Meghan Mallory's Diary

Chapter 3: January 18

Hi everyone! I'm gradually awakening from my Covid slumber. This is another book, a bit like Don't Call Me Cat!, which is going to start with two stories running alongside one another. There's the diary of Meghan and the life of Shannon. The rest I won't give away. I hope you enjoy this chapter. As always, feel free to vote and comment. Let me know your thoughts because it does help! I changed the cover art work btw! Hope you're not confused. Have a great weekend xoxoxo

I've had a few days' rest to think about how best I want to tell my story. There are so many thoughts jumbled in my head and I was going to just empty my soul into these pages without much idea of what I wanted to achieve.

Anyway, Mark's away on business, so it's given me the space and time I need to decide how I want my story told.

There's so much to tell about my life now; the life of Meghan Mallory that everyone thinks they know.

But I want to fill in at least a few of the gaps so you can see that I was not brought up in this gilded, cage-like existence.

The real Meghan was born in the warm spring of 1972, an arrival that had been planned, executed and delivered with little emotion on the part of her parents.

When Jennifer Darwin gave birth in that spartan hospital corridor all those years ago, rumor has it there was little noise, and even less fanfare when this tiny being slipped unnoticed into the world.

The house where we lived was equally silent, set back from the road by a neat lawn and large oak tree which showered the sidewalks with crispy leaves in the Fall. Paint on the the clapboard house would often peel away and flake off, covering the front porch with confetti-like shapes which blew like flurries of snow in the wintery squalls of the north east.

Behind these walls was where I grew up, sheltered from the outside world and locked into the lives of two people bound by ancient marriage vows and little else.

The arrival of a tiny being with a beating heart and ferocious pair of lungs was an unwelcome intrusion into their mundane lives.

As a baby I whimpered and cried for attention but none was forthcoming from a mother who was frigid and incapable of love for anyone or anything.

My father was equally remote. Life for him was working as a low paid clerk in the local textile mill, ground down by the drudgery of a job with no future. He'd come home, shoulders slumped, and sit in a corner waiting for his supper before retiring to the den with his daily newspaper. That happened every day until I was eight years old.

Looking back, my father should have seen the writing on the wall years ago but he was blind to reality. 

The year before I was born, a new federal agency introduced health and safety legislation. Anyone with half a brain could see it was only a matter of time before his mill was declared environmentally unsafe. When it eventually closed, the workers, my dad included, were officially unemployed.

Those were tough times and I swear my parents were often unaware of my presence in the home. I drifted in and out of their lives like an invisible spirit, leaving only footprints on the dusty floorboards as proof I existed.

By the age of 10 I had retreated to a world of books – fact and fiction - as I looked for an escape from this strange adult world I was inhabiting. I had few friends and those I did have were never allowed in our house. Those friends gradually found other friends and I became the loner.

I was little girl lost. And it was the pages of those books that ignited my desire to travel to far off shores and to see, touch and taste everything the world had to offer.

I really don't want to dwell anymore on those days. I just wanted you to know my background. Many people talk behind my back, envious of my wealth and lavish lifestyle.

If they knew the truth, they would back off and give me some space. I'm not that person they've created from column inches and online salacious gossip.

I'm more real than they'll ever be but I'm trapped and unable to give my side of the story.

But here is my diary and now you can find out the real Meghan Mallory.

Those early days were confusing for me. I had no compass to navigate through the maze of emotions rushing through the empty corridors of my mind. I was lost and I craved love from a mother incapable of such depth of feeling. No matter how hard I tried and the tears I cried, it pushed her further away.

As the years passed, I worked hard at school, with few distractions that come with friendships and boyfriends.

I buried myself in academia, rarely leaving my studies and graduated with the highest GPA. Unsurprisingly, my valediction caused hardly a ripple in the pond of small town life.

But more importantly, it afforded me the escape to college which I so craved.

All my parents wanted was to see me married and off their hands; someone else's responsibility.

But escaping home was on my terms. I fled not into the arms of a man (well not yet anyway) but into the a world that opened up endless opportunities.

Those days were probably the happiest. I cast off the shackles of life back home and reinvented myself.

For all intents and purposes, Melissa Darwin, from Massachusetts, never existed.

I became Meghan Mallory.

And that's where this story begins: early 1990s in UCLA. I arrived after the student race riots when activism had died down considerably. 

My lectures on ancient history consumed my youthful imagination, and the weekend parties  opened up a whole other world of possibilities.

During the week I would lose myself in the Roman Empire but by Friday night I was invariably in the arms of a boy I'd made eye contact with in a campus coffee shop. You have to understand this was all new to me.

The freedom was intoxicating and my new found identity gave me courage to finally go out and live life to the full. I know it was the time of Aids and we had to be careful, but I lost my virginity within weeks of arriving on campus.

He was tall and athletic and I was constantly questioning why he was attracted to me of all people. We talked, laughed and ended up in his bed. I can't even recall his name now but I remember his hands; the way they undressed me, teased me and opened me up to the physical world. I was 18 and ready to explore my sexuality.

He was my first lover and one of many. My body had been starved of love and affection for so long that I fell hard and fast into the arms of any boy or man offering me physical contact.

I had no barometer by which to measure this avalanche of lovers. They were one-night stands; a quick hook-up, fumbled hands and clothes discarded in untidy piles in student dorms.

 I look back on those moments and can still feel the rush of euphoria as my body connected with another; how I would ride the crest of that wave until it came crashing down on me, leaving me exhausted but craving more.

And it wasn't just more sex. I wanted to experience everything the physical world had to offer. But sex was my drug of choice.

I was indiscriminate with lovers and they were happy to find a young woman offering up her body as a sexual playground. As long as we had safe words and even safer sex, I was game.

That was until the day Mark Jenson walked into my life.

Stay tuned for the second part of Shannon's story next week xoxoxo