Abusive Relationship

Within days of losing my virginity to Latin Muslim, the abuse began. It lasted nine years. It left thick, traumatic scars. It cost tens of thousands of dollars. And Latin Muslim wasn't the abuser.

The abuser wasn't even a man, and the relationship wasn't even sexual.

My abuser was a psychic.

I was in downtown New Haven, walking past the mall, when I was accosted by a girl selling fake roses. At first, I ignored her.

"You, stop! No, you, stop!" That command, uttered in a thick Brooklyn accent, was issued directly at me.

I turned around and faced a girl in a red coat. She was about my age. Thin. A woman of color, but of indeterminable ethnicity. She had piercing brown eyes and large ears that poked through her thin curtain of straight black hair.

Her name was Dollar, and for $10 she offered to read my palm.

She saw trouble.

But for $70, she would go light seven candles at Church for me, and pray all night for me, and all of my problems would be solved.

When Dollar finished lighting up the Church, she called me with the news. It wasn't the happy ending she'd initially promised. It was something more.

Something called Jealousy.

She interrogated me, with extreme gravity, about my parents. What position in the family was my dad? The oldest child. What position was I? The middle child. What about my mom? The middle child.

"Yes, that's it. It's coming from your mother."

My mother had been a victim of Jealousy, and that's why her life had never worked out right. That certainly rang true. My mom, a brilliant woman, the first of her family to go to college, had ended up marrying my dad and losing her mind. You couldn't get more star-crossed than that.

And now my mother's mysterious hex was being passed down to me because we were both middle children. But for $500, Dollar was going to dig up a graveyard, remove the curse and set everything right.

She referred to her mysterious and outlandish spiritual tasks as The Work, and like a child molester, she was very insistent that The Work must be kept secret. I could not talk to anyone about it – absolutely no one. In fact, I couldn't even write about it, not even in my diary. Because the Bad Spirits were everywhere, and we didn't want them interfering with The Work.

Did I buy it?

Yup.

Dollar knew things about me that she couldn't possibly have known, and she threw me little evidences of her Power.

She told me I'd know she had started The Work because I would dream about her, and sure enough, that night I had a vivid dream about her, laced with serpents and religious imagery. When Yale shut down for the Christmas break and I stayed at a friend's off-campus apartment, she called me there, even though I'd never given her the number. The Spirits had revealed my unlisted, temporary phone number to her.

That's how my long, twisted life with Dollar started. And initially, it wasn't all bad. She became my "friend." We hung out together. I got to know her entire family – mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins. And some of the "advice" she gave me over the years probably saved my life.

But ultimately, the relationship was about power, and not just the Magic Kind. Dollar terrorized me with veiled threats about all the dire things that would happen if I didn't come through with money for The Church (up to and including that my mom would get sick and die). Dollar verbally abused me, taking credit for everything good that happened in my life and blaming my "negativity" for everything that went wrong.

And I, like a gambler, kept paying and paying and paying because I didn't want to believe that I'd been so thoroughly had. Dollar became the thread that ran through all of my sexual relationships, from Latin Muslim when I was 19, all the way to Brown, when I was 28.

(Virginity Diaries Part 9 of 11: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Lessons Learned 1 2 3)