I can’t stand the sight of her face. It’s round like a pumpkin. In the picture I saw on Facebook, Connor had his arm draped over her shoulder. They were both smiling. Her teeth looked like little chiclets. Candy corn asses. She tans too much. Her brown hair fades into her fake brown face. Her shoulders are boxy and I fucking hate her. I have no pictures with Connor like the one I am staring at now. We never made it to a holiday. We started hanging out after Valentine's Day, we were done, officially, before summer started. Now here she was...five years younger than me, sharing pictures of their first Thanksgiving together. I was spending Thanksgiving alone. The same as last year. I found some pictures of Connor and I. Lesley took them at the bar. They are candid. We didn’t pose. In one I am whispering something in his ear, and the look on his face makes me ache. He really cared about me. I can see it there, in that moment, captured forever. I didn't know what I was telling him in the picture. Some secret about one of our friends maybe. I wish I had appreciated him. I think my heart is going to burst out of my chest sometimes. When I saw pictures of Avery and his new wife, the woman he left me for, it didn’t hurt like this. I was with him for two years and I am more numb, more desolate over a guy I was never officially in a relationship with. Time really is irrelevant. The rules are bendy and bullshit. I just want the image of their faces to go away. I want all this hurt to go away.

I looked down at the single bowl of mashed potatoes in my hand, at the pathetic single tear on my thumb.

The bowl fell in slow motion, a dramatic descent to my cheap, ripped, linoleum floor. My dog Holly hopped up from her bed and ran to lap up the contents. I couldn’t tear my eyes from my laptop on the dining room table. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving played softly in the background.

I deactivated my Facebook. I couldn’t look at Connor and pumpkin-faced-Tracey anymore. I would end up leaving it deactivated for a year.

The rest of the holidays went by slowly, achingly brutal. I spent most of the hours I wasn’t working in my bedroom of my tiny trailer watching Friends and Buffy reruns. I took on extra hours at work. My car broke down twice and I had to take the bus for a while.

Blane, who I no longer slept with since we lost interest in each other’s skin, would pick me up for the bar on Wednesdays so I never had to miss out.

I flipped through them. Men. Men with hands like a salve.

First, there was Jesse, he was twenty, and I met him online. We slept together twice, so I never counted it as a one-night stand. Eventually, I ghosted him.

The next guy was the reason I stopped meeting guys online. I had to kick him out of my trailer after a frightening hour on my couch of heavy petting and no’s that were repeated too many times.

Sex had become a weapon. Men and women wielded it in such strange ways. I just wanted someone to crave me beyond flesh. I wasn’t sure what I would do with someone like that, they weren’t Connor, and I felt foolish for holding onto my desire for him. We had such a short time together. I was fixated on the idea of him as a partner. The white picket fence life.

I had a tiny chain link fence behind my trailer. It was rusty, one side was held together by some zip ties I bought at Walmart. I worked with my hands all day at work. When I got off, I didn’t want to move. I wanted to lie in bed, relax.

There was no one to help with the things that were falling apart at home. Did I find Band-Aid fixes for everything? My trailer had three bedrooms. One was full of everything personal my uncle owned. It was a storage shed for all the things he wanted when he got out of prison. There was a large tool chest in there and sometimes I would rifle through it looking for nails, a hammer.

All things eventually come to an end, right? The year, the shitty year, would finally bleed away. 2009 promised something better. They all did. We stepped into January hoping everything would be different.

I promised myself I would be different. No more fucking nameless, faceless nobodies. No more texting Connor; he never answered anyway. And that made me want him even more. Knowing that if he was with me, he would ignore another girl's texts. It's such a silly thing. His faithfulness to Tracey, the way he pretends I didn’t exist, still pulled me to him.

But I promised myself I would let him go in the new year. I would find a distraction that was more permanent. More than just fucking. But skin and liquor were the only things pulling me out of my hole, one that was sinking deeper and deeper beneath my feet.

Sometimes an unnamed grief took over. Something gnawing, something I couldn't pinpoint.

That's where I was at then. It was a different time, we didn't talk about those things, and I didn't know anyone who suffered from any sort of mental illness. It seemed like such a damning phrase then. Mentally ill. I wasn't certifiable. I thought idly about killing myself, from time to time, but in that not-so-serious way.

When things would pile and push I would think that tomorrow was something I did not want to see. I never thought of actually ending it. I didn't want to die, but I didn't want to be alive. I had my dog and my cat to feed. They relied on me. Sometimes it felt like they were the only ones who needed me. They truly relied on me, in the way that simple friendships and casual hookups could never compare to.

I think having someone really rely on me would be too much. How would I fare as a mother? It wasn't something I thought about too often at that point. I couldn't even keep a boyfriend. Should you have children if you shy away from hugging? Skin-to-skin touch that is not sexual? Sometimes when I was drunk I liked to hang on my friends, hug them. That was about it though. No funny hand holding or friendly kisses on cheeks. I liked to hug. Only then though. A sober hug was an act of intimacy I didn't want, nearly as scary as hand-holding.

The odd thing about being someone who proclaims themselves as someone who doesn't like a hug, is that more people want to hug you. They want to pry one from you. They want to feel special, to say "she doesn't like hugs but she lets me hug her”. I didn't understand it. Why would you want to purposely make someone feel uncomfortable? It made me resent people. I wonder when it stopped, my giving away of hugs. Was I a child that loved hugs? Did I stop at some point, for some reason? I’d seen videos of myself when I was five years old. I talked and talked and I was loud, happy, boisterous. When I was a teenager, things changed. But aren't most teens supposed to be moody?

I didn't want to be hugged. I hated being caught in a bathing suit. I was very curvy, voluptuous. I didn't want grown men, especially anyone in a father type position, to look at me.

It was strange to have something so spelled out for you, and to not see it. Denial is a powerful drug. I ached for every little girl who was forced to hug her creepy uncle. To sit on a stranger's lap because he was dressed as Santa Clause. My mother showed me pictures of myself with Santa. I was always screaming, in pure terror. Why was I forced to try again every year? Traditions are hard to break away from. We are all victims of “this is what you're supposed to do” guilt.

I wouldn't force these things on my child if I had one. No forced affections, no forced feelings.

Imagine a little girl being in control of her own little body. I wish I had known what that was like.

I wonder what childhood will be like for little girls, hundreds of years from now. If we will finally be where we need to be.

I believed in reincarnation. I believed I would see it one day, those horrors far behind me.

I was once obsessed with an Everclear song about an absent father. I never heard it on the radio, but I pulled it out from time to time. A form of forced suffering. A séance of sorts. I wanted to exorcise my demons. Stare them in the face.

I didn't want to keep going to bed with them.

I didn’t want to keep falling in love with them.

But I would.