May

When I was about 14, I had an idea for a story that I never wrote, because I was working on something else. Back then the story had grown out of anger and despair, but somehow I have lost that urge for revenge or for lashing out like that. So it always just remained an idea. The idea I had was certainly less gory – but May exactly captured the essence of that story. May is almost exactly like my story’s main character, and once more it is true – the characters we invent are always part of who we are. I can relate to May. The part of me that is agreeable and friendly and has its normal moments is a construct. One that I have been instructed to be, that my common sense, my social sense, my moral sense has made me. It's real, but it's the house-trained dog whose civility and pleasantness covers up the ferocious animal inside that wants to snap at the one stepping on its tail. Beyond my civil self, there is a May, a girl that is socially inadequate and desperately lonely and can’t understand why people reject her.

“But you like weird!"

It’s exactly the thing I would have said. And then the sadness, brokenheartedness and breakdown, spiralling into angry disappointment growing out of lost hope. Except that I never let it out. I don’t even let it out into the front room of my self. It’s a furious Bertha Mason in a locked back room who screams and cries and hits her fists into bloody lumps against the wall, claws at her cheeks and screams insanely “but you said you like weird!”
In my low days and in my nightmares, the doors get weak and Bertha-May comes out and goes berserk through the house that is my mind, and she is trying to get me to hurt me, but I was always strong enough to not let her. She just turns my mind into a lunatic asylum for a day in which I grit mental teeth while I cling to my head under my covers, suppress screams and hold on until I feel strong enough to lock her back into her room and bolt the door.
But I can’t keep guard all the time.