craved a different kind of occupation. During those moments of waking discomfort, I would sometimes bite down consciously, surrendering to the pressure, and an inexplicable but undeniable relief followed. It wasn’t about hurting myself; it was about feeling something—pressure, restriction, a fleeting sense of control. It was a small, unconscious rebellion against the things I couldn’t manage, a silent release. In the stillness of those early mornings, there was a strange comfort to the ache—a flicker of pain edged with something almost like pleasure. She heard me, she knew I did this, but still, she didn’t bring me to get it fixed.

Despite the tension gripping my small body, there was always one moment of release—a ritual that soothed the storm inside me. After bathtime and pajamas, my brother and I climbed into our bunks for bedtime stories with Mother. It was the best part of my day—a truly stress-free interlude, and one of the few consistent comforts in our home. She read to my brother first, then to me—tales from Brothers Grimm to One Thousand and One Nights to Harry Potter. I absorbed stories through my ears rather than my eyes—a routine that, unintentionally, delayed my own reading skills.

In first grade, I wanted to write my own stories, a desire born from a desperate need to make sense of my world and to understand why I felt so different. Or, at the very least, I wanted to be able to read on my own the books my mother had been reading to me, whenever I felt like it, without having to depend on her.

But my undiagnosed dyslexia turned this yearning for expression into a constant torment.

Homework haunted me. Even when it was only three pages, it felt like reading the longest book in the whole library. My mother tried to help between tending to my younger siblings, but her assistance was sporadic and tense. My father remained absent during homework struggles. As the eldest, I felt the pressure to figure things out on my own. I stared at the words until tears blurred the incomprehensible letters, wondering why something so easy for everyone else felt impossible for me. While other kids breezed through reading aloud in class, I sat in the back row with volunteer grandmothers who helped struggling students. Their patience—so different from my parents’—made me feel like maybe I wasn’t stupid after all. When I learned to work around my writing challenges—because dyslexia doesn’t disappear, it just quiets down—I filled bedazzled store-bought diaries, school notebooks, and whatever scraps of paper I could get my hands on. As a shy, asocial child with few friends to confide in, these pages replaced Imogen as my closest confidants—paper proving more resilient than porcelain, words more enduring than whispers. My mind was often tangled with thoughts and questions, and putting them on paper was the primary way I could begin to unravel them, transforming writing into my method for sorting through the chaos in my head.

Sometimes, writing only led me further into my own confusion—breadcrumbs leading deeper into a darkening forest. Even so, filling those spiral-bound notebooks was better than the alternative: keeping everything locked inside. This choice, this clinging to the page, stemmed from an almost desperate drive to leave my mark in this world, to prove that I too existed, that I too mattered—just like the characters in those stories. However, the worlds I built on paper, the strength I found in words, couldn’t entirely banish the shadows of the night. Sleep often brought a different kind of unease. I’d wake with a start, heart pounding, convinced I’d heard a floorboard creak, a door latch click. More than once, I crept into my parents’ room, seeking reassurance that we were truly alone in our isolated country house. I knelt close to their bed, undecided whether to wake them, to try and sleep with them, or just to go back to my own bed, now that I knew they were there. This persistent undercurrent of fear made the casual way our home was secured feel all the more precarious. Perhaps sensing my fear—or maybe it was just the unwritten script of rural life—my parents bought a puppy. “A guard dog,” they announced, as if this small, yapping creature was an impenetrable shield. With this supposed protector now part of the household, and often moving freely in and out, the doors to our house were rarely closed, and even less often locked. This open-door policy cultivated a certain atmosphere in our home – a veneer of casual trust, an illusion that the countryside was inherently safe and that nothing truly bad could breach our doorstep. It was an environment where boundaries felt porous, and it was into this very openness that figures from my parents’ world often came and went.

One such figure was Bernard. I don’t remember ever meeting him; I felt as if I’d always known him, a friend of my father who predated my mother. I had heard all of my father’s tales of how they had sailed the Caribbean Sea, gone to the Bahamas, encountered pirates and all. My father never returned to that life of adventure on the sea, probably because of us kids, but Bernard still escaped the snow, setting sail each winter.

He was an architect, a profession my parents seemed to regard as superior to their own. They spoke of him much like they did about my mother’s brother, the lawyer, who drove a red BMW and lived in a house with pillars on each side. But the one time I visited Bernard’s home, it was little more than a permanently parked mobile home. His car was as old as his clothes. He often wore little more than a sarong with nothing underneath and sandals. All of this contradicted his social status. But he called it “voluntary simplicity.”

This philosophy, however, didn’t prevent him from undertaking ambitious projects or from being a frequent presence during his summer visits. He always came unannounced, yet invariably bore something new or initiated some activity. One year, for instance, putting his skills as an architect to good use, he and my father embarked on building us a treehouse. It was every kid’s dream. He often brought food too—chips, mostly—though they never quite tasted right. They were often stale; the orange powder on the Cheeto-like puffs didn’t stick to our fingers, and the rippled chips weren’t hard or particularly salty. Still, he offered these treats with a certain flourish. Other times, his offerings or activities were more involved. One visit, he brought a camera, to take family portraits, though he also took portraits of me and my siblings individually. Another time, he arrived with a professional-looking massage table, initially for my father’s pain. My sister, barely four and full of childish impatience, lurked around it, fascinated as my father received his massage. She darted under the table, laughing every time she met my father’s squished face peering through the headrest hole, eager for her own turn. My brother and I also wanted to test this intriguing table. After my father was done, we somehow ended up getting massages from Bernard too, my sister squeezing in between each of us.

