All Things Blue

24. All Things Come To An End

Kitty Gloria

1668 University Rd, 38106 Memphis TN

United States of America

But here's the funny thing about hope. It infects the bloodstream and it spreads faster than any poison. Pandora should've let it out of the box. It was the night I met Mike that Pandora clamped the spirit of hope deep inside my body.

This is what began an end for me.

I was back in San Francisco and I felt so much younger then. Maybe right around 15. I could barely even remember that part of my life but I know I had been working for Jared and I hadn't been to school for almost a year.

About 3 and a half years ago in San Francisco

Jared was beating the shit out of me. I was used to getting my ass beat by Jared, but this time it hurt. I usually likened myself to a walking corpse. I was quiet, zoned out and imagined I was anywhere but wherever I was.

I read in the Bible once that God would rather spew you out of his mouth if you were lukewarm because anything is better than lukewarm, he'd rather you be boiling hot or ice cold. I used to be confused as a child asking Charlie to explain it to me again and again but I understand what he meant now.

It was because God would never want someone like me.

I was not burning hot and alive with this passionate vigor for life, but I was not freezing cold and dead either. Instead I was lukewarm, barely surviving and unnaturally breathing only alive because a constant hum, the first rule of nature, buzzed through my entire body.

I can't blame running away or even prostituting as an excuse. When I first began, I was still boiling hot, alive. I would sleep with Jared only in the beginning just for the camera. I got used to it, sometimes even liking it. But when I began sleeping with tricks it became much more difficult.

The first time a trick nutted on me, I threw up and before he left out the hotel room. The trick must've told Jared because Jared came straight in and slapped the shit out of me. He said if I ever did that again, I'd be homeless.

At the time it was my biggest fear because I knew then I'd have to walk the streets with no protection. I was in a foreign city, I had no family that cared about me and if someone shanked me in the streets, no one would come looking for me.

At least with Jared; as long as I brought him money and he knew where I was all hours of the day, I was protected, I'd have something to eat, somewhere to sleep and something to wear.

It wouldn't be much but it was what I had, it was the cost I had to pay for anxiously believing his lies.

Be anxious for nothing.

So it was then, I became ice cold, numb to all emotion and dead inside. Whenever I slept with someone, I pretended I wasn't there. I would imagine I was on a rollercoaster or on a beach. It felt like work, and I didn't particularly enjoy it.

Instead I would pray I was anywhere but here.

But that day was different. Now I had become neither freezing cold or boiling hot. I had just enough moments in life not filled with shame and disgust that I had become content with my current circumstances. Enough times I had visited a new pizza place I liked right before work or laughed with Jared about something. A few tricks I had met came just to talk to me and most of my tricks were regulars.

I had enough good to outweigh the bad and that made me complacent.

That day however, I had told Jared I was with a trick for the past two hours.