My Brain hurts!!!

As a child, I often wondered how I would react if my parents died. Would I cry? Would I whimper? Would I care enough to cry?..

The reason for this, well… my parents weren’t what you called parent material. I have a mother who took pride in her sons and left her three daughters to basically fend for themselves. When times got rough with my dad, she would receive a phone call from my older sister. My sister fearing for her life, while living with my father, cried to my mother over the years. All my mother would say was, just hang in there. But, what could she hang on to? A young girl, not yet a woman who has seen and gone through much more than an elderly woman. The answer she expected was something that she would never hear from my mother.

Years has passed, and even though my sisters and I have came to the conclusion that our mother in actuality would have preferred not knowing us, I was still clinging on to a thin hope that she had feelings for us. That thin hope was squashed when she revealed that “LOVE DOES NOT PLAY A FACTOR WHEN IT COMES TO HER DAUGHTERS”. On any giving day, I would have just shrugged it off as something she would say out of anger, but the look in her eyes had hit me. She was telling the truth. Nothing but the truth, so help me god.

As the day progressed and my eyes had became a pale pink. I had that thought again. Would I really cared if she died tomorrow? With the information I received from her mouth, why should I care. I became a motherless child in a split second. Thoughts of changing my name to not reflect hers flooded my brain. I wanted to disconnect myself from her. At least I still had my dad.

My dad. The joker, the smoker. Part-time parent and full-time musician. He was a educated musician druggie who could concentrate like no other. He’s my father when he’s around. I haven’t seen him over the years, but on Monday I thought about him. “well”, I said to myself. “Well, since I no longer have a mother, at-least I still have a father“. Today he suffered another stroke, his fourth I believe. This one has left him paralyzed on one side of his body. He’s lost his memory and basically doesn’t know who he is. I lost him today.

Now, as I sit here, I’ve realized that I’ve lost both my parents in one week. One, who doesn’t care who I am, and the other who doesn’t know who I am. I’ve become an orphan over the span of three days and I can definitely say that it hurts. My older sister makes it a point to call me everyday now to say that she loves me. I like that. I tell her that I love her and I honestly feel and hear the love in her voice.

I am now feeling anger towards my mother. She left us with our father when we were kids to find herself ‘per say’. She got her hands on us when we were becoming teenagers. At this time, we’ve already grown into ourselves and the need for a mother was no longer there. She thrust herself upon us until our guards were let down, just to let us down in return.

In some ways I would say that It would hurt if she died. But just for a little while.

"He was MASTURBATING officer!!!!"

Something incredible?!

I once saw a man masturbate on the subway. Well, I shouldn’t say once per say, it’s more like something that happens once every couple months. It’s funny how some men are afraid to ‘choke’ the chicken in front of their significant other, while there are some who wants nothing more than to have a couple dozen people look at them in amazement.

I brought this up because once again, I was granted the permission to see a man do this to himself, while riding the subway home. Instead of saying “gross” or “ewww”. I thought to myself, “wow, this man has some guts”. I mean, my ex who I knew did this on a regular before I came in the picture, was afraid to do it in front of me. If I pulled a double shift at work, he would spend quality time choking the chicken. So, why was it so hard for him to do it in front of me?



‘We had sex everywhere. With or without an audience. I am one of those people who took public displays of affection and ran with it. I was free loving of him. He was just beginning to come into himself sexually, and maybe I pushed him too hard, too fast.’


I remember him asking me to pleasure myself while he watched. Me, being the free willing person that I am, I gladly flicked away. He sat there with his eyes focused on me. His smile as wide as my legs, his intentions to get close to me were easily dismissed as I slapped his hands away. His attempts to help me finish something that I started were shunned. He sat there with his eager smile wondering when it would be his time. Inside I laughed, as if to show him that it’s no big deal to do this in front of someone other than yourself.

This is where the tables turned. I called him over to the bed and said to him in a raspy voice. “Now your turn”. For a while he looked as if he was about to be the happiest man on the planet. That look was easily wiped away. He became embarrassed. He knew what I was asking, what I was saying to him. I wanted him to masturbate in front of me. He laid on the bed, posed himself and began to touch. He sighed. He looked disturbed, as if it was to taboo to do in front of me, like it was this little dirty secret that men do. He then turned to me and said, “ I can’t. Not in front of you”.

When I asked him why, he couldn’t answer. I ended up killing the mood that night, and from then on, I never asked him to do that again.

Towards the end of our relationship, in one of his desperate attempts to keep me, he did it. He laid next to me, kissed my lips and then slid his hand down the covers. For a few minutes he laid there, stroking and moaning. Then, he released. I was amazed, and I smiled. Smiling was something that I hadn’t done in weeks before that night. He looked at me and said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking. ‘See, I’ve done it, now would you stay?’ I went to sleep shortly after that, and from what I could tell the next morning, he had been crying silently. He knew the relationship was over, and his attempts to keep me were too little too late.

I didn’t pull away from him because he was ashamed to touch himself in front of me, but his insecurities did played a factor. He was most secretive throughout our relationship. He became withdrawn most times and every time I tried to talk to him, he walked out of the room. I didn’t expect much from him, just partnership.

I recently spoke to him over the phone. Promises of one day meeting up to have lunch. I did ask him why it all ended up the way it did between us. Why it took the end of our relationship for him to finally open up and expose himself to me.

( The last week of our relationship, he talked to me all the time. He told me things that I never could have guessed. He had let me into his memories, made me share his triumphs and downfalls. But by then, the damage was done. He had spent so much time hiding himself from me, that when he did open up, it was as if I was meeting him for the first time. I fell in love with him all over again, and fell out of love with him for the second time. )

He replied by saying how young he was. That even though I wasn’t his first partner, I became the one who made him feel the need to explore different avenues. He felt threatened, as if I would have led him down the wrong road. The night he masturbated in front of me, he was just starting to understanding that I wasn’t trying to steer him wrong, but was only trying to make him more aware of who he was.

As I sat on the train, with this man tugging with all his might to relieve himself. I found that this act that so many of us know so well, can become something most of us would go our lives denying. Yes, as the train pulled into the station, the man got up, folded his news paper and high tailed it out of the train. I sat there with a few others smiling, while a middle aged lady followed him out shouting so loud “That man was masturbating on the train officer”. The last thing I saw were two cops pursuing him and then the doors closed. The train moved off, and I was on my way home.