One summer, he brought his new project: a self-sufficient towable trailer, though it was a handmade contraption that bore little resemblance to any ordinary camper or RV. Through the two doors that opened wide to expose its insides, the musty scent of old fabric and recycled plywood hit me. The air inside felt different—stagnant, with undertones of sweat and that peculiar oil he used.

The first thing I saw over the sofa on the left side were pictures of naked women with big bushes, laying on rocks like lizards. Their eyes followed me around the narrow space. Faded pink corals stapled to the grey-blue walls, souvenirs from his Caribbean travels, scratched against my arm when I moved past them. A piece of what looked like a hose was screwed to the ceiling on both ends, leaving room for little fingers and small hands to grip, like a pull-up bar but looser. Near one of the open doors, I noticed a single burner; its metal surface bore stains and burnt food residue. Tucked into the corner that the door would make when closed sat a rudimentary toilet seat, clearly designed to sit over a bucket.

Further in, he demonstrated how the sofa could become a bed. The once-blue fabric covering the foam padding was stapled directly to a wooden platform with big storage space underneath. Two tiny triangular windows peered like eyes from either side, their mosquito netting filtering the harsh daylight to a tolerable glow. Moving right, I ran my fingers across a thin counter matching the dimensions of the horizontal window above it. The wood felt sticky, catching on my skin as I traced its surface. When the bed transformed into a sofa again, a long piece of wood pulled out to create a wide table, its hinges protesting with each extension. Near the right door stood a sink that drained directly outside, topped by a shelf designed to hold a large water jug. Rust stained the drain, the metal salvaged like everything else in Bernard’s tribute to voluntary simplicity.

Despite these oddities, or perhaps because of them, I was fascinated. It was so much better than my treehouse—like an actual, tiny house, perfect for someone my size. I felt I could have lived there. Now each time Bernard came, he brought his house with him and stayed for even longer periods. I felt privileged to be invited into this other world. More stale chips that crunched too softly between my teeth. And no need for the massage table now that there was a bed.

The smell of rancid olive oil, cheap and never meant for cooking, seeped into every inch of this secret box. It coated the air, the sheets, the walls. His hairless, leathery skin—browned from all his time under the Caribbean sun—glistened with it in the dim light that filtered through the small windows. This oil clung to my clothes and hair long after I left, a persistent reminder I couldn’t wash away.

Eventually, Bernard made the tiny house a more permanent fixture in our lives. He left it in our driveway, calling it a gift of sorts—something we could use when he wasn’t there. But really, it meant he could come by whenever he wanted. My parents worked a lot, so they weren’t always around. We children were, to say the least, unsupervised. Free.

It was a beautiful day, the day Bernard took my brother away. The sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, creating dancing patterns on the ground. The mourning doves cried in the distance. This time my father was there. Bernard arrived like a hair in a bowl of soup, suggesting he take my brother to an ongoing art exposition—a recurring yearly event where you followed a path through artisan shops and outdoor art shows. I was about ten. I knew of it. I wasn’t invited. I didn’t want my brother to go alone—but more than that, I didn’t want him to go at all. I didn’t have the words to tell my father, only these images, this feeling he shouldn’t go. My father said yes to Bernard’s request. I didn’t understand. If he said it was okay, it must be. I must have been wrong.

I stood at the long windows that looked out to the driveway. I watched my brother climb into Bernard’s car, his small frame swallowed by the front seat, barely visible above the dashboard. Then they rolled away. Shrinking. Too far. Out of sight, I lost them completely. My mind erased the rest of that day.

After this event, I felt a need to stay home—to watch over my siblings. The weight of this new vigilance, the constant fear, often overwhelmed me, especially when the house was quiet and dark. Sometimes I cried for reasons too big and confusing to name. My mother would sit beside me with a bewildered look as I gasped for air between sobs. She didn’t ask what was wrong—it was like she knew—she simply quieted me, her whispered shush cutting through my ragged breathing. My brother developed a nervous stomach, vomiting regularly with no medical explanation. In response, I stopped vomiting altogether, as if our bodies had made a silent pact—one of us always had to be well. My sister seemed unaffected.

The unlocked doors of our country house, once symbols of freedom, now felt like open invitations to danger. I guess this was how wild animals felt in the dense forest surrounding my insecurities. They roamed as freely as their predators. And there, welcoming me home from school every evening - the tiny house. It sat permanently parked. Hiding in plain sight, just like Bernard. I existed in constant contradiction—desperate for the security my mother represented while harboring a growing distrust in my parents’ ability to protect us.

