Stare not long into the abyss...

The cameras rolling, her on her stomach, the bright lights penetrating every thought. Thoughts about her childhood are streaming from somewhere, somewhere she's tried to run from and fuck away. "If I just put enough of the good between the then and the now, it'll finally be gone. It'll finally leave me alone." The sweat dripping from above, falling on the small of her back. She wonders if any of her family have stumbled on any of her work. If her little brother, late at night been looking at websites he knew he shouldn't have been and thought, "Holy shit, that's Victoria, that's my sister." The phone calls had stopped a long time ago, from both ends. The shame and disgust from her father and her mother's nonchalant denial of everything that had happened to her. Rolling over, the man above her asking, "You like that?". She remembers when she started doing this for money and how it seemed to hurt to have to lie. More memories from somewhere deep down inside flash inside her eyelids, her eyes clenched shut and only getting tighter. "Why would someone do that to a little girl? Why did it have to be me?" She wonders if someone watching this could tell that she was fighting off tears, if they could sense that she didn't want to be there; like a murderer on trial, televised for the world to see. Head down, arms folded, waiting for a verdict to be read. She bites down hard on the gum in her mouth, she tries to focus on something, something not inside her, something not painful, something that meant her no harm. The man finishes, the evidence streaming down her face, onto her naked body. She just wants to be somewhere else; maybe not so much away from here but sometime else. Before her innocence had been taken, before she felt unsafe in her father's arms.

The water from the shower fogging the glass in the bathroom at the studio. She wonders how much semen has been washed down this drain, how many girls sat in this shower and wondered if this would be all they ever knew, questioning if they've got a soul left at all? The tile beneath her feet is cold and somewhat refreshing after how hot the shower had been. She walks to the mirror and uses two fingers to wipe the steam away just enough to see her eyes. She looks for a moment but turns away before she's forced to see the person looking back at her. The only person left in this world who knew any better, who knew what she was capable of, who knew who she was. She pulls on her clothes and walks down the hall, collects her paycheck and walks to her car. Noticing that she's out of cigarettes she walks to the gas station across the street and walks inside. The attendant gives her a look reserved for people who've spit in your face as she walks to the counter.

"Can I get a pack of Marlboro Lights?"

"Sure, but you can't pay with fuck money, whore."

She walks away without her cigarettes. "I should have known better. I shouldn't have come here." She'd heard the stories about the owners across the street, she'd heard about the horrible things they'd said to girls who came from where she'd just left. "I don't know that I would have said anything different. I don't know that I blame her for what she just called me. In the eyes of someone who's looking in at me, I am just that. A whore." The world had become something different, something hostile. In the two years she'd been doing this since she turned 18 she wishes she'd kept track of the number of people she'd been with. She felt used up, like the little engine that couldn't. She felt life before she came here, before she read the ad in the paper, before she stepped off the bus was something so far away, something so unfamiliar and strange to her that she didn't believe it had ever happened. If you asked her, she couldn't remember where she came from. Who her friends were. Where she was born.

She always asked that she didn't know the names of the men she slept with. She figured that it wasn't real, she wasn't doing anything wrong if she didn't know them. It helped if she didn't know them, if she could look the other way and not ever see them again. Forcing herself not to create a memory of them. Keeping them out of your consciousness and more importantly, your subconscious. If she saw them again on the street, she could honestly say she'd never met them before; there was no recognition. Nothing that could tie the now to the then. It's comparable to drug addiction in the way that if you are a recovering addict, the last thing you want to see is a syringe full of heroin walking around waiting to bump into you.