Pollo empanado. Fried breaded chicken, a meal my mother has cooked forever, a meal I haven’t had in forever. A smell that inundated every inch of the kitchen as I walked through it. A meal my sister sat and ate while I walked back outside. A reminder of being young. A reminder.
I keep getting these images and memories of what it meant to be young, what it felt like being a kid. I feel nostalgia take over me every other day during the summer.
When I got my period the day after my 12th birthday I remember being on the beach and having to go up to the apartment, crying. I walked a long stone staircase. Infinite. I was wearing shorts. I don't remember why I was crying because I recall that for the longest time I wouldn’t stop thinking about what it felt like to have my period, wishing I had it because some of the girls in my class had it too. Because it would bring me closer to them. But it's one thing to wish and another to have. I think we were in Mallorca, where I just came back from. It was August and we were always at the beach. That summer I remember Frank's spaghetti bolognese, my parents' friend, which was the most delicious spaghetti I had ever eaten. He cooked it shirtless. I remember the foam party in the town square and sneaking onto Frank son’s computer to check my email to see if any of the three boys I liked at the same time had written me, stealing 10 minutes to connect to MSN messenger and exchange a few sentences with them. Sentences that like foam, were empty but seemed to carry a lot of emotion. A lot of information. That’s what it felt like to be 12 years old. A lot of emotion with little information.
Nostalgia and memory haunt me lately.
“You’re on a list of ginger girls he said he fucked” she mouthed, surrounded by our friends, while we ate the most delicious chinese food.
A ghost came knocking. Not in a haunting way, but rather, I shaked my head and laughed at the ridiculousness. No nostalgia this time, but just memory. We met 12 years ago, when I was 16.
This man is a man I have been thinking about recently. When you discover the possibility of abuse you could have encountered, when you face it directly, what does one do with that information?
Because I worry about collateral damage and being sued, I’ll call him by his initial- C. Or I could also call him by the name he used back then. Demian, like the novel by Herman Hesse. He loved being cryptic and tormented but as years go by I think that was just his nature- and I never thought one could be essentially just that. Tormented and dark, rather than enigmatic.
We met online. June 2010 I was waiting for a friend to go see B.B King live. I stood by the door and noticed a freckled boy with curly hair. A beautiful boy. I remember feeling like I had never seen someone so pretty. Later that night I got a message request from Max Demian. “Were you standing by the door of the B.B King concert?” And so it started. We had a few friends in common. He spoke perfect french even though he wasn’t french (what happens when you go to the french lycée, nothing more nothing less), loved reading, loved philosophy, listened to music I had never listened to. He skated and attempted to play the trumpet. He had a way with words. I mistook mystery for a lack of empathy.
I always fall in love quickly, but I fell for him in a frenzy. Uncontrollably trapped in his aura. I remember standing on a bus with no AC on, face to face, and feeling my body crave every inch of him- like I’d give myself up for him if he wanted to in a split second. I had never had sex but I felt like we could. Like I would. Entrapped in him. I never felt like that before or after. An inviting darkness, perplexing in an addictive way.
Not much later, I think it was August, back from our summer holidays, after he’d been distant, we met up for coffee. I was nervous, hoping he’d still find me pretty, hoping the distance I felt was in my head. It wasn’t. After a long speech of excuses, I understood he was dumping me because he wanted to have sex with me and we hadn’t yet. I remember him mouthing that sex was important, very much so. I was being broken up with because at 16, still a virgin, two months in, I had not slept with him. I cried on my way back home but I knew then he was an asshole. Time went by and I had other boyfriends, crushes and flings. I think it was almost a year later, when I bumped into Demian in the street. We exchanged a few words, he apologized, he was sweet. Somehow, and the truth is, I don’t remember how, I was tied to him again.
I told myself I’d play it cool this time around. Not only would Demian realize how amazing I was but I would not be as attached. I’d be cool and collected. Perplexing, like him.
I have never been perplexing. I am as transparent and vulnerable as water.
It lasted maybe a month, probably less. And that’s when he turned into a ghost. From night to morning, he stopped answering my messages. My calls. Hours turned into days. I remember the feeling of sitting on the metro’s bench and holding onto my Blackberry phone like it was my heart. I could not understand how someone who’d told me he loved me had disappeared this way. I started excusing him to my mom, who could see the tears in my heart: he had to be sick. Maybe his mom had taken his phone away from him- after all, we were 16, and sometimes parents would still do these kind of things- maybe something really serious had happened.
I preferred to think he was hurt or dead than to think he had decided to ignore me. I was so hopeless I favored the pain of death instead. Now, we call it ghosting. Then, that term didn’t exist yet. Of all the strain men and boyfriends have inflicted on me, this one really stung. Demian didn’t even have the decency to dump me. I found out via a friend in common he was hooking up with someone else. I didn’t hear from him or see him again, except for this one time at 1 in the morning a few months later, walking down Fuencarral with a group of friends. This friend I mentioned earlier, was walking ahead of me, stopped, hugged him, and as soon as Demian saw me, he ran away with his tail between his legs. He was nothing but a coward.
9 years go by and I make a new friend. I find out she is his recent ex girlfriend. Another old friend has also hooked up with him. And so it begins, and we laugh at the pathetic connection that ties us beyond friendship. This new friend has suffered his pain. I don’t remember the details but I do remember it was arduous. I think of the way he was 10 years ago and think he can only have gotten worse. Way worse.
11 years go by and I bump into him at a party. We stand next to each other but don’t say hello. I wait for him to make the move and he never does. Again a coward. The truth is I craved a hello from him, some kind of recognition, but I also loved the power I had when ignoring, pretending I didn’t know who he was. Demian was balding. No beauty anymore.
12 years go by, I make another new friend. She also happens to have been with Demian. But this time around, I know, things have gotten worse. She tells me. You know who he is. “He told me you were on a list of ginger girls he fucked”. I tell her I got dumped because we never did.
Abuse is a lightly way to put what he’s done over the years. A vampire. One word and I believe everything they say. Everything she says. I need no specifics to know that he consumed her. That he consumes women. That he devours and abuses psychologically and physically too. I was too young maybe, maybe too distracted to recognize that part of him or warn others. What would I have done at 16 anyway?
What do you do when ghosts come haunting back? What do you do when you realize a network of women have been hurt and ravaged by him? What do you do when he’s been excused as sensitive as tormented as mysterious as dark as sad? What do you do when he’s a friend of your friends? What do you do when you understand that he’s an abuser? It is not simply the way one is. It is not simply a way of being. It is not an excuse. I’m tired of excusing them. Abusers. I’m tired of excusing vampires. I’m exhausted by the mercy we have towards bad men. Bad men between us. Bad men that DJ at the clubs we dance at. Bad men that continue being seen as victims. Bad men that continue being not cancelled, but exonerated. Why do we excuse bad men when they have a track record of doing bad things?
Max Demian is a bad man. There’s no faux in that. There’s no lie behind that. No matter the trauma or the darkness that has surrounded him. There are no more valid excuses. I used to feel nostalgia when I thought of Demian. Like I should’ve changed the way I acted, would’ve liked to have enough spit to do something different- or maybe if I bumped into him again I would have kissed him so he’d understand what he missed or any other kind of bullshit behind thoughts triggered by the insecurity of a 16 year old. Mostly I just wanted revenge.
I hate knowing that he’s telling people we’ve fucked. But I take pleasure in knowing that I will tell people something way worse: the truth.
The truth is my revenge. It will always be.
The best writer my eyes have ever come across
🪞