Tears in the dead of night.
Knuckles banging against the shower wall till they bleed.
Alone isn’t a feeling, it’s a way of life.
I didn’t choose this lifestyle, it’s who I am.
At age five, I was diagnosed with a mental disability.
When the kids on the playground found out, instead of hitting the tetherball, they used me.
In middle school, I tried to convince myself that life would get better.
But when I started writing “alone” all over my body and felt shamed by my teachers, I knew otherwise.
In ninth grade, I felt sure I’d end up homeless. I started making friends with people living on the streets of downtown LA.
Back home, trying to appear normal, I would lie to my parents, saying I was out with my friends. Then would close the door to my room and snort a couple of lines or smoke till all my weed was gone.
Later, I would go downstairs and take my prescription drugs, then return to my room and pray to Allah, Ganesha, and God for a better life.
The summer of my fifteenth year, I was placed into a residential treatment center.
No drugs, no bullies, no parents, just a house filled with girls a lot like me.
There I discovered a sense of sisterhood that was wonderful and new.
Living among these girls who had fought their way through difficult lives made me realize I was far from alone. And I also understood that I needn’t be alone, feel alone, just because my brain worked differently than most other people’s brains.
Being released from residential was odd. I was on probation and had to spend all my time with family, no interaction with the outside world.
Reluctantly, I accompanied my bookworm mother to a bookstore. I walked around enjoying my newfound freedom till I tripped and fell into the bestsellers table.
I knocked a copy of The Girls by Emma Cline onto the floor.
Picking that book up is what saved my life.
Suddenly I was immersed in California of the 1960s.
I found myself, my reflection, in Evie, the main character, who had always felt odd.
At age five, she realized that she was attracted to other girls.
Many years later she ended up in San Francisco living in a cult of boys and girls who have lost all interest in society. They felt as if they were aliens, floating around, too strong to even let gravity bring them down. She lived among beautiful people, no one was ignorant or mean.
Evie made me want to jump into the book and find places and people who are like me.
I know cannot live within the pages a book, yet The Girls, did for me what no drug prescription or otherwise, had ever done – made me feel alive, connected, a part of a big, complex world where I belong.
Yes, belong.
That’s what Emma Cline and literature have done for me.
Melina Mousli Bennett
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