Just after my twelfth birthday, a new sibling arrived—a boy. My mother handed him to me with a confidence that felt like validation. His tiny hand wrapped around my finger felt like purpose. I babysat him whenever my mother needed me to; on the weekends, or if he was too sick for daycare, I stayed home from school so my parents could work. Every time he fell asleep on my chest, I was careful not to disturb him. I would lay down and watch whatever was playing on TV—the good, the bad, the ugly; it didn’t matter, as long as he remained asleep. The more responsibilities I shouldered, the more I believed I was doing something right—becoming indispensable to our family’s survival.

As the eldest of four, a role that now included caring for a toddler brother, I soon found myself called upon to look after other children in the town as well. The responsibilities of babysitting now came with a welcome perk: my own money. As a teenager, I saved, and I finally bought myself a tiny black-and-white TV for my bedroom. I often stayed up past bedtime, eyes glued to its grainy display, the volume turned so low that even the creak of my shifting weight could drown it out. There was something magical about it—the intimacy of watching movies in the dark, hidden away in my own little world. Through the silver screen, I began to uncover my favorite kinds of movies, piecing together my cinematic identity—from whatever happened to be on TV to more deliberate, curated choices I saved to watch later. They all shared a common thread: a femininity I longed to understand and embody, especially in contrast to my own awkwardness. I admired Monica Bellucci’s stunning beauty in Malèna, Catherine Deneuve’s quiet curiosity in Belle de Jour, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe—not just for how men looked at her, but for the naive, playful innocence she brought to her roles and her radiant smile. I wanted to grow up to be like them—carefree and graceful. It was only later, when I left the TV on after one of my favorite feature presentations, that I discovered what came next—softcore films, often Emmanuelle—followed by the entire channel vanishing in a ’winter storm.’

During this time, Bernard faded from our lives. We were aging, and he preferred places where children roamed with even less supervision, and where local authorities looked the other way for the sake of tourism. His absence should have felt like relief, but instead, it left me hypervigilant, as if the danger hadn’t passed but had simply changed form. Life, however, moved forward with its usual, relentless rhythm. When I was fifteen, another sibling arrived—a baby girl who could have been my own. Our mother continued to delegate motherly responsibilities to me, and I often felt more like a stand-in parent than a teenage sister. This, of course, meant even more kids to supervise. But by then, school wasn’t my only burden—I also worked real weekend jobs, mostly because babysitting for my parents didn’t count; that was just free labor. Still, each diaper I changed, each meal I prepared, each homework assignment I helped with became another brick in the wall I was building between my siblings and the world’s Bernards. If I did everything perfectly, maybe they would stay safe. Maybe we all would. All that work—the babysitting, the weekend jobs, the constant effort to hold everything together—meant I had actually saved a significant sum. With that hard-earned money, I bought myself the MacBook Pro I’d dreamed of. That laptop became my window into another world. I’d stay up late into the night, or fall asleep to the flickering glow, lost in a new obsession: the erotic genre. I watched and rewatched the potent scenes—Sharon Stone’s crossed and uncrossed legs in Basic Instinct, Mickey Rourke feeding Kim Basinger from his refrigerator in 9½ Weeks, James Spader controlling Maggie Gyllenhaal with nothing but his voice in Secretary. These films became my unconventional education in the erotic tension of control and surrender.

As my sexuality burgeoned and my need for independence grew stronger, these forces increasingly clashed with the reality of our crowded house. When the lack of personal space became unbearable, I moved into the only other habitable space—the infamous tiny house in the driveway. It had mostly served as a teenage hangout for me or my brother when friends came over. But before I could claim it as mine, I stripped it bare. The naked-lady pictures and coral souvenirs disappeared, followed by the ominous horizontal bar above the bed. The makeshift toilet seat—meant to sit over a bucket—and the stove were next, torn out. I painted over the greyish blue walls with leftover eggshell white—an act of purification. Still, on humid days, the rancid olive oil smell would rise back up through the walls, as stubborn as memory itself. This tiny house, reborn as my sanctuary, offered me freedom to explore. Whenever I could—before or after school or work—I did what many hormonal teenagers did: consumed an unsettling amount of pornography. Orgasms were a free pleasure and a quick stress relief. But something was missing from those short clips on free websites. They didn’t linger the way movies like Secretary did. Those films awakened something inside me that was both thrilling and terrifying—something I wanted to try, even if it scared me.

Perhaps because the readily available pornography didn’t always satisfy the deeper stirrings awakened by those films, or maybe because I longed for narratives I could more fully control, I began to write.

Between shifts at my various jobs, my writing mirrored my mood. My diary transformed into a playground for fantasies—scenarios inspired by the mind games, seductions, power dynamics, and sexual scenes I’d encountered. My curiosity pushed me further, leading me to discover The Marquis de Sade, The Story of O, and Memoirs of a Geisha. I longed to be like Sayuri—taken somewhere I could be trained, shaped, cared for by someone who saw my potential. Short stories poured from my fingers—tales of women finding pleasure in surrender. I published them on Blogger but told no one. My dirty little secret lived on the web, while I lived in a pedophile’s candy house—the kind that looked sweet on the outside but didn’t have enough rooms for all the kids trapped inside.

Chapter 2 picks up from here... Want to keep reading?