Make money doing the work you believe in
The Words
Naida, learning the script. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.
It was done with words. That's the part people don't believe, so I'm going to be careful with it.
When you imagine a thing like this, you imagine force, and there was force, the void has force in it, I'm not pretending it didn't. But the force wasn't the tool that broke me. The tool that broke me was sentences. Soft ones. Sweet ones. Said over and over until they stopped being things said to me and turned into things true about me.
Noviecita. That was the first one and the deepest, the word he used instead of my name until I half forgot I had another one. Little girlfriend. Say it to a kid enough times, in that warm patient voice, and it stops being a lie and starts being a job, a thing you are now, a thing with duties. He'd say it and something in me would sit up to be it. That's not me being weak. That's a seventeen-year-old whose parents just died being handed a word that sounded like belonging, and reaching for it, because reaching for it was the most human thing left in me and he knew it and he aimed at it.
Gracias, Papi. He trained that one onto me like you train a dog to sit. I'd do the thing, get through the thing, and the words were supposed to come after, gracias, Papi, and if they came easy he'd smile and call me good girl and my best student and hand me a chili-mango lollipop like I was five, and the awful part, the part I can barely write, is that some starving piece of me lit up at the lollipop and the good girl, because it was the only warm thing in the day and he'd made sure of that, made sure he was the only weather in the room. Por favor, Papi, if I wanted anything. You want a thing, noviecita? You know how to ask. And I'd ask the way he taught me, and hate myself in some cold back room of myself even as my mouth did it.
That's the conditioning. Not a spell. A script, run on a kid, until the kid runs it herself. He'd say his words on his triggers, noviecita, a hand on the back of a chair, that low warm Papi voice, and the words would pull the responses up out of me, the smile, the gracias, the leaning-in, until the responses didn't need the words anymore. Until the trigger alone would do it. He was building a girl who'd come when he called her his, and be grateful she was wanted, and he was building her inside my body, on top of me, using my own mouth and my own face for the parts.
And the one he never said. I have to give you that one too, because it was the keystone of the whole build. He made me feel loved and he never once said I love you. Not ever, not in any shape. He'd get me all the way to the edge of believing it and then just not, and leave me there, reaching, and the reaching kept me his better than any lock. I spent that whole road earning toward three words a grown man had already decided he was never going to spend on me. That's the leash. A warm word held one inch past where the kid can reach, forever.
But I'd catch it. That's the one mercy in this Note. I'd surface out of the cool far place and hear my own voice giving his words back, gracias Papi, doing okay, being good, and a thin clear thread of me would stand off to the side and think, with a cold I'd never felt before, that's not me. Those are his words coming out of my face. He put a stranger in my mouth and the stranger calls him Papi and means it. And the cold of that thought was the first thing in weeks that was all the way mine. He hadn't installed it. He didn't even know it was there. It was small and it was mine and it hated him with everything the trained girl wasn't allowed to feel.
That's where resentment starts. Not as heat. As cold. As one clean thin line of no standing off to the side, watching a trained girl say gracias Papi to the man who broke her, and knowing, the way you know your own name, that one day that line is going to be the whole of me, and the trained girl, the noviecita, is just going to be the costume I put on to get close enough.
I didn't have the desert yet. Didn't have the fire, or the grave, or the thing I'd turn into that nobody could ever sweet-talk or file down again. All I had was the cold line off to the side, watching, hating, waiting. But everything I am now grew up out of that line. He thought he was writing me. He never once noticed the one sentence he didn't get to author, standing in the corner of his own workshop, the pinche thing taking notes.
