Pieces of a Hole: Mandy

Well... If anybody ever reads these sporadic entries of mine, please forgive me for trying to get the stupid things out first. This is really all just bottled up stuff. I really don't think I've ever gotten over anything.

Maybe I'm throwing out puzzle pieces for someone else to put together. The things that make me, well... me. Maybe I spend too much time dwelling on past mistakes or the past in general. Psychoanalyzing myself... But life feels like solitary imprisonment to me. Imagine sitting in a room with nothing to do but think back, knowing that tomorrow when you wake up you'll still be in that room. All you can do is listen to the comings and goings of people, perhaps listen to their stories and wish you were free.


This is a mental picture of my second true love, Mandy. My first true love was Stevie Nicks, but that's something different altogether.

Mandy was... ethereal. Different. Of black and Irish descent, with the best physical characteristics of both. She was a little darker than me, with freckles, green eyes and reddish hair that frizzled up at the ends if she grew it too long. Small and compact with a body of tightly coiled muscle that was covered in scars, both self inflicted and otherwise...

She was incredibly intelligent. She was also wise beyond her years in a way that I couldn't understand until much later. She never had a childhood. She also didn't afford herself the luxury of being young and naive. She was always the quickest with a joke and the first one to flash a smile or laugh at the silliest of things, but her eyes almost never had any humor in them. Or much else.

Mandy was a victim of severe emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her mother. She said that her mother had treated her like that for as long as she could remember, until Mandy put a stop to it herself. I never found out how she did this, but knowing Mandy, it had to be pretty brutal. When I met her mother, Mandy would walk into their townhouse and speak, her mother would look at her with this mixture of fear and awe, speak and then quickly leave the room. She was the first of a long string of Mothers that hated me for one reason or another...

But whatever damage she did to Mandy couldn't be fixed or repaired. She had scars on her back from where her mother had beaten her with everything from extension cords to metal coat hangers. She had scars on her legs where her mother had dug her fingernails in while Mandy tried to crawl away. She had multiple cigarette burns on her chest. Thin scars on her stomach from a razor. A scar running down the back of her neck where her mother had smashed a bottle over the back of her head, the broken part slashing it's way down. A hole through her left hand from being stabbed with a pencil. A crescent shaped scar that ran beside her right eye from being punched with an iron, leaving her eye perpetually red. She had spent many a week with no food or light, locked in the basement of that house.

She was only 15 when I met her. She told me she loved me after I saw all of those scars and didn't flinch. When I learned what had happened to her, I wanted to do... anything. Tell someone. The cops or SOMEONE. I wanted to do things to her mother in return. Mandy laughed at me. She said "Why bother? Fight's over. I won!" But she lost something.

She would leave most nights and look for people to fight with. She would show up bruised and bloody with the biggest grin on her face. She called it "playing". A lot of people were afraid of her, the tiny girl who wore long sleeves even on summer nights. We would walk past guys standing on corners and they'd shut up and stare at her as we passed by. She would keep chatting away, seemingly oblivious to it all.

Mandy was the person that got me interested in psychology, sociology and philosophy. She was also the person that started teaching me that the world was a lot deeper than our normal, everyday lives. She taught me origami and got me interested in different genres of music. She forced the extremely thick southern accent I used to have out of me because "it makes you sound like you escaped here from a plantation!"

We talked about starting our own family when she turned 18. She said that we could start with various accounts that her Father left to her. She also told me that in eight months that I wouldn't have a choice in the matter...

The last thing she said to me was "Don't look like that. You act as if this is the last time we'll see each other!"

I went back there five months later and discovered that she died in a car accident two days after I last saw her. No one told me. Her mother had moved and didn't bother to tell me. Our friends thought that I had known, but couldn't make it back....

No one in my family cared and I had no friends back home, so I swallowed it all and tried to carry the weight on my own.


It was this incident, along with the deaths of the other three friends in our little group, that led to a long string of dark years that ended in my first mental breakdown and a short stint in a mental institution.

But that... is something for another day.

I owe almost everything that I am to two people. Mandy is one of them.

I still miss her greatly...