“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

I wasn't always a monster. I was born to a loving family. I was privileged growing up. I went to a nice college. I did everything a young girl should. It was always going to end in blood. It had to.

My mother use to tell me that I have and old soul. She would look at me from across the table, her eyes bloodshot from the wine on her breath and say to me, "you've done this before." I spent hours in front of the mirror changing my face, trying to see what she saw.

I saw a girl. Just a girl.

There is little to say about my younger school years. I had a normal childhood with normal friends. I was happy then. My father would read to me before bed until I was thirteen. He started with the normal ones about elephants and birds, but when I got restless he would move on to the masters of horror and mystery. The monsters in those stories kept me awake at night, fearful of what was lurking just inside the shadows. He told me I was safe as long as I stayed in bed, under the blanket.

When I was eight years old, my brother and I would play together. It was innocent at first. We played Cowboys and Indians, doctor, Red Rover... all the games young brothers and sisters are supposed to play. Sometimes we would play house. I cooked the plastic food and washed the plastic pots and pans while he took care of our pretend Barbie doll children. At night we went to a very real bed where he performed his very real husbandly duties. He was fourteen at the time and I didn't know what was happening.

My parents didn't believe me.

My mother called me a liar and kept insisting that I'd told this lie before. She hurled insults at me through gulps of wine, the red staining her teeth and lips like an open wound. My father said I read too many stories and couldn't go around telling people such horrid fallacies. Nevertheless, he looked concerned.

He talked with my brother about it the next day, who of course denied everything. Father believed him and I never again spoke a word of it to anyone. That was when I first learned to lie. He came to my bed again that night. He would slide his hand into me, telling me all the while how toxic I was. "Why do you make me do these things to you?" he would ask me. I cried silently, not giving him the satisfaction of an answer. It went on until I was ten and he found a high school crush.

All things considered I had a normal high school experience. I wasn't too damaged by what happened and it never happened again, so I let it go. I had friends but I wasn't terribly popular. My senior year of high school I managed to win the title of Prom Queen. My date was a sweet guy, Dexter. He knew my limits and accepted them without question. I can still see the look of alarm on his face when his name was announced as Prom King. We danced the rest of the night away like normal high school teenagers should. It was beautiful.

That made it all the more bittersweet when we broke up to go to different colleges. I chose a college on the West Coast and he wanted to stay in town. Dexter was very much into tradition and lasting values, which lasted as far as my best friend's skirt. I wasn't too broken up about it.