Kayla/Somebody's Daughter

Kayla is a frequent OGW writer.  Her story, along with those of Nancy, Casey and Rain, became the inspiration for a new novel, Somebody's Daughter.  Read the first 21 pp. of Somebody's Daughter at http://www.writing.com/authors/shelley2007.  Read more from Kayla, Casey, Rain and Nancy in OGW:  10/1, 11/5, 11/12, 12/10, 12/31, 1/14, 2/11, 3/25.  Here's a little more from Kayla:

Somebody’s Daughter

Kayla:  Interview 4; recorded Monday, 9/13/10 at 3:35 pm:

I’m recording this now because Mommy you need to know this, you need to hear me, please don’t be mad:  

Here’s what happens when a heart breaks:  You feel it in your back and around my ribs.  The focal point is in your heart, a heavy coldness that spins inside, jagged edges cutting out your center, your self.  The pain extends around like a rope, tying all of you into the loss.

Your stomach feels empty, even though you’ve just eaten a small mountain of chips and spicy melted cheese hoping to fill it and be a normal teenager again, when you’ll never be normal or quirky or pretty or promising or loveable...

You can’t fill yourself, and you grasp with your fingers, without even thinking about it – your fingers open and close, reach and pull.  You want to get something, anything inside.  Even if it’s anger.  Or self-loathing.

Nothing can go right when your heart is breaking.  You get out your paints to try and show the darkness inside on the outside, and the brush flies out of your hand and is lost under the bed where you can’t reach without getting a splinter in your belly. Jesus fucking Christ Give Me a Break!  You yell in a whisper at the ceiling and at all the Gods of all the religions who let this happen to you.  

You get out another brush and paint anyway, but the color over color over color turns to mud, and it only drags your spirit into the mess of your aching body and the final picture doesn’t cover the hole inside you, it makes you cry, and before long you’re  wailing as you try to paint the canvas, and fail, and start painting yourself brown and ugly like you feel.  

You feel like everything you’ve worked for – hoping and dreaming and praying so hard – it was all a lie, a great cosmic lie.  The way you felt just hours before the party – swollen with excitement, fat with pleasure, open to possibilities, one with the whole fucking fabric of the universe or some shit, well it’s all gone now because it wasn’t just waking up and not remembering, and it wasn’t just finding the only boy you ever loved in the room with your best friend -- it wasn’t just your innocence…

It was all of you.